As streams carve their paths, their beds deepen, unveiling distinct strata of dolomite and chert. These strata, akin to layers in a cake, tell a story of the region’s geological past, opening a window into an ancient ocean’s seabed. Here, the sediments of oceanic life were compressed into stone, with variations in density and hardness reflecting the water’s depth and temperature. This resulted in different compressions in warm, shallow seas compared to their deeper, cooler counterparts.

The genesis of oil traces back to these ancient warm, shallow waters. Here, dead plankton, including both phytoplankton and zooplankton, combined with algae and bacteria, descended to the ocean floor. These remains mingled with inorganic materials carried by rivers, forming a layer of organic-rich mud. Over eons, in the absence of oxygen and under accumulating sediment, this mud transformed, through increasing pressure and temperature, into oil and natural gas. While most of the world’s oil deposits were formed during the dinosaur-dominated Mesozoic era, the organic matter composing oil is even older. The connection between oil and dinosaurs, widely believed by many, actually stems from a 1930s marketing campaign by Sinclair Oil Corporation, which used dinosaur imagery to imply the ancient origins of their oil.

With the uplift and fracturing of the ancient ocean’s seabed, the process of erosion and leaching began, a process still active today. Observers can see how water cascading down canyon walls deposits layers and minerals on the smooth, flood-formed walls. These waters leave behind a stony residue on the yellow stone, creating distinctive geological features that mirror the region’s dynamic history.