Colorado Plateau

Three of the West's great provinces meet within a few miles of this panel. The plateau runs west from here; the Nacimiento Mountains to the north are the southern tip of the Rocky Mountains, pushed up between about 75 and 55 million years ago; and the Rio Grande rift opens to the east. Geologists put the plateau's edge at the Jemez-San Ysidro fault zone by White Mesa, whose cap of Todilto gypsum, a Jurassic evaporite, has been quarried south of San Ysidro. The red beds beneath it are Triassic and Jurassic.

What the plaque says

Official Scenic Historic Marker Colorado Plateau From this point, the Colorado Plateau extends across north- western New Mexico into north- eastern Arizona, southeastern Utah, and southwestern Colorado. A colorful landscape of mesas, and canyons, it is underlain by natural mineral, oil, and gas resources locked within sedimentary strata deposited millions of years ago. Eleva- tion 6,400 feet.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Jemez Historic Site — 17 mi
  The stone walls of a 1620s mission church standing among the ruins of Gisewa, a Jemez village named for the hot springs beside it.
• Valles Caldera National Preserve — 28 mi
  A crater thirteen miles across, floored with grass, left by an eruption 1.25 million years ago and owned privately for 140 years under a law that called it vacant land.

More markers nearby

• Vásquez de Coronado's Route — 3.5 mi
• Pueblo of Zía — 6.0 mi
• Trinidad Gachupin Medina (ca. 1883-1964) — 6.0 mi
• Pueblo of Jémez — 7.6 mi