Cedar Mesa Sandstone
The pale, cross-bedded Permian dune sandstone that builds the spires and needles of Canyonlands' Needles District.
Also known as: Cedar Mesa
Permian — vast deserts, ending in the worst extinction ever
The world back then
Early Permian, roughly 290 million years ago. You're in another sand sea — dunes rolling off the flanks of an ancestral mountain range, the sand pale where the wind sorts it, red where iron creeps in. Blazing days, cold nights, and the occasional damp interdune flat that briefly touches the sea. Wind, sand, and more wind, banded like taffy.
Now that furnace of a desert is the spires of the Needles, and your entire job is to admire them. Nothing out here can burn you or bury you anymore; you get to gawk instead of survive. That's the luckiest role deep time hands out.
Recognize it in the field
- Typical color
- white to gray, with red-orange and tan banding
- Weathers as
- Massive cliff and slickrock former — builds the joint-controlled spires, fins, and balanced needles of the Needles District.
- Grain
- fine- to medium-grained, subangular to well-rounded frosted quartz
Look for
- large-scale eolian cross-bedding
- barchan/transverse dune and sand-sheet sets
- thin dark-red flood/interdune partings
- paleosols (mottled, bioturbated, nodular limestone)
- frosted quartz grains
- intertongues laterally with adjacent Cutler formations
How this rock was made
The NE margin of a Permian sand sea near the Needles District, thickening south and west; fed from and flanking the ancestral Uncompahgre highland.
The setting: large wind-blown dune sea (eolian erg) (dune field) with interdune, salty coastal flat (sabkha), and marginal-marine/river (fluvial) rock types (facies)
~800 ft in the Cedar Mesa region (NPS); GeoLex type description 500–1,000+ ft.
In the rock record
Part of the Cutler Group.
↑ Younger — rests above
↓ Older — sits beneath
Where to see it
Regions: Colorado Plateau (Paradox Basin margin)
- the Needles District spires (Canyonlands)
- Cedar Mesa, Utah (type area)
- San Juan River corridor near Mexican Hat / Bluff
- Natural Bridges National Monument
Float past it: Cataract Canyon · Meander Canyon · Narrow Canyon