Jaap van 't Veen's photos with the keyword: Arizona

One of the most famous Grand Canyon National Park is one of the most well known national parks in the USA. It is considered being one of the seven wonders of nature. Millions of years ago a part of the earth's crust was pushed up, creating the Colorado Plateau of which the Grand Canyon is now a part. Over millions of years the Colorado River has made its way through the rocky layers of the plateau, where the rocks were (and still are) polished further and further. Because each rock layer consists of a different type of rock, the effects of the force of the water are different everywhere. This has created a complicated system of deep, capriciously shaped ravines. Besides the Colorado River other erosive forces, such as frost and wind, have also had a great influence. The dimensions of the canyon are enormous with a length of 446 km’s and a width between 18 and 29 km’s. The maximum depth is about 1.600 meters. The area became a national monument on 11 January 1908 and a national park on 26 February 1919. In 1979 the park was placed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. We visited several viewpoints of the Grand Canyon between Grand Canyon Village and Desert View. At the last one we were during sunset and could admire the beautiful colours of sky and ravine walls. Without any doubt Grand Canyon was one of the highlights of our visit to Arizona/Utah, but to be honest the (impressive) landscape at the different viewpoints was often more or less the same.

Wire Pass Slot Canyon starts at a parking lot, accessible from US 89 though a 13 km’s long quite bumpy dirt road. The first km’s the trail is following the meandering Coyote Wash with low red coloured rocks of Navajo Sandstone. Slowly but surely the rocks become higher and closer to each other. Before we did realize we were in the Wire Pass Slot Canyon, a very impressive slot canyon. Sometimes just one meter wide and a couple of times we saw tree trunks which were trapped between the rock walls. At one point we could hardly get any further through a large boulder that almost blocked the trail. After about 700 meters the canyon became wider and culminated in a large open space (main image) with huge rock walls, which on one side were beautifully illuminated by the sun. The cliffs are marked with several big horn sheep petroglyphs. The Wire Pass Slot Canyon ends here at the confluence with the Buckskin Gulch, the longest slot canyon of the USA.

Petrified Forest National Park is well known for its many chunks of petrified logs ( www.ipernity.com/doc/294067/45523794 ), but it offers more fascinating and intriguing scenery. The Blue Mesa area of the park is part of the second-oldest layer of the so called Chinle Formation, deposited approximately 220 - 225 million years ago. This formation can be seen across the park with the multi-coloured Painted Desert (PiP 1) and the Blue Mesa badlands. Blue Mesa (main image) - easy accessible by a three mile long loop road - is a very desolate landscape of mudstone and sandstone layers in blue, purple and greys. The landforms have been sculpted by erosion. The Tepees (PiP 2) is a part of Blue Mesa with tall, cone-shaped hill striped with almost perfect layers of reds, pinks, blues, greys, purples, and white.

Monument Valley - or officially Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park - is without doubt one of the most striking examples of the breathtaking beauty of the empty desert in the southwest of the USA. The vast plain serves as a backdrop for the silhouettes of the red rock formations. With its natural beauty it is one of the most majestic and photographed places on earth. Before human existence, the area was a lowland basin. For hundreds of millions of years, materials that eroded from the Rock Mountains deposited layer upon layer of sediment which cemented a slow and gentle uplift, generated by ceaseless pressure from below the surface. These horizontal strata were quite uniformly elevated one to three miles above sea level and the basin became a plateau. Millions of years ago there were many more rocks in this area, which consisted of various types of sandstone rock. The softer layers are worn away by the natural forces of wind and water, causing the so-called mesas. These are wide rocks that are flat at the top. The continuous erosion process ensures that even a mesa wears away very slowly. The harder top layer wears less quickly than the softer sides, so a mesa gets narrower and narrower. If the width of rock is eventually smaller than its height, it is no longer a mesa, but a butte. Also the butte slowly wears away, until a spire remains. Even those rock needles will slowly disappear completely. Most of the park is located in Arizona, the northernmost point belongs to the state of Utah. Window is one of the most visited stops so the viewpoint can get rather crowded. Main picture: North Window, between Elephant Butte and Cly Butte, looking towards East Mitten Butte, with Castle Butte, Bear & Rabbit and Stagecoach in the background PiP1: the famous panorama with the Mitten Buttes and Merrick Butte PiP2: Merrick Butte, along the Valley Drive PiP3: classic image of Monument Valley, taken at mile marker 13 along the road from Mexican Hat (US Highway 163)

A number of canyons within the borders of the Navajo Reservation in Arizona form the National Monument Canyon de Chelly. “Canyon de Chelly” is the translation of the Navajo word “Chéyi”, which means “inside the rock” or “canyon”. The area received the status of National Monument due to the many archaeological finds that have been made. There is evidence that people have lived here almost continuously for 5.000 years. Canyon de Chelly is not only interesting because of its rich human history, but also because of its impressive nature. As a matter of fact the National Monument consists of four large canyons and many small side canyons. The shallow muddy Chinle Wash flows through the canyons; the constant presence of water ensures that there is always a lot of vegetation. In the west, the cliffs are less than 10 meters high, but further east the canyons become deeper and deeper. In the east the walls rise about 300 meters above the bottom of the canyons. Canyon de Chelly is still inhabited by the Navajo Indians and visitors are not allowed to go everywhere. Main image: bottom of the canyon with the Chinle Wash PiP1: Canyon de Chelly, seen from one of the overlooks along the South Rim Drive PiP2: Spider Rock is the most famous monolith in Canyon de Chelly. PiP3: White House - a Puebloan village built into a sheer 500 foot sandstone cliff - was occupied between 1060 AD and 1275 AD. One can visit the ruins through the White House Trail; the only trail by which visitors may enter the canyon without a permit or an official Navajo guide.

Petrified Forest National Park is well known for its abundant number of fossils, especially fallen trees that lived in the Late Triassic Period, about 225 million years ago. The park is home to some of the most impressive fossils ever found and more are being discovered each year as erosion exposes new evidence. Fossils found here show the forest was once a tropical region, filled with towering trees; more than 150 different species of fossilized plants have been discovered. When trees were toppled by volcanic eruptions, they were swept away by flowing water and deposited in marshes and covered with mud and volcanic ash. Buried under layers of sediment, the logs remained buried for millions and millions of years undergoing an extremely slow process of petrification, which essentially turned the logs to colourful stone. Much of the park’s petrified wood is from Araucarioxylon arizonicum trees (an extinct species of conifer). The beautiful colours in the petrified wood come mainly from three minerals: pure quartz is white; manganese oxides form blue, purple, black and brown; and iron oxides provide hues from yellow through red to brown. Theodore Roosevelt created Petrified Forest National Monument on December 8, 1906. Petrified Forest was designated as a national park on December 9, 1962. (Main picture was taken along the Giant Logs Trail, behind the rainbow Forest Museum. The colourful collared lizard is quite common in the park during summer months.)