The Valles Caldera is one of the nation's full of life supervolcanoes, and quiet a stint of top-quality than six million existence, the eruptions of the footing seize blanketed the swathe with rhyolite tuff and ash. If you play at a physiographic map of the caldera you can see that eating away has sliced during the flanks of the volcanic highbrow, juicy testimony of not getting any younger eruptions. The coagulate at Kasha-Katuwe is the judgment of this artlessly at the last eating away of the soft volcanic rocks.
Quite a lot of of the layers on the flanks of the caldera hire jet and mudflow deposits with boulders and cobbles of all sizes. The generously proportioned boulders protect the softer dormant rocks from eating away until the boulders stand at the top of considerable pillars (see the third picture). These are "hoodoos". At last the boulders reverse, and eating away attacks the dormant waver, producing the amusing narrowed spires that grasp the carving it's name (the English part anyway; "Kasha-Katuwe" refers to "white cliffs" in the Keresan tongue). The eating away of the soft waver by flash floods in this arid conditions seize alike led to the formation squeeze steep-walled nick canyons (the fourth photo).
The carving is a bit quick-tempered to find; the fit pamphlet and lay down map can be found nearby. The New Mexico Office of Geology and Marble Resources has a kindly review of the geology of the swathe. If you ever travel document by the Sante Fe-Albuquerque swathe on a conserve trip, border it out!
