At the time of abandonment, ancestral Unaweep Canyon was a V-shaped canyon resembling Glenwood Canyon just upstream from the city of Glenwood Springs, Colorado. The reasons for its change in shape and appearance to the beautiful U-shaped canyon we find today and the profound effect the abandonment of Unaweep Canyon had on the deepening of the Grand Valley and the canyons of the Monument will be brought out in the section “Canyon Cutting.”
The Age of Man
Like the dinosaurs before them, a few of the Tertiary mammals were so long on brawn and short on brains that they evolved into grotesque monsters and overspecialized themselves into early extinction. Fortunately, however, most of the mammals evolved more slowly and moderately into the forms we find today.
One group—the anthropoid primates—began to think, so they developed their brains rather than their brawn, particularly the Tertiary ancestors of man. Few remains of these ancestors have been found in Tertiary rocks, but many more have been discovered in rocks of the next geologic period—the Quaternary. Thus, this period may properly be regarded as the age of man, for man then began to dominate the Earth for better or for worse.
The Quaternary—latest and shortest of the geologic periods—is divided into the Pleistocene and Holocene (recent) Epochs ([fig. 61]).
The Ice Age
During the Pleistocene Epoch, all continents of the Northern Hemisphere and some of the Southern Hemisphere were partly covered at least four times by huge glaciers. Each glacial advance in Europe and North America was ended by a warmer interval during which the glaciers melted and retreated northward; then, vegetation and soil had time to become re-established. Thus, the Pleistocene has properly been called the ice age.
None of the continental glaciers reached the Monument or the Uncompahgre Plateau, or arch, but small alpine glaciers grew in the high Rocky Mountains to the east, sculpturing sharp-crested peaks and ridges and forming beautiful valleys and lakes. Many of the beautiful lakes on Grand Mesa were formed by glaciation, but some near the edges were formed by landslides.