Painted Desert is a brilliantly colored plateau region extending about 200 miles (320 kilometers) along the Little Colorado River in north-central Arizona.
The desert received its name from early Spanish explorers, who called it El Desierto Pintado, meaning The Painted Desert. It is a fantastic wasteland, with buttes, mesas, pinnacles, and valleys formed by ages of wind and rain cutting into shalelike volcanic ash. The pastel colors of the desert add to its beauty, especially because heat, light, and dust often seem to change the colors from blue, amethyst, and yellow to russet, lilac, and red. The Painted Desert is particularly beautiful at sunrise and sunset, when the colors are the most brilliant and the shadows the deepest. The bright reds and yellows of the desert come from iron oxides–hematite (red) and limonite (yellow).
Several national monuments are in the Painted Desert. These include the Sunset Crater and Wupatki national monuments.
