Before leaving Monument Valley, I’d like to tell you about one special place in the eastern part of the valley, Mexican Hat. It’s a small town sitting next to the San Joaquin River, with a short plateau on the other side of the river. On the other side of the plateau rises the most unusual mountainside in the world, as many geologists have declared who have come to Mexican Hat from all over the world just to see that mountainside. It rises about 2,000 feet into the sky, with all of the grandeur of many sedimentary stratifications, large and small, in evidence. The unique feature of the whole mountainside is that the sedimentary layers all bend over down toward the river as if they were trying to flow into it and disappear. Thousands and thousands of feet of sedimentary strata are bent over toward and into the river in this fashion.

This scene is one of the most dramatic I have ever seen, proving the super violence that occurs during a cataclysm. In this case, a huge fissure opened in the Earth where the San Joaquin River flows now, the fissure being opened enough to be as a huge jaw opening to its throat with the molten layer normally sixty miles beneath. Of course, the molten layer would rise into the sixty-mile throat, being sixty miles below that of seething white-hot molten everything beneath. The sixty-mile thick shell presses down, while also providing a huge fissure for that pressure to push the molten stuff upward into the gaping throat-fissure.

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Now we have the most awesome, horrific, appalling, formidable, terrifying, uncanny, ultimately violent, Paroxysmic, cataclysmic collision of the forces of Nature on the surface of our planet – even beyond imagination until you see for yourself, right at Mexican Hat, with the side of that mountain stopped cold in the midst of its death throes.

At this point the supersonically rampaging oceans and wind hit the scene. So, we have a super earthquake so huge as to open a fissure in the whole shell of the earth, opening a path for the molten layer below to be pressed upward into the fissure; the molten invader melting the hard layer beneath that side of the mountain; the 1,000 mile-per-hour ocean water slaughtering the mountainside (having lost its foundations), driving it down into the huge fissure and steaming the molten stuff below into solidity; and the mountainside stops feeding itself downward into the maw, while the oceans in their fury pass on, leaving a huge part of themselves sloshing around and back and forth in the valley, plus some surviving, beautiful, picturesque monuments standing today for us to see.

In other parts of the valley, upheavals of sedimentary strata in huge structures point upward, with the rock being scorched in a plethora of places. Church Rock and Agathla reign; each has many scorched sedimentary boulders scattered around, near its base.

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