I’ve driven Cottonwood Canyon Road three times now, and each time the Cockscomb stops me cold.
The formation runs roughly 30 miles north-to-south through the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, a jagged spine of Navajo Sandstone tilted nearly vertical—sometimes beyond vertical, actually, which shouldn’t be possible but definately is. Geologists call it a monocline, though that term feels too sterile for what you’re seeing: a 165-million-year-old layer cake that got shoved upward from below, probably during the Laramide Orogeny around 70 million years ago, give or take. The layers that were once flat seabeds and dune fields now stand on edge like a fence someone forgot to finish building. I used to think folds in rock happened slowly, almost gently, but the Cockscomb looks violent—like the earth got impatient and just ripped itself open.
Here’s the thing: you can’t really understand it from photos. The scale is wrong, the colors shift depending on whether it’s morning or late afternoon, and honestly, pictures flatten the weirdness of driving alongside a wall of stone that curves and buckles for miles.
When Ancient Oceans Became Ridgelines (and Why That Matters for Paria Canyon)
The Cockscomb isn’t isolated—it’s part of the East Kaibab Monocline, which stretches from Arizona up into Utah, slicing through what would later become Paria Canyon and the broader Grand Staircase-Escalante region. The same tectonic forces that created this fold also tilted and exposed the Vermilion Cliffs, the White Cliffs, and the Pink Cliffs—the “steps” of the Grand Staircase itself. Turns out, when you shove a continental plate upward (in this case, the Colorado Plateau getting muscled around by the Farallon Plate subducting beneath it), you don’t just get mountains. You get these long, linear warps where rock layers bend instead of breaking. The Cockscomb is one of the most dramatic examples in North America, and it’s weirdly accessible—you can literally touch Jurassic-era cross-bedded sandstone from your car window, which feels wrong but isn’t.
Wait—maybe I should explain cross-bedding. It’s those diagonal lines you see in the sandstone, frozen evidence of ancient sand dunes that migrated across a desert roughly 180 million years ago, back when this area sat near the equator. The dunes piled up, got buried, compressed into stone, then got shoved sideways millions of years later.
Anyway, the Cockscomb acts like a geological textbook you can walk through.
Why Driving the Fold Feels Like Time Travel (Even Though It’s Just Dirt Road)
Cottonwood Canyon Road—the main route past the Cockscomb—is washboarded, rutted, and impassable when wet, which is to say it’s perfect for this kind of landscape. You’re moving through the Entrada Formation, the Carmel Formation, the Navajo Sandstone, all exposed in vertical slices because of that ancient fold. I guess it makes sense that early settlers and geologists ignored this area for so long; it’s remote, waterless, and the rock is too fractured for much besides looking. But that’s exactly why it ended up protected under the Grand Staircase-Escalante designation in 1996—though that protection has been contested and reduced since then, which is a whole other mess I won’t get into here. The point is, you’re driving through a place where erosion and tectonics collaborated to create something that feels almost curated, like a museum exhibit, except it’s 1.9 million acres and no one’s charging admission.
The Paria River, which carved Paria Canyon downstream from here, follows fault lines and weak zones in the rock—another byproduct of the same folding event. Where the Cockscomb rises, the canyon cuts deep, and you start to see how interconnected these features are: folds, faults, rivers, cliffs. It’s exhausting trying to hold all the timescales in your head at once—millions of years of deposition, then millions more of uplift, then a geologically brief period of erosion that’s still happening every time it rains.
I’ve seen people pull over, take a photo, and leave within five minutes. I don’t recieve that at all.
