Canyonlands National Park United States

Legendary

A magical place of mesas, canyons, and buttes carved by the Colorado and Green rivers.

Photo by Jeff Hollett

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Canyonlands National Park doesn't have any roads connecting its different sections. To go from one part of the park to another, visitors actually have to leave the park entirely and drive back in from a different direction.

That's because two powerful rivers, the Green and the Colorado, cut the park into pieces. Where they meet, called the confluence, sits right at the heart of the park.

These rivers carved the landscape into four separate districts: Island in the Sky, The Needles, The Maze, and the rivers themselves. Each district looks and feels completely different from the others.

Island in the Sky sits high on a huge mesa, more than 1,000 feet above the surrounding canyons. It's the easiest district to reach, with a paved road, several overlooks, and short trails perfect for a quick visit.

The Needles gets its name from tall, colorful rock spires made of sandstone. Ancient peoples once lived here too, leaving behind ruins and rock art that visitors can still see today.

The Maze is the wildest and most remote part of the park. Reaching it takes serious effort, a rugged vehicle, long dirt roads, and real backcountry experience.

Canyonlands became a national park on September 12, 1964, protecting more than 337,000 acres of canyons, mesas, and towering rock formations.

Watch the sunrise at Mesa Arch, one of the most photographed spots in the entire park. Hike among the sandstone spires of The Needles district. Drive the scenic road through Island in the Sky for sweeping views of canyons carved by the Green and Colorado rivers.

Is Upheaval Dome a meteor crater?

Most geologists now think so. Upheaval Dome is a circular scar about 3 miles across in the Island in the Sky district, with a crumpled core of rock rising 750 feet from the floor. Nothing else nearby looks remotely like it.

For decades the leading explanation was salt. Deep underground sits a thick layer of salt, and salt can slowly push up through heavier rock, buckling everything above it. That would make the dome a blister rather than a crater, formed over millions of years.

Then geologists studying the rock in the 1990s argued for a meteorite strike instead. In 2008, two German scientists settled it for most people when they found shocked quartz in the rock. Shocked quartz only forms under pressure so sudden and violent that almost nothing in nature can make it.

The best guess now is that a meteorite hit here sometime in the last 170 million years, and what you are looking at is the worn-down stump of the crater.

Why can't you walk on the dirt in Canyonlands?

Because the dirt is alive. The dark, crusty, bumpy ground between the plants is called cryptobiotic soil, and it is not really soil. It is a living skin made of tiny organisms, mostly a kind of bacteria, tangled together with moss and lichen.

That crust is what makes the desert work. It grips the sand so the wind cannot carry it off, soaks up rain and holds onto it, and pulls nitrogen out of the air to feed the plants growing through it.

It also grows painfully slowly. One footprint can destroy decades of growth in a single second, and a badly crushed patch can take longer than a human lifetime to return.

This is why rangers ask visitors to stay on trails, on bare slickrock, or in dry sandy washes. The phrase they use is "Don't bust the crust."

Who painted the Great Gallery in Horseshoe Canyon?

Nobody knows. The Great Gallery is a painted rock wall about 200 feet long with roughly 20 human-shaped figures on it. Some stand over 7 feet tall. Many have no arms or legs, just long dark bodies and large staring eyes, so people call them ghosts.

The style is named after this canyon. Horseshoe Canyon was once called Barrier Canyon, and archaeologists still call the style Barrier Canyon Style.

The age is argued over. Estimates run from about 7,000 years ago to about 1,000 years ago. Rock paint is very hard to date, since there is rarely enough left to test.