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The Colorado Plateau encompasses 130,000 square miles of Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado.  It ranges from elevations of less than 5,000 to 14,000 feet above sea level.  It is characterized by tablelands, volcanic peaks, and deeply etched plateaus dissected by the Colorado River and its tributaries.

The Plateau has the world's greatest concentration of national parks and monuments and is home to 10 Native American tribes.  One million people, a quarter of them Native Americans, share this geological wonder with numerous rare and unique species of plants and animals.
 

         
                  The Colorado Plateau is the area
              within the black dotted line

"Place and passion for place are inseparable from creative expression.  The tastes, smells, sights, and sounds of our surroundings permeate our waking and dreaming lives.  They become the material for both poetic metaphor and scientific inquiry, and can figure even in the smallest gesture or invention -- pine cones in the winter wreath, pinon in the stew, rabbitbrush in the handmade paper, coyote in a children's tale.

"We may see abstractly 'by our own lights' in terms of experience and belief, but we also see literally by the light of our landscape."
                                                                                   Carol Haralson writing about the
                                                                                   "Influence and Inspiration" of the Colorado Plateau
                                                                                    in the Spring 2003 issue of Plateau Journal,
                                                                                    Volume 7, Number 1

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