The Colorado Plateau
The high red-rock heart of the Southwest
The Colorado Plateau is a vast, high tableland covering the Four Corners region where Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico meet — roughly 130,000 square miles of layered sedimentary rock lifted thousands of feet above sea level while staying remarkably intact. Rivers cutting down through that rising rock have carved it into the most concentrated collection of canyons, arches, mesas, and spires on Earth, including the Grand Canyon itself.
Because the plateau rose as a block without being crumpled into mountains, its rock layers remain nearly flat, so erosion has sculpted them into clean cliffs, terraces, and stone monuments of red, orange, and white. This single landform holds an unmatched cluster of national parks — Grand Canyon, Zion, Bryce, Arches, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef — along with Monument Valley and countless other red-rock wonders. It is the scenic core of the desert Southwest.
Related
- Arches National ParkThe world's greatest concentration of natural arches
- Bryce Canyon National ParkA natural amphitheater of red rock spires
- Canyon de ChellyNavajo homeland canyon and national monument in northeastern Arizona
- Mesa Verde National ParkAncestral Puebloan cliff dwellings, the first park created to protect human works
- Monument ValleyTowering sandstone buttes on the Navajo Nation
- Painted DesertArizona’s banded badlands between the Grand Canyon and Petrified Forest
- The Grand CanyonA mile-deep gorge carved by the Colorado River
- Zion National ParkA deep red sandstone canyon in southern Utah
- Four CornersThe only place where four U.S. states meet