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A box canyon is a small canyon that is generally shorter and narrower than a river canyon, with steep walls on three sides, allowing access and egress only through the mouth of the canyon. Box canyons were frequently used in the western United States as convenient corrals, with their entrances fenced.
The known human history of the Grand Canyon area stretches back 10,500 years, when the first evidence of human presence in the area is found. Native Americans have inhabited the Grand Canyon and the area now covered by Grand Canyon National Park for at least the last 4,000 of those years.
The Grand Canyon [a] is a steep-sided canyon carved by the Colorado River in Arizona, United States.The Grand Canyon is 277 miles (446 km) long, up to 18 miles (29 km) wide and attains a depth of over a mile (6,093 feet or 1,857 meters).
The resulting Grand Canyon Supergroup of sedimentary units is composed of nine varied geologic formations that were laid down from 1.2 billion and 740 million years ago in this sea. [11] Good exposures of the supergroup can be seen in eastern Grand Canyon in the Inner Gorge and from Desert View, Lipan Point and Moran point. [12] [note 1]
In the park, this formation can be found in the Hurricane Cliffs above the Kolob Canyons Visitor Center and in an escarpment along Interstate 15 as it skirts the park. [6] This is the same formation that rims the Grand Canyon to the south. Farther to the west, a complex island arc assemblage formed above a subduction zone.
The Mesoproterozoic formations in the Grand Canyon are overlain by the 850 million year old, Neoproterozoic Chuar Group and Sixtymile Formation sedimentary rocks. The Great Unconformity is a famous gap in the stratigraphic record of the Grand Canyon of 900 million years between Proterozoic granitic rocks and Cambrian marine sediments. For the ...
Cross bedded sand dunes accumulated to great thickness, especially in the nearby Zion and Kolob canyons area (see geology of the Zion and Kolob canyons area), forming the buff to pale orange Navajo Sandstone. Navajo outcrops form cliffs, temples, and under certain conditions natural arches (such as Millard Canyon Arch) in the area.
Except where underlain by the Sixtymile Formation, the Tapeats Sandstone is the Cambrian geologic formation that is the basal geologic unit of the Tonto Group.Typically, it is also the basal geologic formation of the Phanerozoic strata exposed in the Grand Canyon, Arizona, and parts of northern Arizona, central Arizona, southeast California, southern Nevada, and southeast Utah.