The park’s rocks tell a story about the past. We can see evidence of rocks that changed a long time ago, as well as changes in the height of the Rockies over time. We can also see old oceans, the folding and breaking of the Earth's surface, ice shaping the land, and both recent and ancient movements of land like landslides.
Cheyenne Mountain State Park shows the rocks that make up the foundation of our state. These granitic rocks, found at the tops of the Front Range, are almost two billion years old. We can see them today because of continuous erosion and lots of collisions between continents that happened in the Precambrian era.
Big forces like faulting, folding and mountain-building have pushed this rock up to the surface over time. Often the rock changes before we see it as plates collide into each other. When plates crash into each other, they make the rock in the bottom part of the mountains melt and then harden again, creating a kind of rock called metamorphic rock. New minerals grow in a specific way because of the pressure from the colliding plates. Both the igneous rock (mostly granitic rock) and the metamorphic rock became visible when erosion caused the mountains to rise up.