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In fact, had we gone into the reservation we would have missed this... along the edge of the slope in the foreground there is a slip of the land. I'm guessing a small earthquake has caused a fault line. It was around a kilometre in length.
The canyon is where the Rio Grande rover flows and has carved down through the various layers of limestone as these layers had risen. The cliff is the front of a large thrust fault from the west toward the east. These layers of limestone rise more than 1,000 feet above the flat lands in the foreground. As the layers were thrust upward the river continued cutting downward resulting in the distinctive notch seen from a distance. The lighter colored rock in the formation on the left side of the picture is tuff, a compacted volcanic ash.