BGuthrie Photos: UT -- Moab -- Dead Horse Point State Park

UT -- Moab -- Dead Horse Point State Park:

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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. HORSE_160716_012_STITCH.JPG: The road goes through the narrow neck where the horses were cut off
2. HORSE_160716_013.JPG: Navajo Sandstone: This view area is underlain by Navajo sandstone, which is found throughout the Colorado Plateau. Navajo sandstone creates some of the most dramatic scenery in the area, often forming cliffs and rounded domes. From here, you can see a large number of these rounded domes. Navajo sandstone was deposited 200 million years ago. At that time, the area was a vast desert system, complete with shifting sand dunes. It looked very much like the Sahara desert does today. These sand dunes subsequently hardened. Erosion exposed the "petrified" sand millions of years later, creating the Navajo sandstone formations that we see today. As you travel towards Canyonlands National Park, you will see isolated remnants of Navajo sandstone. These rocks were harder than the sediments in which they were embedded. That is the reason they remain. Look for these Navajo sandstone remnants as you travel up Utah Highway 313.
3. HORSE_160716_016.JPG: Rock Coloration: One feature of the Colorado Plateau that makes it so beautiful is the many and varied colors of the rock layers. Each sedimentary layer seems to have its own distinctive color phase. This coloration is due to the various minerals found in the rocks. These minerals react to weathering by coloring the rocks. The permanent reds and yellows in the landscape are formed when iron in the rocks is exposed to the atmosphere. The black sheen seen on many rocks, especially on cliff faces, is formed by manganese. (This black sheen is called "desert varnish.") Purposes and greens are caused by clay minerals in the Morrison and Chinle formations. It is thanks to these minerals that the Colorado Plateau is so colorful.
4. HORSE_160716_035.JPG: Where Have All the Horses Gone? Wild horses inhabited the North American continent more than 50 million years ago; long before man stumbled on to the scene. They looked very different then and were hunted by ancient man as a food source. The horse disappeared from North America during the last Ice Age, about 10,000 years ago. Horses evolved into their modern form on other continents. Men learned that they could be domesticated and used for work and transportation. Spanish explorers brought these horses to the New World in the 1500s. Three hundred years later, cowboys found herds of wild mustangs running free on the mesatop around Dead Horse Point. Men devised many clever methods to capture these strong, fleet-footed equines. If you were a cowboy in the late 1800s, how would you catch wild horses in this rugged country? You would probably look for a place to trap them so you could round them up. Dead Horse Point provided the cowboys with the perfect horse trap. All they had to do was herd a band of horses out onto the Point. Then, by constructing a simple fence of juniper branches across the narrow "neck" of land, the Point became a natural corral. Here they could sort through the horses and separate the healthy, marketable ones from the culls or "broomtails." Legend tells that one such band of broomtails was left corralled on the Point where they died of thirst within sight, but not within reach of the Colorado River, 2,000 feet below. Wild horses no longer live at Dead Horse Point, but there are thousands of them in other areas of the West. Bands of these noble beasts still roam the wild and rugged lands throughout parts of Utah, Nevada, Wyoming and Colorado. They survive as a symbol of the freedom and wildness that has cast the legacy of the West.
5. HORSE_160716_043.JPG: Cryptobiotic Soil
6. HORSE_160716_079.JPG: Cryptobiotic Soil
7. HORSE_160716_166.JPG: Holding It Together (cyanobacteria)
8. HORSE_160716_175.JPG: The Colorado River: The Colorado River, as seen here 2,000 feet below Dead Horse Point, carved out this entrenched meander of canyon walls over the course of 10 to 15 million years. Relatively recent human activity has reshaped sections of the river. In 1869, a one-armed American Civil War veteran, John Wesley Powell, led the first successful expedition of the yet uncharted waters. Later, advances in technology made it possible to dam the river's canyons, creating reservoirs such as Lake Powell (named after the famous explorer), and divert water to cities in the desert. A Long Journey: Starting from snowmelt over 9,000 feet above sea level in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, the 1,450-mile-long Colorado River flows down through Utah and Arizona before reaching the Sea of Cortez.
9. HORSE_160716_188.JPG: A Layer Cake of Time
10. HORSE_160716_198.JPG: The Sculpting Power of Water Water has eroded and weathered the sedimentary rock of this region for millions of years. As water seeps into the rocks, it dissolves the cementing minerals that bind the sand grains, allowing them to be carried away. The sand grains then enter the flow of the Colorado River and turn the water into an abrasive solution like liquid sandpaper. The fast current of the gritty river carves through the rock, deepening the canyon. Today, the river is 2,000 feet below this vantage point.
11. HORSE_160716_372.JPG: The Origins of a Name You are standing at the point where legends begin. This narrow neck of land is small in size but plays a giant role in the origins of the name Dead Horse Point. For decades, legends and myths about ghostly horses, cruel cowboys, and leaps of fate have surrounded this land and given it the name Dead Horse Point. Of those, the tale that best provokes the imagination is the legend of the cowboys who worked on this mesa during the late 1800s. According to the legend, wranglers often drove herds of feral horses across this narrow bottleneck leaving them corralled by the sheer cliffs. On one haunting drive, for reasons still unknown, the cowboys chose the best horses and left the others corralled on the point. With the gate across the neck closed, the remaining horses were trapped with no way out, no water and no hope for survival. Those who found the remains of the unfortunate horses gave this place the name Dead Horse Point.
12. HORSE_160716_379.JPG: A view of the ghost horse of other legends can be seen in the rocks left of the riverbend.
13. HORSE_160716_382.JPG: The narrow strip of land called The Neck is barely wider than the road
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AAA "Gem": AAA considers this location to be a "must see" point of interest. To see pictures of other areas that AAA considers to be Gems, click here.
Wikipedia Description: Dead Horse Point State Park
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Dead Horse Point State Park is a Utah state park adjacent to Canyonlands National Park, featuring a dramatic overlook of the Colorado River. The park is so named because of its use as a natural corral by horse thieves in the 19th Century. The plateau drops off with sheer cliffs several hundred meters tall on 3 sides, with only a narrow neck of land (30 yards or so) connecting the plateau to the main plateau. Thus it was easy for rustlers to simply fence off this narrow neck, and keep their horses from running away. Unfortunately the dry desert conditions, lack of food and water, and limited space often killed the horses. The area was used as the set for the Grand Canyon scenes in the 1991 film Thelma & Louise.
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Directly Related Pages: Other pages with content (UT -- Moab -- Dead Horse Point State Park) directly related to this one: [Display ALL photos on one page]:
- 2003_UT_Dead_Horse: UT -- Moab -- Dead Horse Point State Park (9 photos from 2003)
Same Subject: Click on this link to see coverage of items having the same subject: [Natural Beauty] [Park (State)]
2016 photos: Equipment this year: I continued to use my Fuji XS-1 cameras but, depending on the event, I also used a Nikon D7000. Seven relatively short trips this year: two Civil War Trust conference (Gettysburg, PA and West Point, NY, with a side-trip to New York City), my 11th consecutive San Diego Comic-Con trip (including sites in Utah, Nevada, and California), a quick trip to Michigan for Uncle Wayne's funeral, two additional trips to New York City, and a Civil Rights site trip to Alabama during the November elections. Being in places where people died to preserve the rights of minority voters made the Trumputin election even more depressing. Number of photos taken this year: just over 610,000.
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