The whole La Garita country was shaped by one enormous eruption

If you have walked Penitente Canyon, scrambled among the spires of the Wheeler Geologic Area, or just driven the La Garita country west of the valley, you have been standing on the leftovers of a single event. About 27.8 million years ago, a volcano centered at what geologists call the La Garita Caldera let go in a huge explosive eruption.

The numbers are hard to picture. The U.S. Geological Survey puts the erupted volume at more than 1,200 cubic miles of material. For scale, the Forest Service notes the ash spread over roughly 9,000 square miles in a layer 100 to 650 feet thick. That hardened ash is a rock called the Fish Canyon Tuff, and it is soft enough that wind and water keep carving it into fins, hoodoos, and the smooth pockets climbers love.

So the features people drive hours to see, Wheeler’s pale towers, Penitente’s walls, the nearby Elephant Rocks, are not separate wonders. They are the same deposit, eroded in different ways. Knowing that tends to change how the landscape feels under your boots.

To read how the eruption and its rock are described, see the Rio Grande National Forest’s geology page and the USGS overview of caldera eruptions.