Horseshoe Bend

Horseshoe Bend is a dramatic, nearly 270-degree meander of the Colorado River carved into Permian-age Navajo Sandstone near Page, Arizona, where the river loops around a sheer sandstone promontory before continuing downstream toward the Grand Canyon. The horseshoe-shaped bend formed as the ancestral Colorado River, flowing across a relatively flat plateau, developed a sinuous meandering course; regional uplift of the Colorado Plateau then caused the river to incise directly downward along its already established winding path, cutting a steep-walled canyon roughly 300 meters deep while preserving the meander's curved shape rather than allowing it to migrate laterally, a process geologists call entrenchment. The result is one of the most recognizable examples of an entrenched river meander anywhere in the world.