The Most Remarkable Rock Formations in North America

24 places in 3 countries · updated 13 October 2026

1. 01 El Capitan

   United States37.734° N 119.637° W

   

   Glaciers shaped the valley, but because El Capitan's granite has so few cracks, the ice could not pluck it apart the way it did neighbouring cliffs. That is why the face is so sheer — and why it became the world's defining big wall. The most famous line, The Nose, follows the prow between the southwest and southeast faces. Warren Harding, Wayne Merry and George Whitmore first climbed it in 1958 over 47 days spread across a year and a half, using fixed ropes and bolts. Two years later a second team did it in a single push of seven days.

   Did you know? Each February, for a couple of weeks, the setting sun can turn Horsetail Fall on El Capitan's east side a glowing orange, the so-called firefall.

   More about El Capitan →

2. 02 Devils Tower

   United States44.590° N 104.715° W

   

   The rock is phonolite porphyry, a grey igneous rock studded with white feldspar crystals, which was pushed up as molten magma into the overlying sedimentary rocks about forty million years ago and cooled underground; as it cooled it contracted and cracked into columns. It is most often interpreted as an eroded laccolith. What is clear is that the softer rocks around it have since been stripped away by erosion, leaving the hard core standing alone.

   Did you know? There is no apostrophe in Devils Tower because the U.S. Board on Geographic Names discourages possessive forms in place names.

   More about Devils Tower →

3. 03 Cave of the Crystals

   Cueva de los cristales

   Mexico · 38.7 km from Delicias27.851° N 105.496° W

   

   The giants owe their size to heat and patience. A magma body a few kilometres down kept mineral-laden groundwater warm for an immensely long time, and as the temperature slowly fell below about 56 °C, gypsum began to crystallise out of it. Uranium-thorium dating puts the crystals at up to about half a million years old, and laboratory measurements of their growth rate are among the slowest ever recorded for any crystal. The same conditions made the chamber almost lethal: air around 58 °C with near-saturated humidity meant that an unprotected person could last only about ten minutes.

   Did you know? At that pace, the largest beams are thought to have needed around a million years to reach their size.

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4. 04 Landscape Arch

   United States · 24.6 km from Moab38.791° N 109.607° W

   

   What makes it extraordinary is proportion. The span is a long, shallow curve of rock so slender for its length that it reads almost as a line drawn against the sky, set among the rock formations of Devils Garden. The arch was named by Frank Beckwith, who led a scientific expedition into what was then Arches National Monument in the winter of 1933–34.

   Did you know? Two more smaller rockfalls followed the 1995 collapse within the same month, on 13 and 21 June.

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5. 05 Shiprock

   United States36.688° N 108.836° W

   

   Geologically, Shiprock is the eroded throat of a volcano. Around 27 million years ago, magma rising through the crust solidified some 2,500 to 3,000 feet below what was then the surface, forming a plug of volcanic breccia shot through with minette, a dark igneous rock. Over millions of years the softer sediments around it washed away, leaving the hard core and the radiating sheets of minette standing in the open. It is one of the most striking volcanic necks anywhere and was designated a National Natural Landmark in 1975.

   Did you know? Radiometric dating of the minette dikes shows that the rock solidified about 27 million years ago.

   More about Shiprock →

6. 06 The Wave

   United States36.996° N 112.006° W

   

   The stripes record ancient history. The Navajo Sandstone formed from sand dunes of the Jurassic period, and its fine alternating layers are traces of how the dunes grew, grain by grain, under the wind. Wind and occasional water then carved U-shaped channels through the rock, cutting across the layers and exposing them in sweeping lines. After rain, pools form in the hollows and can briefly fill with tiny tadpole shrimp. Nearby is the Second Wave, with fainter colouring.

   Did you know? The ancient sand sea that left the Navajo Sandstone may originally have been about two and a half times larger than its surviving outcrop of roughly 102,000 square miles.

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7. 07 Natural Bridge (Virginia)

   Natural Bridge

   United States37.627° N 79.545° W

   

   For the Monacan people the bridge was a sacred place, linked in tradition to a victory over pursuing enemies. In 1742 an exploring party sent by Virginia's governor followed Cedar Creek through the arch, and in the following decades it became one of the celebrated wonders of the New World. " are still pointed out on the wall of the arch. Thomas Jefferson bought 157 acres including the bridge in 1774, called it "the most Sublime of nature's works", built a log cabin here and surveyed it himself in 1802.

   Did you know? Jefferson's two-room log cabin at the bridge hosted guests including John Marshall, James Monroe, Henry Clay, Sam Houston and Martin Van Buren.

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8. 08 Peña de Bernal

   Mexico20.750° N 99.946° W

   

   Geologists describe the rock as an endogenous volcanic dome: thick, almost solid lava pushed up into older marine rocks without ever spilling out as a flow. Once volcanic activity ceased, erosion stripped away the softer material around it over millions of years, leaving the hard core exposed as the tower seen today. The name has an old Spanish root — "bernal" was a word applied to a large, elongated, isolated crag — while the Otomí and Chichimeca names for the place both mean "in the middle of two".

   Did you know? Estimates of the rock's age differ sharply between studies, ranging from roughly 8.7 million to about 67 million years.

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9. 09 Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument

   United States · 26.5 km from Los Alamos35.674° N 106.419° W

   

   The rock was laid down six to seven million years ago by pyroclastic flows from eruptions in the volcanic field of the Jemez Mountains, and is assigned to the Peralta Tuff. Wind and water have since worn the soft layers into cones wherever a resistant caprock shielded the material beneath, and have cut narrow slot canyons through the deposits. Tent rocks are a form of hoodoo, and here they stand in dense groups along the canyon walls.

   Did you know? Small rounded beads of obsidian, volcanic glass cooled so quickly it never crystallised, lie scattered in the arroyos and are known as Apache tears.

   More about Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument →

10. 10 Basaltic Prisms of Santa María Regla

    Prismas basálticos de Santa María Regla

    Mexico · 22.9 km from Pachuca20.234° N 98.563° W

    

    What makes the place unusual among columnar basalts is water. The Río San Antonio Regla, fed from a dam upstream, drops through the canyon in a series of permanent waterfalls that spill directly over the prisms, so the falling water runs down the grooves between the columns and catches the light on their facets. The lowest fall is known as the Cascada de la Rosa. Paths, staircases and suspension bridges have been built along the gorge, letting visitors look at the columns from below, from the side and from above, where the tops of the prisms form a honeycomb pavement.

    Did you know? Alexander von Humboldt visited on 21 May 1803 and drew the scene in a sketch titled 'Basaltic rocks and waterfall of Regla'.

    More about Basaltic Prisms of Santa María Regla →

11. 11 Percé Rock

    Perce Rock

    Canada48.524° N 64.199° W

    

    The rock is a record of change measured in centuries rather than millennia. When Jacques Cartier sailed past in 1534 he described three arches; later drawings show two, and the outer one fell with a crash on 17 June 1845, leaving the free-standing pillar that still guards the eastern tip. The stone itself is Devonian limestone laid down some 400 million years ago, and around 150 fossil species have been identified in it, from trilobites and brachiopods to corals. Erosion is still at work, and estimates put the loss at roughly 300 tonnes a year, which is why nobody climbs it and why walkers who cross the sand bar at low tide are warned to keep clear of its foot.

    Did you know? It ranks among the largest natural arches in the world that stand in water, and small boats can pass through the arch at high tide.

    More about Percé Rock →

12. 12 Painted Hills

    United States44.661° N 120.273° W

    

    Each colour corresponds to a different chapter of that change. The deep reds are fossil soils formed in humid spells, rich in oxidised iron and aluminium; yellower bands record drier intervals; the dark streaks are lignite, the compressed remains of plant matter; and the soft greys are mudstone, siltstone and shale. The slopes carry almost no vegetation, so the stripes stay exposed, and the light keeps rewriting them: flat and pastel at midday, saturated and almost glowing in the low sun of morning and evening. Fossils are scarce here compared with the rest of the monument, though leaf impressions of redwood, alder, fig and cinnamon relatives have been found in the shales.

    Did you know? The striped beds belong to the Big Basin Member, the oldest division of the John Day Formation, which built up over some 20 million years.

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13. 13 Hierve el Agua

    Mexico · 14.4 km from Mitla16.866° N 96.276° W

    

    The larger formation, the cascada grande, hangs about thirty metres down from a lip some ninety metres wide, high above the valley floor; the smaller cascada chica drops around twelve metres from a base about sixty metres across. On the terrace above them, known as the Amphitheatre, four springs bubble up at a mild 22 to 27 °C. Their fizzing gave the place its Spanish name, "the water boils", although the water is barely warm. It gathers in natural rimmed basins and in two larger pools cut for bathing, and the dissolved minerals tint it a milky turquoise that stands out sharply against the ochre scrub.

    Did you know? Only two of the four springs on the upper terrace actually bubble; the effect is thought to come from underground currents, not from heat.

    More about Hierve el Agua →

14. 14 Devils Postpile National Monument

    United States37.624° N 119.084° W

    

    The story did not end with cooling. Later, a glacier moved over the formation and planed off the tops of the columns, leaving a surface on the crest that looks almost like a tiled floor, still marked with the scratches the ice dragged across it. At the foot of the wall lies a long apron of broken columns that have toppled over the millennia. Downstream, the river drops 101 feet (31 m) over Rainbow Falls, named for the bows of colour that appear in its spray on sunny days. The John Muir Trail and the Pacific Crest Trail run together through the monument, which sits between 7,200 and 8,200 feet above sea level and borders the Ansel Adams Wilderness.

    Did you know? In a survey of 400 columns, 44.5 percent were six-sided, a higher share of hexagons than at most other columnar basalt sites.

    More about Devils Postpile National Monument →

15. 15 Garden of the Gods

    United States · 7 km from Colorado Springs38.878° N 104.871° W

    

    The rocks record a long story. The coarse red Fountain Formation, some 320 to 300 million years old, is made of debris washed off the Ancestral Rocky Mountains; the Lyons sandstone, a little younger, preserves desert dunes from a time when this part of Colorado was a sea of sand. The Lyons beds form the tallest walls in the park, among them North Gateway Rock, which rises about 98 metres. A dinosaur skull found here in 1878 turned out to belong to a previously unknown plant-eater, now called Theiophytalia kerri, which lived about 112 million years ago.

    Did you know? A subspecies of honey ant described in 1879 was named hortideorum after the park, from the Latin for garden of the gods.

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16. 16 Trona Pinnacles

    United States35.617° N 117.368° W

    

    The spires are made of tufa, a porous rock composed mainly of calcium carbonate, and they grew underwater. During the Pleistocene, between about 100,000 and 10,000 years ago, Searles Lake held water, and where calcium-rich groundwater seeped up through the floor of the alkaline, carbonate-rich lake, minerals precipitated around the springs and built up towers layer by layer. When the lake dried out, the towers were left standing in the open. They fall into three groups of different age: the northern group is about 11,000 to 25,000 years old, the middle group holds the tallest pinnacle, and the southern group, with some 200 spires, dates from about 32,000 to 100,000 years ago.

    Did you know? Geologists sort the spires into four shapes: towers, squat tombstones, massive ridges and low cones under 10 ft high.

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17. 17 Cathedral Rock (Sedona)

    Cathedral Rock

    United States34.820° N 111.793° W

    

    The stone itself tells a story of a vanished coastline. The upper butte is carved from the Schnebly Hill Formation, a red-bed sandstone built up from coastal sand dunes along the shore of an ancient sea in the Permian period. On the lower trail, fossil ripple marks are still visible in the slabs underfoot, and in the first saddle a dark band of basalt cuts through the red rock — a dike where molten rock once forced its way up through a crack.

    Did you know? The vortex idea took hold in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the psychic Page Bryant singled out a handful of Sedona sites, Cathedral Rock among them.

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18. 18 White Pocket

    United States37.458° N 111.704° W

    

    The bedrock is Navajo Sandstone, the petrified remains of a vast field of Jurassic sand dunes, and in most of the surrounding country it weathers into red domes and cliffs. At White Pocket the cross-bedded layers of the old dunes are still visible beneath the surface, but over them lies the white crust that makes the place unique.

    Did you know? Those dunes formed part of a vast sand sea on the western edge of the supercontinent Pangaea, possibly two and a half times larger than its surviving outcrops.

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19. 19 Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness

    United States36.304° N 108.118° W

    

    The rocks expose one of the most remarkable geological records in North America — described as the longest, most complete and most fossil-rich sequence of beds spanning the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary in any single sedimentary basin in the world. Four formations appear in the wilderness. The oldest, the Fruitland Formation, consists of grey shales, thin coal seams and white sandstones; above it lie the greenish shales and siltstones of the Kirtland Formation, then the Ojo Alamo Formation, which records the boundary at the end of the age of dinosaurs, and finally the striped white and black shale and sandstone of the Nacimiento Formation.

    Did you know? Some dinosaur bones found in the younger Kimbeto Member were weathered out of older beds and buried again, making them so-called reworked fossils.

    More about Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness →

20. 20 Smith Rock State Park

    United States · 37.6 km from Bend44.369° N 121.138° W

    

    The rock tells the story of a violent volcanic past. Around 30 million years ago the ground here collapsed into an emptying magma chamber, forming the Crooked River caldera, which then filled with the debris of the eruption — ash and rock fragments that solidified into rhyolite tuff. About 500,000 years ago fresh basalt lava flowed over the older tuff, and the Crooked River has since cut down through both, exposing the pale, welded tuff that now forms the cliffs. The ridge of Smith Rock reaches about 3,200 ft (975 m), some 600 ft above the river.

    Did you know? Highliners string slacklines from a nearby outcrop called the Diving Board across to the mouth of Monkey Face.

    More about Smith Rock State Park →

21. 21 Needles

    United States · 37.2 km from Rapid City43.837° N 103.549° W

    

    The Needles were the first site proposed for the carving that became Mount Rushmore. The sculptor Gutzon Borglum turned them down: the granite was of poor quality and the spires were simply too thin to carry monumental heads. They found a different calling instead. Fritz Wiessner climbed the Totem Pole in 1936 and Khayyam Spire the following year, and from 1947 Jan and Herb Conn made more than 220 first ascents here over the decades. In 1961 John Gill free-soloed a route on The Thimble that was among the hardest climbs of its day.

    Did you know? Jan and Herb Conn found the Needles by chance in 1947 while driving through the Black Hills on their way to climb Devils Tower.

    More about Needles →

22. 22 Mingan Archipelago

    Canada50.209° N 63.589° W

    

    The rocks are Ordovician limestones and dolomites, laid down on the floor of an ancient shallow sea more than 440 million years ago and locally rich in fossils. Once the beds were exposed, waves, rain and frost began working on them, undercutting and dissolving the weaker layers and leaving the more resistant blocks standing alone as pillars. Some forty limestone islands and around a thousand islets and reefs are scattered over roughly 150 km of coastline between Longue-Pointe-de-Mingan and Aguanish, with Anticosti Island lying across the channel to the south. Île Niapiskau, with its tall limestone monoliths, is among the best known.

    Did you know? Basque, Spanish and Portuguese seafarers fished cod and hunted whales around the islands from the 16th century onward.

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23. 23 Monument Rocks

    United States38.791° N 100.762° W

    

    The chalk is the floor of a vanished ocean. Around 80 million years ago, in the Cretaceous period, the Western Interior Seaway divided North America in two, stretching from the present Gulf of Mexico north through Canada, and the shells of countless microscopic organisms settled on its bed as soft limy ooze. The Smoky Hill River, rain and wind have since stripped away the surrounding rock and left these remnants standing. The Kansas chalk is famous for its marine fossils — fish, turtles, oysters, sharks' teeth, birds and the great swimming reptiles that hunted in the seaway — many of which can be seen in museums of the region.

    Did you know? The chalk is built from coccoliths, the microscopic plates of plankton that drifted down onto the floor of the inland sea.

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24. 24 Thor's Well

    United States44.278° N 124.114° W

    

    The well is generally explained as a former sea cave. Over thousands of years waves pounding the volcanic shoreline hollowed out a cavern, until its roof gave way and left a bowl-shaped opening a short distance from the water's edge, connected to the sea underneath. Its depth is usually estimated at about 6 m (20 ft). The show depends on the tide, the height and direction of the swell and the wind, and is most dramatic in the hours around high tide.

    Did you know? The Alsea people, whose southern territory included the headland, called Cape Perpetua Halqaik, a name that may mean something like an exposed place.

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