

Today, this otherworldly landscape is a must-visit stop on southern Utah's circuit of five national parks, with some 2.6 million people making the trip in 2019.īest of all, despite the park's dramatic terrain, you don't need to be particularly adventurous to enjoy its greatest spoils. Harding named the area a national monument in 1923, Congress passed a bill the next year to establish a national park, and it officially earned that designation in 1928. ” He sent word back to Washington, D.C., and worked to improve road access, and tourists began visiting from Salt Lake City before the end of the decade. Humphrey transferred to the region and immediately became transfixed with the “indescribable beauty that greeted. Mormon pioneers first settled the area in the 1850s, and the eventual park's namesake, Scottish immigrant Ebenezer Bryce, reportedly called the mazelike terrain “a hell of a place to lose a cow.” The plan to set this land aside as a national park began in 1915, when U.S.
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Now these spires have funky names that refer to their odd shapes - Thor's Hammer and the Poodle, for example - and they form the basis of nearly every experience within the park: Visitors check off viewpoints that overlook them, hikers weave among them, and photographers jockey for position to shoot them in every type of light, from the warm glow of sunrise to the milky shine of a full moon. For their misdeeds, the trickster god Coyote punished them by transforming them into stone. According to lore, this area was home to the To-when-an-ung-wa, or Legend People, a prehuman race who mistreated the land and misused its resources. But for a more colorful creation story, we turn to the Indigenous Paiute people, who have lived here since about 1200 CE. Geologists will tell you that erosion caused the hoodoos.
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(Note that, despite its name, this isn't technically a canyon but instead a series of more than a dozen natural “amphitheaters” carved into a plateau's edge.)

But what it lacks in acreage, it makes up for with the world's highest concentration of hoodoos, or totem-pole-like rock columns. At 56 square miles, BCNP ranks 51st out of 63 national parks by size. En español | Some national parks sprawl for millions of acres and encompass wildly diverse terrains others, such as southern Utah's compact Bryce Canyon National Park (BCNP), do one thing really well.
