Our bodies needed rest! We slept late, lounged around the campsite then cruised the campgrounds and main park area while riding our bikes. After a late lunch we took in the Park History Museum and then rode the bikes into town and “shopped”.
Its hard to imagine how these towering canyon walls were formed as it has takes over 400 million years of wind and rain and a few earth moving events to create what we see today. This all started with monster sand dunes in an area that covers Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico from the Zion and Bryce Canyons north and east to Grand Canyon, Canyonlands and Arches national parks, Colorado National Monuments and down to Mesa Verde and the Canyons of the Ancients. The sand piled higher and higher and the pressure pushed down and compressed. Then the whole area was pushed up into mesas. Then 148 million years ago rain, rivers and streams started carving out the softer sandstone and depositing other minerals to cement the sands together. But the raging rivers like the Virgin and the Colorado are what did most of the shaping during the past 50 million years into what we see today.
This area was first populated by the Ancestral Puebloans about 1500 years ago and later by the Southern Paiute peoples. Westward expansion brought the early Mormons until President Taft declared this a national monument.
View to the east from our campsite at dusk.
The evenings here are beautiful!
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