Travel | Arizona | Vermillion Cliffs National Monument
White Pocket Dazzles with Phantasmagoric Colors and Contours
This remote, little-known geologic wonder rarely disappoints
It is a cloudless autumn day on the Arizona-Utah border, and I’m tracking a Dilophosaurus, a fearsome, agile ancestor to T. rex, who scampered across this white-sand landscape some 190 million years ago.
“He went that way,” says our guide Kieran, who kneels beside a series of faint three-toed tracks.
A brilliant sun is overhead, and I’m squinting into an otherworldly expanse of white, crystalline sandstone that is the result of a single cataclysmic moment from the early Jurassic Period.
Kieran, who in addition to being an outdoor guide, holds a degree in geology, explains that a shallow, sandy-bottomed inland sea once bisected the North American continent and stretched from the Arctic to what is now the Gulf of Mexico. As tectonic forces began to uplift the Colorado Plateau, the inland sea drained, leaving behind a vast expanse of sand, much larger than today’s Sahara. This stark landscape, known as an erg, stretched from present-day Southern California to Wyoming.
