“I can’t remember a time when I didn’t draw,” Allan Schulz told an interviewer in 1995. “It has always been a part of me.”

Growing up on a cattle ranch in Montana, Schulz learned to entertain himself by observing his surroundings and rendering them in pencil and crayon. To this child, art was a pastime, not a career goal. But after high school and two tours of military service, Schulz had an inner need to pursue a creative life. Blessed with a combination of natural talent and tuition money under the G.I. Bill, Schulz was admitted to the competitive Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. Here he built the foundation for a lifetime devoted to the arts.

As a technical artist, Schulz helped design NASA’s first space shuttle by translating engineers’ equations into three-dimensional forms that the engineers could then test and refine. Ever one to seize an opportunity when it presented itself, Schulz later traveled worldwide doing heavy construction—a time in his life that he valued for the extended exposure to other lands and cultures.

But it was the spectacular canyon country of northern Arizona and southern Utah that fueled his passion.

“I found my home in this country,” he said. Surrounded by vast expanses of richly colored sculpted rock, Allan Schulz moved to southwest Utah and devoted his retirement to painting these remarkable landscapes. It became his goal to “leave a record of the way this country looked when I lived here.”

The Great Rock Stairway


Click on cross-section above to enlarge.

In the canyonlands of southern Utah and northern Arizona the forces of erosion have laid bare over 1.5 billion years of the Earth’s history.

The oldest rocks are found in the walls of Grand Canyon, where foundation rocks of the Vishnu Schist underlie later formations where ancient brachiopods, trilobites, primitive fish, and tracks of early amphibians and reptiles have been discovered.

The sheer walls, temples, and towers of Zion Canyon are carved from rock layers of the younger Mesozoic Era. Other exposures of rocks of this era are along the Grey, White, and Vermilion Cliffs. In these areas the rocks contain bones and tracks of now-extinct dinosaurs, as well as other reptiles, amphibians, ancient mammals, and petrified wood.

Younger rocks of the Cenozoic Era form the pinnacles of Cedar Breaks and Bryce Canyon. Presumably these layers, as well as those of the Mesozoic Era at Zion, once extended over the Grand Canyon region. However, the relentless erosive power of water has since stripped these layers back to the north to form the celebrated “Great Rock Stairway” descending southeasterly from Bryce Canyon and Cedar Breaks to Grand Canyon.

Geologic Cross Section courtesy of Zion Natural History Association.