How did the Garden Get There?

Garden of the Gods is a geologically unique land feature. The forces of nature that created these unique and beautiful landscapes were just beginning to be understood by modern theories of geology in 1850, starting with the theory of plate tectonics. Plate tectonics is the current geological paradigm, in which we believe the earth is made of about half a dozen major plates, and these plates move from the centers of oceans until they collide with each other, where one plate will go under the other.

USGS. Plate Tectonics Map - Plate Boundary Map. 2005. Photograph. Geology.com.

Plate tectonics caused buckling in the Earth’s crust that created the ancestral Rockies about 300 million years ago, the ancestral Rockies were the first of three mountain building events in the region. As this first set of mountains rose, they were being eroded by water and ice, relentlessly breaking boulders into smaller and smaller rocks. As the mountains eroded, streams carried materials down to the edges and piled them up in large alluvial fans; these alluvial fans are what comprised the founding formation of the red rocks on the west half of The Garden of the Gods as we see it today.

Michaels, Albert J. Alluvial Fans. 2000. Photograph.

Each episode of erosion that followed laid down a new horizontal layer of sediment  in sequence stacked one atop the other where the oldest layer of rock, the fountain formation,  situated on the west side of the garden. At The Garden of the Gods, there are many different rock layers that date back almost 500 million years and most young rock layers are about 70 million years old.

                                       

Wind erosion over the sediments of the ancestral Rockies caused particles to break down further into sand which then collected into sand dunes. The fine sand grains were layered over the fountain formation and compressed into sandstone under the accumulating weight. These sand dunes, when turned into rocks, became the large rocks in the center of The Garden of the Gods. These are the lines formation.

                                                    

As the mountains wear down, the seas begin to return. We come into what’s known as the Mesozoic era, this is the age of dinosaurs. During the Mesozoic era, shallow seas covered the Garden of the Gods and in fact much of Colorado and North America. After the lime sandstone was laid down, a great, shallow inland sea intermittently span the area from the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico.

                                          

Colorado is composed of layers of rock that have been composited for the past 500 million years, and those layers are remains of ancient landscapes that were buried sequentially. In fact, Garden of the Gods has its own unique dinosaur called the Theiophytalia kerri discovered in 1878 by James Kerr, a Professor from the Colorado College.

                                                       

Goulet, Lisa. Skull of Theiophytalia Kerri, an Advanced Iguanodontid Ornithopod. 1998. 

The movement of plate tectonics caused the formation of the second set of Rocky Mountains, as these plates collided, the continent began to crumble and that crumbling reached inland to what is known now as Colorado, as it reached in, the rocks bent, folded, and in some places they began to break. It’s the break that creates The Garden of the Gods and the spectacular geology we have here. As the broken layers of sedimentary rock receives pressure, they upended to their vertical and sometimes over vertical orientation that you see now.

                                        

 For millions of years, faulting through the garden accommodated the dramatic movement of the sheets of rock from below the surface. The same layers of rock that are exposed here, is uplifted fins are flat lines beneath the city of Colorado Springs, about two miles deep, so you can’t get to them, but here you can get to them.

                                                       

It took an enormous amount of time to move these rocks into their current positions, this was not one single large earthquake event, but rather if you look closely at the lime sandstone, there are many little cracks and fractures each one being a fault, these cross each other and offset each other, that helps understand the story of how these rocks were jostled by fault after fault until they reached the vertical position we see today.

                                                  

After the Laramie Rockies eroded, the modern Rockies rose in their place from heat and pressure slowly over time. In the Garden of the Gods, erosion continued performing its unending task of chiseling away the softer rock to expose the strata that we see. The modern Rockies developed along the same faults that occurred during the ancestral Rockies and the Laramie Rockies, as erosion took material off the top of the Laramie Rockies, it removed weight from the Rockies and in response to that, the mountains were able to rise again, to the position they are today.

                                                   

Although the modern Rockies and The Garden of the Gods took millions of years to form, appreciation of their natural beauty endures universally through time.

                                       

                                                      

                                        

                                         

                                                         

                                           

                                            

How Did Those Red Rocks Get There? Garden of the Gods Visitors Center, 1999. Film.
How Did Those Red Rocks Get There?

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