Utah Geology and Map

Utah's amazing, mind blowing geological structures will bring even a casual tourist to their knees.  Never mind a rock hound like me who was brought to tears on several occasions by the sheer magnitude of mother Earth's stunning wonders.

A VERY simple explanation of how the rocks in Utah were formed: while tectonic plate movements are still ongoing, when Utah was over the equator, hundreds of feet of dry desert layers were formed,  plates continued to move, sea levels rose forming inland seas which retreated are rose many times

making many different types of layers depending on what else was going on like volcanic activity and erosion of rock and dust from the Rocky and Appalachian Mountains, and then freshwater lakes came and went, etc. etc.

The color of the pink, orange and white rock results from the oxidation state of the then current environment and the amount of iron in the rock.  If iron rich sediment was forming while the atmosphere was high in oxygen, they were pink and
orange, when iron rich layers were formed with little oxygen in the environment they were grey or green or black.  The limestone is white because it contains little iron.  Add  millions of years of weather and water to erode, sculpt, carve,  and take away and voila, beautiful and unique geology.

See the green oxidized layers among the white and red, and in photo below see how the crumbling top layer is eroding away to reveal the red/white/green layers below.  

Eroding Top Layer Reveals Red and Green Layers 

This map shows our route through the 5 parks we visited.  We enter from the east on Route 70 and go south to 191 to Moab and from here visit Arches and Canyonlands National Parks.  Then back to I-70  to Capital Reef.  We have been advised not to take the quickest route down Rt 12 to Bryce Canyon due to the size of our truck/RV and the too sharp and steep turns

on that road so we go back to I-70 to US 89 down to Bryce.  Again we have to go the long way this time to Zion since the quick route down 89 to Rt 9 entails an old tunnel at the entrance to the park whose max height and length requirements we exceed.   So over to Rt 15 we go through Cedar City which turns out okay since there is a Walmart we need to visit.  Take the short cut onto Rt 17 to Rt 9 unless you want to visit the shops/gas/state liquor store in Hurricane.