Interpretive Sign - The Painted Wall

At 2300 feet, Painted Wall is the highest cliff in Colorado. If the Empire State Building stood on the canyon floor, it would reach slightly more than halfway to the top of the cliff. The patterns that inspired the name Painted Wall were created more than a billion years ago when molten rock was squeezed (intruded) into fractures and joins in the existing rock, then cooled and hardened. Unlike a painting, these patterns are 3-dimensional. If you were to slice off a section of cliff, an entirely different pattern would be revealed.