At its type area north of Ouray, Colorado, the Cutler Formation consists of over 1,000 feet (300 m) of bright red sandstone, siltstone, and conglomerate beds alternating with reddish mudstone or clay-rich limestone.

[7] At this point in geologic time, the Uncompahgre Uplift of the Ancestral Rocky Mountains was still rising along an arc from eastern Utah through southwestern Colorado and into northern New Mexico.

Tremendous quantities of sediment were eroded off the uplift and accumulated at its southwest margin to form the undifferentiated Cutler, which in some places reached a thickness of 8,000 feet (2,400 m).

Further west, eolian (wind), fluvial (river) and marine influences became important and produced the lithological variety of the Cutler Group.

The coarsest exposures are near Gateway, Colorado, within a mile of the thrust fault defining the southwest margin of the ancient Uncompahgre Uplift.

[5] However, other geologists objected to this because the contact was defined by the fusulinids present in the beds, which made this a chronostratigraphic rather than a lithostratigraphic distinction, and by a subtle angular unconformity that was not easily recognized in the field.

It was named by Charles Whitman Cross and Ernest Howe in 1905 after Cutler Creek, which enters Uncompahgre River about 4 miles north of Ouray, Colorado.

[21] The Cutler was traced through the Jemez Mountains and found to be laterally equivalent to the Abo Formation by Wood and Northrop in 1946.