Protected for the Rock: Columns, Bridges, Pillars and Caves

Devils Postpile protects columnar basalt, along with Rainbow Falls on the Middle Fork of the San Joaquin River. At 798 acres it is small, and it was set aside as a monument in 1911.

Three natural stone bridges cut from white Permian sandstone of the Cedar Mesa Formation are the reason for this Utah monument, established in 1908. Its dark skies later made it the first International Dark Sky Park, in 2007.

Here the protected rock holds fossils. The monument, established in 1915 on the Colorado and Utah border, contains a quarry with one of the densest known concentrations of Jurassic dinosaur fossils, set within canyons carved by the Green and Yampa rivers.

Hills of sandstone and siltstone banded in red, orange, yellow and green make up this Gansu geopark of 322 square kilometers. It shows Danxia landform, a type named for southern China, laid down by mineral deposition and exposed by uplift and erosion.

Tall grey limestone pillars and pinnacles, weathered into dense forest-like clusters, cover about five hundred square kilometers in Yunnan, roughly ninety kilometers east of Kunming. UNESCO lists it both as part of the South China Karst and as a Global Geopark.

This Hunan park, China's first national forest park in 1982, is known for quartz sandstone pillars shaped by erosion, ice expansion and plant growth rather than chemical dissolution. It sits within the Wulingyuan Scenic Area, a World Heritage Site since 1992.

A valley cut into sandstone and granite in southern Jordan, about 60 kilometers east of Aqaba, with sheer sandstone mountains between wide alluvial valleys. UNESCO inscribed it as a mixed site in 2011 because its petroglyphs and Nabataean remains sit within the same geology.

The path now goes underground. On Palawan, an 8.2 kilometer navigable stretch of the Cabayugan River runs through a cave system at least 32 kilometers long and empties directly into the South China Sea, within a park established in 1999.

The last stop is the caves of Sarawak. Mulu has 295 kilometers of explored passages, including Deer Cave, the largest known cave passage in the world, and the Sarawak Chamber, one of the largest known underground chambers, first studied by a 1977 to 1978 Royal Geographical Society expedition.