Grand Mesa

Grand Mesa rises between the Colorado and the Gunnison rivers east of Grand Junction, a plateau of some 500 square miles usually called the largest flat-topped mountain in the world. Its top is basalt. About ten million years ago lava ran down what was then a valley and filled it; the hard rock protected what lay beneath while the softer sediments around it wore away, until the old valley floor stood as a tableland thousands of feet above the country around it. Geologists call it topographic inversion, and rounded river cobbles under the basalt give it away.

The top of the mesa holds more than three hundred lakes, many of them dammed or enlarged as reservoirs that send water down to the orchards and towns of the valleys. The Grand Mesa Scenic and Historic Byway, State Highway 65, climbs from Interstate 70 through Plateau Creek's canyon and across the top to Cedaredge, about sixty-three miles, past the Grand Mesa Visitor Center near the lakes.

A side road runs west along the top to Land's End, where the mesa breaks off in cliffs some 6,000 feet above the Grand Valley. The road up those cliffs from the valley floor was built in 1933 and 1934 by about two hundred veterans enrolled in the Civilian Conservation Corps, working from a tent camp at the foot of the mountain, and was long known as the Veterans' Road; Forest Service crews finished the steepest section in 1935. In 1936 and 1937 the Works Progress Administration built the stone observatory at the rim from the mesa's own basalt.