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The Geology of the Garden of the Gods

We have lived in Colorado (Colorado is a Spanish word, often translated as "red colored," when, in fact , it just means "colored," or, in more p.c. (personal computer) terms, "of color") for many years, very near a city park named "Garden of the Gods" (our little town is also home of Focus on the Family, who have maybe-not-so-tongue-in-cheekedly suggested the name of this park be changed to "The Garden of God," which makes me wonder if there isn't an even better name for the park out there somewhere.)

I took a long walk there today, and noticed, not for the first time, that although the most obvious features of the park are huge sandstone rocks (as coincidence would have it, red in color), most of the little stones lying along the trails are quartz and granite.  Now, as you will remember from Junior High School Earth Science class (for the younger of you, Junior High was kinda like Middle School, only lots more bells), sandstone is classified as a "sedentary" rock, meaning that it was formed by just lying around on the sea bottom several years ago.  Granite and quartz, on the other hand are "ingenious" rocks, formed in the fiery bowels.  Of the earth, that is.  If formed in one's own fiery bowels, they would be "kidne y stones." (The Gardenia of the Gods has no "metaphorical" rocks, which are rocks which have undergone a sex-change operation.  There are a great many of these to the west of here in the Fluorescent Fossil Beds, which suggests that "metaphorical" rocks are probably close in nature to "sedentary" ones.)

Now, I often have wondered how so many ingenious rocks got scattered in on top what is basically a sedentary formation.  As it turns out, if I remember my Earth Science lessons correctly, after the pre-historic effluvium piled up on the ancient ocean floor, compressing the sentiments below it for dozens of years, it became so squished that it turned into stone.  At some point, the fiery bowels of the earth had had enough and eruptured into a catachismic upheaval which tipped the sedentary stones up on end, drained the sea away toward Mexico, raised everything up about a mile and half, and resulted in the Garçòn of the Gods.

Oh, yeah, and also the Rocky Mountains.