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Zion National Park

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Zion National Park
Zion National Park
All-throughout my young childhood I have experienced camping and hiking. It is something that I loved when I was a child, and still love to this very day. From 24 mile hikes in the Grand Canyon, swimming in the pools of Havasupai falls to my favorite, hiking in Zion National Park. Zion is a marvel to behold. The park consists of huge massive canyon walls that soar to the sky. I have walked all-throughout Zion and have experienced it first hand, it is indescribable until you see it first hand. The walls are of mostly sandstone which vary in many beautiful colors. One thing that I can say, is during sunrise and sunset the canyon walls look like a glittering diamond of assorted colors glowing in the sun.. The park is considered to have some of the most elaborate canyons in the United States. Zion consists of many canyons, high Plateau and mesas. The National Park is located at the edge the Colorado Plateau. It is here that one can notice that the rock layers have been changed, eroded to what is called, “The Grand Staircase”.

The mazes of canyons and Plateau’s did not just form over night, but through millions of years of erosion and change. Scientist speculate that Zion was nothing but a flat basin close to sea level. As millions of years of sand, mud and lose gravel eroded change became noticeable. Streams and wind carried these lose materials and dropped them into sections or layers. On one of my research websites the author writes, “The sheer weight of these accumulated layers caused the basin to sink, so that the top surface always remained near sea level. As the land rose and fell and as the climate changed, the depositional environment fluctuated from shallow seas to coastal plains to a desert of massive windblown sand. This process of sedimentation continued until over 10,000 feet of material accumulated.”(http://www.scienceviews.com/parks/zion.html What I have come to realize is that the features of Zion will change as time passes. In



Cited: Page 1."Zion National Park (U.S. National Park Service)." U.S. National Park Service - Experience Your America. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Apr. 2011.

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