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Colorado Plateau
The canyon country of the American Southwest
The Colorado Plateau is the high, arid heart of the American Southwest, a roughly 337,000-square-kilometre province of layered red rock straddling the four corners where Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico meet. Lifted high yet barely deformed, its flat-lying sandstones have been carved by rivers into some of the most spectacular landscapes on Earth - the Grand Canyon chief among them - and gathered into the greatest concentration of national parks and monuments in the United States.
The plateau is a great structural block that rose more or less intact, its sedimentary layers - laid down over hundreds of millions of years as seas, deserts, and rivers came and went - left nearly horizontal even as the surrounding country buckled into mountains. The Colorado River and its tributaries then knifed downward through this rising land, exposing a deep stack of coloured strata and sculpting canyons, mesas, buttes, arches, and hoodoos. The high desert climate, with cold winters and scant rain, keeps the rock bare and the erosional forms sharp.
Ancestral Puebloan peoples farmed and built across the plateau for centuries, leaving cliff dwellings such as those at Mesa Verde, and their descendants - together with the Navajo, Hopi, and others - remain tied to the land. The astonishing scenery prompted the creation of Grand Canyon, Zion, Bryce Canyon, Arches, Canyonlands, and many more protected areas, making the plateau a global destination and a natural laboratory for the study of the Earth's deep past.