Arizona Vacation Part Five

The Grandest Adventure of Them All!

Yesterday we visited the Grand Canyon National Park. The kids have very short attention spans and it doesn’t take long for them to get bored so we stayed for only a couple of hours.

The Grand Canyon was formed two billion years ago when tectonic plates moved slowly across the earth’s surface. A plate carrying an island chain and the plate that became North America collided. The heat and pressure from this process changed the existing rock layers into dark metamorphic rock, which is now the basement of the canyon. Molten rock squeezed into cracks and hardened as light bands of granite.

70 million years ago the Rocky mountains began to form. When they were forming they pushed up the land and created the Colorado Plateau. A large section of Utah, northern Arizona, western Colorado, and a corner of New Mexico rose from sea level to elevations of thousands of feet.

About five or six million years ago the Colorado River flowed across the Colorado Plateau on its way to the Gulf of California. Every time it rained the soil got washed into the river. Along with thousands of years of erosion and the natural flow of the river, the canyon was carved out.

Today thousands of people visit the Grand Canyon National Park every year. We took in God’s beauty and this was our view.

Today the Talbert Zoo heads north back to Spokane. We had a busy, fun vacation full of surprises. I hope we were able to create lasting memories for our children. If you missed the rest of our Arizona Vacation visit the below links.