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Against the soaring backdrop of Arizona's Vermilion Cliffs, the 1929 Navajo Bridge, now used for foot traffic, crosses the Colorado River beside its 1995 counterpart.
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Condors disappeared from the Vermilion Cliffs region during the 1920s. Now they are back: More than a hundred have been reintroduced over the past 15 years.
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In the wilderness area northwest of the monument, the creek-bed trail through Wire Pass starts out wide and shallow but narrows to a deep, tight slot. Seasonal dangers for hikers range from dehydration to drowning in flash floods.
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The Paria River cuts a deepening canyon through the plateau that shares its name. Petroglyphs on the canyon walls record the passage of Puebloans and other native peoples.
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Even at the start of a hike to Buckskin Gulch, the walls of Navajo sandstone darken overhead.
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In the Coyote Buttes, a natural column of rock called a hoodoo and nicknamed the Totem Pole towers against star tracks, revealing the passing of time along its banded length like the rings of a tree.
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Sinuous lines of color swirl through the Wave, the monument's most famous landform. Flash floods carved this passage through petrified sand dunes, exposing the iron-rich bands.
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Water pools in the Wave on a rare wet day in the desert.
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Where Native Americans worked in intaglio—etching designs into the rock (right)—nature works its far more ancient artifice (left).
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Miniature lakes reflect the sky in White Pocket, one of the geological spectacles on the Paria Plateau. Over the eons, groundwater has leached the color out of the Navajo sandstone here, and the weather has broken its surface into irregular polygons.
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A sandstone formation in White Pocket is almost liquid in its coloring.
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Against a twilight sky, a sandstone edifice in White Pocket catches the day's last warmth.
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Welcome to the so-called Honeymoon Trail. Threading the hem of the Paria Plateau, Highway 89A partly traces a route followed by 18th-century Franciscan explorers, and by Mormons on their way to St. George, Utah, often to be married.
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