The Colorado Plateau Region (page 3 of 4)

Author: Ray Wheeler. Adapted from: The Colorado Plateau Region, In Wilderness at the Edge: a citizen proposal to protect Utah's canyons and deserts, Utah Wilderness Coalition, Salt Lake City, 1990, p. 97-104.

Suspended in Time

Hiker on Hickman Bridge in Capitol Reef National Park. Photo © 1999 Ray Wheeler.

Visitors to the Colorado Plateau have often remarked that the vastness of the landscapes gives them a heightened awareness of their own mortality. This effect is in part due to the fact that the Plateau Province contains the world's foremost museum of earth history, and to descend into its canyons is to re-live that history in reverse. Each layer of rock represents an earlier epoch on the calendar of geological time. Scattered through these layers one can find fossil life-forms that span the history of life on earth. At a single quarry in Dinosaur National Monument scientists have uncovered the bones of 300 dinosaurs representing 10 different species. More recent relics lie hidden in time-pockets such as Cowboy Cave, where the dung of extinct camel, mammoth, and sloth, lies buried beneath human artifacts nearly 7,000 years old.

Lost in this strange and hostile landscape, even living creatures may hang suspended in time. Cryptobiotic life forms –so-called because they are neither quite alive nor quite dead--can lie dormant in dry potholes for as long as 25 years, waiting patiently for the climatic conditions that will transform them within hours into fast-swimming aquatic creatures. There are juniper trees 1,000 years old, and bristlecone pines that were 1,000 years old at the dawn of the Christian era.

Hidden in canyon bottoms or perched on mesa tops, isolated by cliff walls and desert, the biota of the Colorado Plateau is as diverse as the landscape itself. Nearly 80 species of fish and 340 species of plants are endemic, and the region hosts more than 80 plants listed or recommended for protection as threatened or endangered species.

And here too, also frozen in time, lie the fossil remains of 12,000 years of human occupation, spanning the entire temporal range of human prehistoric development from the Paleo-Indian culture to the modern Pueblo Indians. The civilization of the Anasazi, which mysteriously disappeared around 1300 A.D., left behind one of the richest archeological treasure-troves on the planet. Scattered throughout the canyons and mesas of the Colorado Plateau are thousands of prehistoric stone structures -- granaries, pit-houses, cliffhouses, kivas, watchtowers -- entire cities of stone. In parts of southeastern Utah the archeological site density is as high as 80 sites per square mile. In San Juan County alone, there are 15,000 known archeological sites, a mere 10 percent of the estimated total number.

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A Textbook of Geomorphology
References