For miles the Scenic Drive runs beside the western face of the Waterpocket Fold, where three formations stack up in a single view. Sheer red Wingate rises from the slopes, the ledgy Kayenta steps back above it, and white Navajo domes crown the skyline, streaked with desert varnish and pitted with honeycomb weathering.
That wall on your left stays with you all the way from here to the end of the road, and it's three old countries stacked in one face. Read it bottom up. The sheer red cliff is Wingate sandstone. In good light you can find long lines in it that sweep across each other at angles, and those are the slip faces of windblown dunes, frozen where they stood. Above the Wingate comes the Kayenta, the ledgy band with shrubs dotted on its steps, laid down by rivers on a floodplain. On top sit the white domes of Navajo sandstone, what's left of one of the largest sand seas in Earth's history. Both began as desert sand, so why a wall below and domes above? Look at what's under them. The Wingate sits on soft Chinle, which erodes out from beneath it, so the cliff breaks away in sheer faces, while the Navajo sandstone sits on firm Kayenta and wears down in smooth curves. The dark streaks are desert varnish, thin as a hair and decades or centuries in the making. In eighteen seventy-seven a geologist named Gilbert wrote of an Indian trail through this country, and of this same valley that had opened so easy a way. People were finding ways across this country long before any wagon.
Photo: Famartin / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 3.0