Travel Photography > Great Basin > Escalante, Utah

To explore the geology of this, the Colorado Plateau and its staircase, let's visit an imaginary desert grocery store, with a shopping list: 1. One slice ham., 2. One leaf lettuce., 3. One slice salami., 4. One turnip., 5. One slice roast beef., 6. One bottle mustard, yellow., 7. One prickly-pear cactus-head, de-thorned., 8. One bottle peanut butter., 9. One slice pepperoni., 10. One avocado., 11. Chocolate spread, dark., 12. One slice, roast beef., 13. One bottle, mayo-mustard., 14. One slice, pastrami, thick., 15. One bottle, brown mustard., 16. green onions, minced., 17. One thin carrot.

We are going to assemble a giant sandwich - with the carrot on the bottom, to the south end of our meal, creating a bump in the layers we place carefully, until we get to the ham, on the top.

Now let's forget about our sandwich, and go back to the time before sliced bread. One hundred and forty-four million years ago, when North America was split in two, by a giant sea which connected the Arctic to the Caribbean, by way of Utah. We call this body of water the Cretaceous Seaway.

Silt, sand, dirt, dust and debris visited this sea from the formation of the Rocky Mountains, from California's forming ranges, creating thousands of feet of layers - sedimentation turned to stone.

These layers - like the iron-red Triassic-silts, the lime of the pink cliffs, the gray of marine rock, are our sandwich.

We are going to cut each layer back with our x-acto blade, until our sandwich looks like a madman's cascade, a staircase if you will, with a bump. We then take an x-acto blade and slice the bump over the carrot down the middle, to the bottom. We will call this split, with each of the rich layers of food showing through, the Grand Canyon.

We will leave our sandwich in the desert for a few days, so the peanut butter and mustard dry and crack. We will run bleach down the cascade, imagining bleach to be millions of years of water erosion. The bleach will run down the cascade, creating ruts, sometimes leaving a layer intact, like a natural bridge; canyons, arches, bumps of dried meats which we call buttes.

We have just made the world's first biodegradable scale-model of the Colorado Plateau, its Grand Staircase, which I have just hopped down. I am now in the Wraithful & Sullen (One slice pepperoni), also known as Escalante.

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