A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1133 entries
cuesta
A cuesta is a ridge with two different faces: a long gentle slope on one side following the tilt of the rock beds, and a short steep escarpment on the other where those beds have been cut through. It forms where the rock layers are tipped a few degrees off horizontal and a hard layer sits on a soft one. Driving across cuesta country, you climb slowly for miles and then drop off an edge.
Etymology
The word is Spanish for a slope or a hill, from Latin costa, a rib or a side, which is also the ancestor of English coast and cutlet. American geologists took it from Spanish usage in the Southwest in the late nineteenth century and made it a formal term. It belongs with a set of landform words that describe the same structure at different tilts: a cuesta is gentle, a hogback is steep and symmetric, and a homoclinal ridge sits between them.
Notes
The Niagara Escarpment is a cuesta, and so is the rim country north of the Texas Hill Country and much of the Colorado Plateau’s edge. The steep face is where springs emerge and where the rock is exposed, so cuestas concentrate both water and archaeology along a single line.