White Pocket
Interesting facts
- The Navajo Sandstone beneath White Pocket was laid down as desert dunes about 200 to 195 million years ago, in the earliest Jurassic.
- 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.
- The reds, oranges and yellows of the sandstone come from iron oxides such as hematite, goethite and limonite filling the spaces between quartz grains.
- White patches in Navajo Sandstone are thought to mark places where deep, reducing fluids dissolved the iron coatings and bleached the rock.
- In 2011 one researcher interpreted the white mass as sand liquefied by an earthquake, with the swirls read as fossil sand volcanoes.
- Beneath the white crust the old dune layers run undisturbed, suggesting the contorted look comes from cross-bedding cut by curved rock surfaces.
- The endangered California condor was reintroduced to the surrounding Vermilion Cliffs region in 1996, chosen for its remoteness.
- The surrounding national monument holds hundreds of ancestral pueblo sites and one of the largest concentrations of rock art in any protected area of the United States.
Why it is worth it
White Pocket is a small, almost hidden patch of rock on the Paria Plateau in northern Arizona where the sandstone looks as if it had been poured, stirred and left to set. Swirls of white, cream, yellow, orange and red twist through mounds and ridges of slickrock, and in places a pale, knobbly crust known as cauliflower rock lies draped over deep red stone.
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. How it formed is still debated: some geologists have read the contorted layers as soft-sediment deformation, others as slumping and sliding set off by ancient earthquakes, while a study published in 2024 interpreted the white layer as a weathering crust deposited by mineral-rich groundwater in an arid climate, preserved at different stages of development across the site.
White Pocket lies within Vermilion Cliffs National Monument, proclaimed by President Bill Clinton on 9 November 2000 and administered by the Bureau of Land Management. The monument covers almost 294,000 acres of the Paria Plateau, the Vermilion Cliffs and Paria Canyon, and also contains Coyote Buttes with the famous sandstone formation known as The Wave. The rock formations begin about 100 yards west of the parking area at the end of the sand roads.
Getting there
The approach starts on House Rock Valley Road (BLM 1065), an unpaved road that leaves US Route 89 about 38 miles east of Kanab, Utah, or 36 miles west of Page, Arizona; its southern end meets Highway 89A east of Jacob Lake. From House Rock Valley Road a series of BLM tracks (1017, 1087 and 1086) crosses deep sand to the White Pocket parking area; the route is passable only for high-clearance four-wheel-drive vehicles. Page, Arizona, is the nearest town of any size, and Page Municipal Airport (PGA) lies about 40 km from White Pocket in a straight line, considerably further by road.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
White Pocket is located geographically in Vermilion Cliffs National Monument, Arizona and geologically on the Colorado Plateau. The Navajo Sandstone is exposed on the plateau as mounds and ridges. These are mostly reddish erosional remnants, but those remnants in White Pocket are blanketed with a white layer appearing as "Cauliflower Rock". This white layer makes this area unique and thus being called the White Pocket.
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