The Horseshoe Bend overlook — the 270-degree entrenched meander of the Colorado River, ~1,000 feet below, and how the river carved it into the Navajo Sandstone. (Boone's tale of the drop dwells here.)
Ease up toward the rim — carefully — and there it is. Below you, the Colorado River curls almost all the way back on itself, a deep green-and-bronze ribbon wrapped a full two hundred and seventy degrees around that great sandstone butte in the middle. You are standing about a thousand feet above the water. Those rafts and boats that look like grains of rice? Full-sized. That's how far down it is.
Here's how the river did this, and it's a wonderful piece of geology. Millions of years ago, the Colorado wandered lazily across a nearly flat plain up here, looping back and forth the way slow rivers do. Then the whole Colorado Plateau — this entire country — began to rise, slowly, over millions of years. And as the land lifted, the river cut down, straight down, keeping to the loops it already had, sawing them deeper and deeper into solid rock. Geologists call that an entrenched meander: a lazy river's curve, frozen in place and carved a thousand feet down. The rock it's cutting through is Navajo Sandstone — petrified sand dunes from a desert that blew across here almost two hundred million years ago. Look at the smooth, swirling patterns in the cliff faces; those are the frozen dunes.
Take it all in — the sheer scale, the silence, the ravens riding the updrafts below you. But keep your feet well back from that edge; there's no fence between you and a thousand feet of air, and this rim has taken lives. Stay here at the overlook a while, and let Boone tell you about the edge, and the people it's claimed.
Photo: Christian David · CC BY-SA 4.0
