Cracked Sandstone. Zion National Park, Utah. October 22, 2012. © Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
Large cracks in layers of sandstone, Zion National Park
On our way to Utah points further east in late October, we passed through Zion National Park and ended up spending the better part of a day photographing along the Mount Carmel Highway route through the park. There are any number of places here to park the car, get out, and walk down into the narrow washes and valleys or climb up to various prominences. On this day the prospect was even more interesting since autumn color had come to the high country – much more than in the more famous Zion Canyon – and the oak and red maple trees were showing brilliant and vivid colors.
At several points we decided to investigate small canyons that passed near the roadway, and several of them included short stretches that were very narrow. There is a lot of tortured looking geology in some of these places, the result of eroding and sculpting power of the sand and water and other processes. Here a large “chunk” of sandstone was leaning away from the creek and was cracking, both along the natural strata in the rock and perpendicular the layers. In these places it is often interesting to see how seemingly solid rock can take on the qualities of a plastic material that has been bent and carved.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
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Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.
Chloe, it all connects together in one way or another – these things shade one into the next. Though the colors of the southwest are something special!
Dan
Really loving these sandstone studies – so very different from the granite of the Eastern Sierras – and yet…. somehow very similar.