Garden of the Gods

My hometown of Aurora, CO, does not hold many mystical geological features that illustrate the complexity of the world. However, the state of Colorado as a whole holds a wide variety of geological locations that formed over millions of years to become what they are today. One such example is the beautiful Garden of the Gods, found in Colorado Springs, CO, and is about a two-hour drive from Aurora. Home to countless species of vegetation and wildlife, the Garden of the Gods shows the best of the natural world. But in order to understand the true complexity of these rock formations, we must go back in time to see how they came to be.

Rock formations in the Garden of the Gods

Even though the shaping of the current Garden of the Gods only occurred mostly within the last .01 million years, the events that led to it’s eventual formation took over the course of hundreds of millions of years. The process began when the Pikes Peak granite was formed 1 billion years ago. Some of the formations that are located inside the park were made between 600 million years ago and 180 to 225 years ago. In the time from 135 to .02 million years ago, there were various mountain building, extinctions and periods of glaciation that had occurred. Then within the last .01 million years, erosional forces had shaped the modern day Garden of the Gods.

The Garden of the Gods is a great example of change that the Earth is constantly undergoing. It not only signifies the idea that nothing is set in stone (pun intended), but also illustrates that the world is constantly shifting in front of our eyes at an astronomically slow pace. The Earth has undergone billions of years of constant shifting, yet because our lifetimes are so short, we have never been able to truly grasp the complexity that is our world.