AN AMATEUR GEOLOGY ROAD TRIP
My travels through the Colorado Plateau of southern Utah and northern Arizona.
by John Fuhring
June, 2010

Page 5
     As it turned out, it was very fortunate that I got to Kodachrome Basin State Park when I did.  I got the last and perhaps the most beautiful campsite there.  When I arrived at the entrance, I was surprised that a place, so off the beaten tourist trail, would be filled up so early in the day, but when I saw the place, I knew why.  This was a very beautiful place and the camping was the finest on the entire Colorado Plateau.  The facilities here are brand new and wonderfully maintained by the park's staff of friendly and hard working people.  I can't say enough regarding how impressed I was with everything and everybody at this marvelous little gem of a park.

     Before I go into the unique and beautiful things that are found at this park, I'd like to show some pictures of my camp and say a little more about it.


     Behind me is the road and my parked truck.  Through an opening in the trees, the raked sand walkway leads you to this glade.  On a clean pad of swept concrete is the picnic table and directly behind that is a very ample clearing for erecting a tent.  


There was an excellent BBQ unit for cooking, but I did all my stuff on my gas stove.


My big "family size" tent.  It was such a luxury to be able to stand up and have room for my
wonderfully comfortable cot (with mattress) in addition to a bed side table for my lantern.

     The pad for the tent was huge and could accommodate even family size tents.  The clean sand of the tent pad is raked to a uniform flatness and is surrounded by brush.  That evening I did not bother putting up my rain-fly for privacy because the brush and the fact that I was deep within this glade provided me with perfect privacy.  It was especially beautiful looking through the top of my tent to the beautiful crescent moon and bright stars.  I could "sleep under the stars" and yet be safe from bugs and other critters. 


Is this a beautiful park or what?


   In front of my tent is the picnic table and its concrete pad, but to the right was a lane that opened up to a beautiful lawn.
     Beyond the lawn was a full bath house.  Yes, a bath house with plenty of hot water for a shower.  The staff there made sure that everything worked and that everything was spotlessly clean.  

     This place was so beautifully designed, constructed and maintained.  It was the most perfect and comfortable place for tent camping I've ever been to or could ever imagine and yet, nearly everybody at Kodachrome Park was in an RV and almost nobody was ... ah ... motor-homeless like I was.  That evening I pitied the people inside their tin boxes with all their "comforts of home" with their built-in toilets and baths.  For the first time on the trip I thought what a horrible waste it is to give RV'ers these magnificent camp sites when all they use is just the parking pad.  If the park people would just crowd the RV'ers into big parking lots and let the rest of us have the beautiful facilities, the RV'ers wouldn't know the difference and it would make it a whole lot easier to get a camping permit before the parks fill up for the evening for those (like me) who were experiencing the Colorado Plateau as it should be experienced - by tent.

     Just for the camping, Kodachrome Basin is worth going out of your way to visit, but it turned out that the camping is just one feature at this jewel of a place.

     Here's just a sample of what you can see there.  I won't show any of the many interesting hiking trails, but the park has them in abundance too.

     
A Sandstone Pipe as seen from my camp at Kodachrome Basin State Park
"Where you see both Mother Earth and Father Rock"

       To tell the truth, I found some of the scenery kind of embarrassing and perhaps this isn't the place to take kids to.  Anyway, here's some pictures I took in the park.

Another and somewhat thicker pipe.


All of the surrounding Entrada has been eroded away showing the bleached sandstone core.




As you pedal or drive through the park there are beautiful formations to see and hiking trails to take
you to even more places.


The Windsor member of the Carmel formation.

     At the very lowest levels in the park, at the bottom of everything are outcrops of the very ledgey Wins or member of the Carmel Formation.  The Carmel consists of middle Jurassic shallow marine and shore deposits that formed along hot, dry shorelines and in the shallows of the Sundance Sea as it waxed and wained.  Some of the Carmel consists of "sabkha" deposits of gypsum that was formed by sea water evaporating along hot, dry shorelines such as we have down in Mexico and in the Middle East Gulf States today.  

     The Carmel Formation generally caps the older Navajo Sandstones in most places on the Colorado Plateau.  There is an unconformity of several million years between the top of the Navajo and the bottom of the Carmel because there was a long period of erosion after the Navajo sands went into storage and before the Sundance Sea moved in from the north and deposited the Carmel.    

     On the tops of the cliffs surrounding Kodachrome Basin Park you can see the "Bleached member of the Entrada" otherwise known and the Henrieville Sandstone, another unconformity and above that the Naturita Formation and in the distances you can see the Cretaceous Tropic Shale (related to the Mancos Shale).  In the far distance you can see the beautiful pink cliffs of the Cenozoic Clarion Formation, but I'll talk of that later.