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The scene that you are viewing from Dead Horse Point was formed by hundreds of millions of years of deposition and erosion. The layers of rock that you see were originally deposited by wind and as sediment in streams, rivers, and seas. The erosional processes that carved these intricate canyons are gravity, the river, wind, moisture, and the freezing and thawing action of water. The hardness of the layer of rock determines if it forms a slope or a cliff. The top layer is Navajo Sandstone, from the Jurassic Period, and the bottom layer, where the Colorado River is today, is called the Rico Formation, from the Permian-Pennsylvanian period.