Nature
Needle Mountain is a 6,620-foot freestanding sandstone summit in Capitol Reef National Park’s remote Cathedral Valley, rising about 240 feet above the surrounding desert near Cathedral Mountain. Its stark form reflects the landscape that inspired Charles Kelly in 1945 to name Cathedral Valley for sandstone towers resembling Gothic cathedrals. The area also lay along John C. Frémont’s 1853 route through this isolated country. Geologically, the mountain is an erosional remnant of unfractured Entrada Sandstone deposited about 160 million years ago on a tidal flat, within a broader landscape shaped by Colorado Plateau uplift and the Waterpocket Fold during the Laramide Orogeny.
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