48 Fun Facts About Canyonlands National Park

Canyonlands lies just outside which Utah town, also the base for visiting Arches?

Moab. No roads join the park's districts, so the town is a 40-minute drive from Island in the Sky but about 75 miles from the Needles and 160 from the Maze.

Which outlaw hid out in the canyons around Robbers Roost, beside Canyonlands' Horseshoe Canyon, in the late 1800s?

Butch Cassidy. He and his Wild Bunch used the confusing tangle of canyons to lie low after robberies, because the rough country was easy to defend and hard to enter unseen.

Which president signed the law creating Canyonlands National Park, days after signing the Wilderness Act?

Lyndon B. Johnson. He signed after a four-year fight in Congress over mining and grazing in the park, and the compromise let ranchers keep their leases there for another decade.

Which Arches superintendent lobbied for Canyonlands and became its first superintendent?

Bates Wilson. He won officials over on jeep tours that ended in long campfire talks and Dutch oven dinners, a campaign the Park Service now calls his 'dutch oven diplomacy'.

What reportedly sparked Interior Secretary Stewart Udall's interest in Canyonlands in 1961?

Flying over the Confluence en route to a talk in Arizona, he saw the meeting of the rivers from the air and at once took up the Arches superintendent's idea of a national park there.

Which writer called Canyonlands 'the most weird, wonderful, magical place on earth'?

Edward Abbey. He learned the country over two 1950s seasons as a ranger at neighbouring Arches, living in a government house trailer and filling the notebooks that became Desert Solitaire.

The Island in the Sky is what kind of landform?

A broad, level mesa. It is wedged between the two rivers on sheer sandstone cliffs, which is why each of its overlooks peers down into a different canyon.

Which switchback route did ranchers use to drive cattle down from Island in the Sky?

The Shafer Trail. Ranchers drove their herds down the cliffs on it to winter pasture; today jeeps and mountain bikes take its hairpins, which still have no guardrails.

Canyonlands' Needles district is named after what?

Red and white banded rock pinnacles. The white bands began as wind-blown dune sand beside an ancient sea, the red as sediment that streams carried down from nearby mountains.

Canyonlands' Maze district is best known for what?

Being one of the remotest areas in the US. No paved road enters it, and from the ranger station its canyons are still hours away by high-clearance four-wheel drive or on foot.

Horseshoe Canyon, a detached park unit, was formerly known by what name that also labels its rock-art style?

Barrier. The Barrier Canyon style means tapered, life-size figures on the canyon walls, and Horseshoe Canyon was added to the park in 1971 to protect them.

The life-size figures painted in Horseshoe Canyon's Great Gallery typically lack which features?

Arms and legs. The tapered, limbless bodies, some with staring eyes and striped torsos, look so spectral that archaeologists refer to them as ghost figures.

Who does the Park Service credit with the Great Gallery paintings?

Desert Archaic hunter-gatherers, nomads who made the canyon a seasonal home, are the Park Service's answer; a 2014 dating study found the panel may be younger, painted between about AD 1 and 1100.

The petroglyph-covered Newspaper Rock, on the road into the Needles, is called what in Navajo?

The stone that tells a story. People pecked its hundreds of figures through the cliff's dark coating over many centuries, and the oldest are slowly darkening again, so newer carvings look paler.

Canyonlands' much-photographed Mesa Arch is best known for what?

Glowing at sunrise on the edge of a cliff. Photographers gather before dawn to catch the moment the underside of the arch lights up above the canyon.

Which explanation of Canyonlands' Upheaval Dome gained ground after 1990s seismic studies?

An eroded meteorite impact crater. The case hardened in 2008, when geologists reported shocked quartz there, grains deformed by the kind of sudden, extreme pressure that an impact delivers.

Canyonlands' canyons are carved into which vast high-desert region centred on the Four Corners?

The Colorado Plateau. Its rock layers, laid down near sea level, were lifted about a mile while staying nearly flat, so the rivers cut down through them like a layer cake.

Just below the Confluence, the Colorado enters which canyon?

Cataract. Above the Confluence both rivers run calm enough for canoes; below it their combined flow spills through the canyon with a speed and power that draw whitewater rafters.

Who led the 1869 expedition that first ran the whole canyon below Canyonlands' Confluence?

John Wesley Powell. The one-armed Civil War veteran set out in wooden boats and spent three months mapping both rivers, recording the canyons' natural and cultural history for a book he published years later.

Which three notorious rapids below Canyonlands' Confluence merge into one at high water?

The Big Drops. They sit in a 14-mile run of rapids rated up to Class V, and with no road into the canyon a flipped raft's crew must be ready to rescue themselves.

Which nonprofit owns the Dugout Ranch, the working cattle ranch at the gateway to Canyonlands' Needles district?

The Nature Conservancy. It bought the ranch to keep the canyon gateway from being developed, kept the cattle, and made it the base of a research centre on climate and land use.

Below the Green and Colorado's Confluence, the lower rapids drown when the reservoir behind which dam is full?

Glen Canyon Dam. When its reservoir is full, still water backs far up the canyon over the old lower rapids, so river trips can end with a long haul across flat lake water.

Before 1921, what was the Colorado River above its meeting with the Green called?

The Grand. A Colorado congressman won the 1921 renaming over objections that the Green was the longer branch, and the old name lives on in Grand Junction, where the river meets the Gunnison.

Who built Canyonlands' White Rim Road in the 1950s, and why?

The Atomic Energy Commission, for uranium prospectors. It paid them incentives during the arms race and cut roads across southeast Utah, yet the mines along the White Rim yielded very little and were abandoned.

Which notoriously rough four-wheel-drive road leads into the backcountry of Canyonlands' Needles district?

Elephant Hill. The Park Service ranks it among the most technical four-wheel-drive roads in Utah, with stair-step drops and turns so tight that drivers must back through them.

What did Canyonlands start requiring in 2015 of anyone driving or cycling the White Rim Road without camping?

A day-use permit. So many drivers and cyclists were tackling the road that the park began rationing single-day trips too; its overnight campsites were already booked up months ahead.

Druid Arch in the Needles is named for its resemblance to what?

Stonehenge. Antiquarians once took that monument for a Druid temple, which is where the arch's name is said to come from.

In which slot canyon near Canyonlands' Horseshoe Canyon unit was Aron Ralston of 127 Hours trapped?

Bluejohn Canyon. An 800-pound boulder pinned his right arm in April 2003, and because he had told no one where he was going, he freed himself after five days by cutting off his forearm.

Who directed 127 Hours, the 2010 film of Ralston's story?

Danny Boyle. His amputation scene proved so intense that viewers were reported fainting at early festival screenings, before the film had even opened in cinemas.

Why is one cliff-ringed pocket of Canyonlands' Needles district closed to all visitors?

To preserve grassland cattle have never grazed. The cliffs kept livestock out, so ecologists have long compared it with a grazed park nearby to see the canyon country as it was before ranching.

Which bird is seen across Canyonlands in every habitat and season?

The common raven. This vocal, jet-black member of the crow family can play and solve problems, which is perhaps why it holds a place in both European and Native American folklore.

Which rattlesnake, armed with unusually potent venom, lives among Canyonlands' rocks?

Midget faded rattlesnake. For all its venom it is shy: it keeps to burrows and rock crevices, comes out mostly after dark and will slip away from people if given the chance.

What in Canyonlands holds the desert floor together yet can be destroyed by a single footprint?

Cryptobiotic soil. The knobbly black crust is alive, dominated by cyanobacteria whose sticky fibres bind the sand grains, so one boot print can undo growth that took decades.

Which international designation did Canyonlands earn in 2015?

International Dark Sky Park. Far from any city, it has some of the darkest night skies in North America, and the park has refitted nearly all of its own lights to keep them that way.

Which Canyonlands rodent can live its whole life without drinking, making water from the seeds it eats?

The kangaroo rat. Its body makes water as it breaks down dry seeds, and it saves what it has by sitting out the hottest hours in a cool burrow underground.

The Grabens in the Needles opened up when overlying rock slid toward the river canyon over what?

Paradox Formation salt beds. Salt left by an evaporating sea flows slowly under pressure, so once the river cut down to it the rock on top began sliding and splitting into long sunken valleys.

The Green, which meets the Colorado in Canyonlands, rises in which mountains?

The Wind Rivers of Wyoming. That is why the 1869 expedition that first mapped the canyons could launch its wooden boats in Wyoming and ride the Green all the way down to the Confluence.

Which Utah state park sits beside Canyonlands' Island in the Sky district, overlooking the Colorado River?

Dead Horse Point. Legend has it that cowboys used the narrow, waterless point as a corral for wild mustangs and left the ones they did not want there to die.

Which Utah senator introduced the first bill to create Canyonlands National Park in 1961?

Frank Moss. His bill tried to satisfy both preservationists and developers by allowing some mining and grazing, and it took four years of revisions before Congress passed a stricter version.

Which sure-footed animal, once in danger of dying out, has rebounded with help from Canyonlands' healthy herds?

Bighorn sheep. Diseases caught from domestic sheep had decimated herd after herd, but the park's own herds, at home on the talus slopes above the rivers, have helped fuel a comeback.

Which unexpected visitor follows streams down into Canyonlands each autumn to feast on ripe cactus fruit?

Black bears. They come down from nearby mountains in late August and September, when the prickly pear and the hackberry trees fruit, and are back in the high country before winter.

Why do rapids below Canyonlands' Confluence swell so violently each spring?

Its flow is largely unregulated snowmelt. With no big reservoir close upstream to even it out, the spring peak is whatever the mountain snowpack sends down, far wilder than in dam-controlled canyons.

Which overlook stands at the southern tip of Island in the Sky's scenic drive?

Grand View Point Overlook. Its panorama over the White Rim to the Maze and the Needles was the view that Arches' superintendent argued a new national park should be drawn around.

Which people built the well-preserved stone and mud dwellings in Canyonlands' Needles district?

The Ancestral Puebloans. They farmed maize, beans and squash here until about 1300, when many moved south toward present-day Arizona and New Mexico, a migration a long drought helped set off.

Which animal in Canyonlands rock art shows that a carving was made after the Spanish arrived?

Horses. They came to the Southwest with the Spanish and changed how the Navajo and Ute lived, so a horse on a panel means it was carved long after the park's oldest figures.

Canyonlands' cacti save water by opening their pores to take in carbon dioxide only at what time?

At night. The cooler air costs the plant far less moisture, so it stores the carbon dioxide chemically until sunrise and finishes photosynthesis with its pores shut.

Canyonlands' toads fill whole canyons with hours-long breeding choruses on spring and summer nights after what?

Heavy rain. The toads sit out dry spells in burrows, then emerge to breed in rain-filled potholes and pools, where the tadpoles must grow up before the water dries away.

Which mountain-building episode, the one that raised the Rocky Mountains, also lifted the Canyonlands region?

The Laramide orogeny. The uplift and the regional upwarp that followed it cracked the brittle sandstone into long parallel joints, and erosion has been working into those cracks ever since.