The Canyonlands National Park Stamp

Where Canyonlands is

Canyonlands, for people who count parks

The father of Canyonlands was the superintendent of a different park. Bates Wilson ran Arches, then a national monument, and spent the 1950s exploring the maze of canyons to the southwest by jeep. His method for winning converts was to drive officials into the backcountry, cook them dinner in a Dutch oven, and let the country make the argument. In 1961 Interior Secretary Stewart Udall flew over the spot where the Green and Colorado rivers meet and came down convinced. Senator Frank Moss introduced the bill in 1962, and Lyndon Johnson signed Canyonlands into law on September 12, 1964.

The fight was over how much to leave out. Utah politicians wanted a smaller park that kept the door open for mining and grazing; conservationists wanted the whole canyon system. The 1964 compromise ran to about 257,000 acres, and a 1971 expansion brought it to roughly 337,000, still the biggest park in a state with five of them.

The rivers are the map. The Green and the Colorado meet in the middle of the park at the Confluence, and between them they split it into three named districts: Island in the Sky, a mesa in the wedge between the rivers; the Needles, southeast of the Colorado; and the Maze, west of the Green. There are no bridges. Districts that sit a few miles apart as the raven flies are hours apart by road, which is why most visitors only ever see one.

The Maze is the remote one, and the reputation is earned. It is routinely described as one of the most inaccessible corners of the lower 48, reached by long dirt roads that demand a serious vehicle and self-sufficiency. The surrounding Robbers Roost country served as a hideout for Butch Cassidy's Wild Bunch in the 1890s, for exactly the reasons that keep it empty now: nobody could follow them in.

The park also holds one of the great rock-art panels in North America. In Horseshoe Canyon, a detached unit northwest of the Maze, the Great Gallery carries life-size painted figures in the Barrier Canyon style: ghostly, armless, hollow-eyed forms up to seven feet tall. They are at least a couple of thousand years old, and some estimates run much older. The style is named for this canyon's former name.

Official Canyonlands park site (nps.gov)

What lives in Canyonlands

One valley here has never been grazed. Virginia Park, a grassland in the Needles sealed on every side by rock walls, was never reached by the cattle that worked over the rest of canyon country, and scientists treat it as a baseline for what this desert looked like untouched. What holds it together is cryptobiotic crust, a living skin of cyanobacteria and lichen that glues the sand down and feeds it nitrogen. A footprint kills it for decades, which is why the baseline stays closed to feet.

The potholes hatch on a deadline. Rain pools in shallow basins in the slickrock, and the dried mud on the bottom is full of the eggs of fairy shrimp and tadpole shrimp, which can wait out years of drought. When a storm finally fills the pothole, they hatch, mature, and lay the next round of eggs in a matter of days, racing the evaporation. A puddle that lasts two weeks is an entire generation.

The desert bighorn here never left. While most of Utah's herds were wiped out in the 19th and 20th centuries, the canyons of Canyonlands sheltered one of the few remnant native populations, and it became the stock that seeded reintroductions elsewhere in the region. Look for them on the talus below the rims, where the terrain is too broken for anything that cannot jump.

The collared lizard runs on two legs. When it commits to a sprint it stands up, tucks its front limbs, and runs across the slickrock like a very small theropod, which fits an animal that eats other lizards. Males wear a green and turquoise that looks wrong for a desert until you see one on red rock in full sun. Look for them in the boulder fields of the Needles, sunning at eye level and gone the moment you point.

The Canyonlands designs

Mesa Arch

A pothole arch lying right at the edge of the Island in the Sky cliff, framing the canyons and the La Sal Mountains beyond. At dawn, light bouncing off the cliff face below sets the underside of the arch glowing red. It is the most photographed sunrise in canyon country, and it costs you only a half-mile walk.

Grand View Point

The end of the road on Island in the Sky, and the place the park explains itself. You look down on the White Rim, a sandstone bench about 1,200 feet below, and the rivers have cut a thousand feet below that: a canyon system two stories deep, with the spires of Monument Basin standing in the middle distance.

The Needles

The southeast district, named for its spires of Cedar Mesa Sandstone banded in red and white like candy. This is the hiker's side of the park, where trails thread between the pinnacles to places like Chesler Park, a grass meadow ringed entirely by stone. Pick it if your Canyonlands was earned on foot.

How to record your Canyonlands visit

Canyonlands, asked and answered