Comanche Point is a summit located in the

Grand Canyon The Grand Canyon is a steep-sided canyon carved by the Colorado River in Arizona, United States. The Grand Canyon is long, up to wide and attains a depth of over a mile (). The canyon and adjacent rim are contained within Grand Canyon Nati ...

, in

Coconino County Coconino County is a County (United States), county in the North Central Arizona, North-Central part of the U.S. state of Arizona. Its population was 145,101 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census. The county seat is Flagstaff, Arizon ...

of northern

Arizona Arizona is a U.S. state, state in the Southwestern United States, Southwestern region of the United States, sharing the Four Corners region of the western United States with Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah. It also borders Nevada to the nort ...

, US. Part of the ''Palisades of the Desert'', Comanche Point is the high point on the canyon's less-visited East Rim, and is four miles north-northeast of Desert View Point, its nearest higher neighbor.

Topographic relief Terrain (), alternatively relief or topographical relief, is the dimension and shape of a given surface of land. In physical geography, terrain is the lay of the land. This is usually expressed in terms of the elevation, slope, and orientati ...

is significant as it towers above the

Colorado River The Colorado River () is one of the principal rivers (along with the Rio Grande) in the Southwestern United States and in northern Mexico. The river, the List of longest rivers of the United States (by main stem), 5th longest in the United St ...

in 1.5 mile. Comanche Point was named in 1900 by

George Wharton James George Wharton James (27 September 1858 – 8 November 1923) was an American popular lecturer, photographer, journalist and editor. Born in Lincolnshire, England, he emigrated to the United States as a young man after being ordained as a Method ...

for the

Comanche The Comanche (), or Nʉmʉnʉʉ (, 'the people'), are a Tribe (Native American), Native American tribe from the Great Plains, Southern Plains of the present-day United States. Comanche people today belong to the List of federally recognized tri ...

, a

Native-American Native Americans (also called American Indians, First Americans, or Indigenous Americans) are the Indigenous peoples of the United States, particularly of the lower 48 states and Alaska. They may also include any Americans whose origins lie ...

nation A nation is a type of social organization where a collective Identity (social science), identity, a national identity, has emerged from a combination of shared features across a given population, such as language, history, ethnicity, culture, t ...

from the

Great Plains The Great Plains is a broad expanse of plain, flatland in North America. The region stretches east of the Rocky Mountains, much of it covered in prairie, steppe, and grassland. They are the western part of the Interior Plains, which include th ...

, in keeping with a practice of naming the points on the canyon's South Rim for Native American nations. This geographical feature's name was officially adopted in 1906 by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names. According to the

Köppen climate classification The Köppen climate classification divides Earth climates into five main climate groups, with each group being divided based on patterns of seasonal precipitation and temperature. The five main groups are ''A'' (tropical), ''B'' (arid), ''C'' (te ...

system, Comanche Point is located in a

Cold semi-arid climate Cold is the presence of low temperature, especially in the atmosphere. In common usage, cold is often a subjective perception. A lower bound to temperature is absolute zero, defined as 0.00K on the Kelvin scale, an absolute thermodynamic ...

zone. On September 27, 1994, the tabloid

Weekly World News The ''Weekly World News'' is a tabloid formerly published in a newspaper format reporting mostly fictional "news" stories in the United States from 1979 to 2007. The paper was renowned for its outlandish cover stories often based on supernatur ...

ran an outlandish cover story that wreckage of a 4000-year-old

UFO An unidentified flying object (UFO) is an object or phenomenon seen in the sky but not yet identified or explained. The term was coined when United States Air Force (USAF) investigations into flying saucers found too broad a range of shapes ...

had been found in limestone rubble near the base of Comanche Point.

Geology

The summit of Comanche Point is composed of

Kaibab Limestone The Kaibab Limestone is a resistant cliff-forming, Permian geologic formation that crops out across the U.S. states of northern Arizona, southern Utah, east central Nevada and southeast California. It is also known as the Kaibab Formation in Ar ...

overlaying cream-colored, cliff-forming,

Permian The Permian ( ) is a geologic period and System (stratigraphy), stratigraphic system which spans 47 million years, from the end of the Carboniferous Period million years ago (Mya), to the beginning of the Triassic Period 251.902 Mya. It is the s ...

Coconino Sandstone The Coconino Sandstone is a geologic formation (geology), formation composed of light-colored quartz arenite of Aeolian processes, eolian origin. It erodes to form conspicuous, sheer cliffs in the upper walls of Grand Canyon, as part of the Mog ...

. The sandstone, which is the third-youngest of the strata in the Grand Canyon, was deposited 265 million years ago as sand dunes. Below the Coconino Sandstone is slope-forming, Permian

Hermit Formation The Permian Hermit Formation, also known as the Hermit Shale, is a nonresistant unit that is composed of slope-forming reddish brown siltstone, mudstone, and very fine-grained sandstone. Within the Grand Canyon region, the upper part of the Her ...

, which in turn overlays the

Pennsylvanian Pennsylvanian may refer to: * A person or thing from Pennsylvania * Pennsylvanian (geology) The Pennsylvanian ( , also known as Upper Carboniferous or Late Carboniferous) is, on the International Commission on Stratigraphy, ICS geologic timesc ...

-Permian

Supai Group The Supai Group is a slope-forming sequence of mixed red beds and limestones that outcrop in the Colorado Plateau. The group was laid down during the Pennsylvanian to Lower Permian. Cliff-forming interbeds of sandstone are noticeable througho ...

. Further down are strata of

Mississippian Mississippian may refer to: * Mississippian (geology), a subperiod of the Carboniferous period in the geologic timescale, roughly 360 to 325 million years ago * Mississippian cultures, a network of precontact cultures across the midwest and Easte ...

Redwall Limestone The Redwall Limestone is an erosion-resistant, Mississippian age, cliff-former, cliff-forming geological formation that forms prominent, red-stained cliffs in the Grand Canyon. these cliffs range in height from to . It is one of the most fossili ...

, and

Cambrian The Cambrian ( ) is the first geological period of the Paleozoic Era, and the Phanerozoic Eon. The Cambrian lasted 51.95 million years from the end of the preceding Ediacaran period 538.8 Ma (million years ago) to the beginning of the Ordov ...

Tonto Group The Tonto Group is a name for an assemblage of related sedimentary strata, collectively known by geologists as a '' Group'', that comprises the basal sequence Paleozoic strata exposed in the sides of the Grand Canyon. As currently defined, the T ...

.William Kenneth Hamblin, ''Anatomy of the Grand Canyon: Panoramas of the Canyon's Geology'', 2008, Grand Canyon Association Publisher, . Precipitation runoff from Comanche Point drains into the nearby Colorado River.

Gallery

File:Grand Canyon National Park 08.jpg, From Desert View File:Comanche Point.jpg, West aspect File:Comanche Point from Desert View.jpg, From Desert View File:Grand Canyon sunrise over Comanche Point from Tanner Camp.png, West aspect at sunrise File:Grand Canyon, Comanche Point.jpg, From Desert View File:Grand Canyon NP Navajo Point 0187 (5449492415).jpg, Comanche Point centered, as seen from Navajo Point. Desert View Watchtower upper right. File:Grand Canyon National Park Cloud Inversion from Desert View, November 29, 2013 photo 0812 - Flickr - Grand Canyon NPS.jpg, Comanche Point centered, as seen from Desert View during a rare total inversion File:Grand Canyon flight over Comanche Point.jpg, Aerial view of north aspect File:Comanche Point (Grand Canyon).jpg, Aerial view of the east aspect of Comanche Point, centered

References

External links

* Weather forecast
National Weather Service
* Comanche Point rock climbing
Mountainproject.com
* 4000-year-old UFO found near Comanche Point
Weekly World News
{{Geology of the Grand Canyon area, , state=collapsed Grand Canyon Landforms of Coconino County, Arizona Mountains of Arizona Mountains of Coconino County, Arizona Colorado Plateau Grand Canyon National Park Two-thousanders of the United States

Geology

Gallery

See also

References

External links