Colorado National Monument

The Colorado National Monument isn’t a two-sided canyon like the ones most of us are familiar with—Zion, for example, or the Grand Canyon. It’s more like Bryce Canyon, a monocline as geologists call it: a one-way slope. The Colorado River, though it flows along the valley at the foot of the slope, didn’t create this canyon by cutting its way through a plateau. The plateau was here before the river, created by a forcible elevation of the earth’s crust called the Uncompahgre Uplift, which happened about 250 or 300 million years ago, give or take a bit. The uplift forms part of the Colorado Plateau, which the river does cut through farther along to the west, in Utah, but here it flows along the edge. The monocline canyon was sculpted not by the Colorado, but by eons of erosion: windblown sand, rain, winter ice expanding in cracks,, and scouring by now-vanished rivers as they washed broken bits of stone into the valley where the Colorado now runs. Today, it’s 2,000 feet below the canyon rim, and the difference in elevation was probably even greater at times during those long ages.

Grand Valley is its name now, and that’s not just chamber-of-commerce hype. Well into the 20th century, this section of the Colorado River wasn't called Colorado at all; its name was the Grand River. That’s accounts for the name of Grand Junction, where the Grand was joined by its important tributary the Gunnison. Thus enlarged, the Grand River continued west into Utah, where it merged with the Green River coming down from the north. That confluence was considered the beginning of the Colorado.

But In 1921, Edward Taylor, a Colorado congressman, took umbrage at the fact that no part of the Colorado River was located in his own state, despite sharing the name. Urging Congress to put an end to this “abomination,” he succeeded in getting the Grand River officially renamed the Colorado. So that river now begins in the state where Representative Taylor felt it ought to begin, and I presume he lies easy in his grave.

The park owes its national monument status to a man named John Otto, whose role the Wikipedia article about him describes this way:

Although we didn’t try to find out the names of the flowers we saw and photographed, another form of vegetation that you see in the pictures we took (not only here, but in the three parks in Utah that we would soon be visiting) are gnarled and ancient trees that have been bent by the weather into picturesque shapes. Only two kinds grow in this environment, juniper and piñon pine (and you often have to get pretty close to figure out which kind you’re looking at).

However, I took these two pictures near Rim Rock Drive for documentary as well as esthetic purposes. Juniper is the tree with the blue berries. (Alas, I have no idea whether you could use this specific variety to flavor gin.) The piñon pine is covered with tiny new cones. I didn’t see many that were blooming like this one, but it was the only one I really stuck my nose into.

When you see old or young trees in our pictures from Arches, Dead Horse Point, and Canyonlands, they’re bound to be one or the other of these two varieties.