Zion National Park

All-throughout my young childhood I have experienced camping and hiking. It is something that I loved when I was a child, and still love to this very day. From 24 mile hikes in the Grand Canyon, swimming in the pools of Havasupai falls to my favorite, hiking in Zion National Park. Zion is a marvel to behold. The park consists of huge massive canyon walls that soar to the sky. I have walked all-throughout Zion and have experienced it first hand, it is indescribable until you see it first hand.

The walls are of mostly sandstone which vary in many beautiful colors. One thing that I can say, is during sunrise and sunset the canyon walls look like a glittering diamond of assorted colors glowing in the sun.. The park is considered to have some of the most elaborate canyons in the United States. Zion consists of many canyons, high Plateau and mesas. The National Park is located at the edge the Colorado Plateau. It is here that one can notice that the rock layers have been changed, eroded to what is called, “The Grand Staircase”.

The mazes of canyons and Plateau’s did not just form over night, but through millions of years of erosion and change. Scientist speculate that Zion was nothing but a flat basin close to sea level. As millions of years of sand, mud and lose gravel eroded change became noticeable. Streams and wind carried these lose materials and dropped them into sections or layers. On one of my research websites the author writes, “The sheer weight of these accumulated layers caused the basin to sink, so that the top surface always remained near sea level.

As the land rose and fell and as the climate changed, the depositional environment fluctuated from shallow seas to coastal plains to a desert of massive windblown sand. This process of sedimentation continued until over 10,000 feet of material accumulated. ”What I have come to realize is that the features of Zion will change as time passes. In 1000 years Zion could be a completely different place due to weathering and erosion. On my last visit to the Zion National park I noticed that there was a strange criss cross patterns in the stone.

I was young and naive and thought that it was a man made phenomenon. Now however after much research I discovered what really caused the patterns. It is known as the Checkerboard Mesa and is made up of Sandstone. The checkered board like patterns are a direct cause of cross bedding, and also different layers of windblown sand. Another reason for the patterns are from years and years of erosion from the rock surface. Also weathering and the wetting and drying of the rock could have possibly caused the checkered cracks.

Answers are everywhere we just have to look for them. Another grand feature of the Zion National park is the enticing Mt. Camel Tunnel. The Geology of Zion is very diverse and as I mentioned earlier is constantly changing. A perfect example of this is the Camel Tunnel. The tunnel is 1. 1 miles long and was created in the early 1900s. The first thing that I find amazing about this is that this was done during the early 1990s. This would prove to be very difficult today yet over a hundred years earlier people were cutting through 3000 foot think sandstone!

On another reserach page it reads, “The Zion-Mt. Carmel Tunnel was a network of scaffolding, set up on the east side of the tunnel going across Pine Creek which flows below. Blasting was used to enlarge the hole and railcars hauled off debris. On the tunnel’s south side, work was not an easy task because the drop-off of the canyon below is 800 feet. The whole process is considered a technological wonder and creating the Switchbacks, leading up to the tunnel, was even more difficult. ”My personal opinion is that there is nothing more beautiful then the world around us. I feel that everyone should visit Zion, or any other national park and witness the true beauty of the natural out door environment. The world is an all most living thing. It is constantly changing and becoming something new. Our existence on the earth is only a splint second compared to the geographic history of our earth. We should all strive to except this fact and learn about the natural changing world around us.