Beauty of Utah's National Parks

From California we crossed Northern Nevada and stopped for a stamp cancellation at Great Basin National Park.  The Great Basin stretches from California’s Sierra Nevada to Utah’s Wasatch Mountains. Congress created Great Basin National Park in 1986, including much of the South Snake Range which is a great example of a desert mountain island.   The Great Basin is named for its lack of drainage.  The streams and rivers mostly find no outlet to the sea, and water collects in shallow salt lakes and marshes to evaporate in dry desert air.  It’s not just one basin, but many that are separated by mountain ranges.

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Entering Utah, I became excited because we had already witnessed in 2015 the beauty of the national parks in that state. 

Our first stop was Zion National Park, one that we had not seen in 2015. And it was magnificent.  Located in Southwestern Utah, a prominent feature of the 229 sq. mile park is Zion Canyon, which stretches 15 miles long and spans up to half a mile deep.  It cuts through the reddish and tan-colored Navajo Sandstone by the North Fork of the Virgin River.  The lowest point in the park is 3,555 ft. at Coalpits Wash and the highest peak is 8,726 ft. at Horse Ranch Mountain. The park was established in 1919.  

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Bryce National Park was next.  This was one of my favorites because of the colors in the limestone formations.  We did not see this park in 2015.  We traveled north to Idaho instead.   Established in 1928, Bryce Canyon National Park is in southwestern Utah.  Bryce Canyon, despite its name, is not a canyon, but a collection of giant natural amphitheaters along the eastern side of the Paunsaugunt Plateau.  It is distinctive due to geological structures called hoodoos, formed by frost weathering and stream erosion of the river and lake bed sedimentary rocks. 

Before this area was full of hoodoos it was full of water.  Between 55 and 40 million years ago today’s Utah was a mountain encircled basin.  For millions of years, rivers deposited sediments – mostly dissolved limestone—into a system of large lakes.  Twenty million years ago, as the Colorado Plateau began to rise, the lakes dried up and their mixtures of sediments became the muddy limestone called the Claron Formation. 

Bryce Canyon is called, “Poetry in Stone.”  (as borrowed from the brochure. Take your time reading this in a relaxing place.) Bryce Canyon’s serene vistas are deceptive; the landscape is never static.  Stand at the rim in early morning and experience the chilly dawn, crystalline blue sky, and rocks ablaze with the ruddy light of sunrise.  After breakfast, walk the rim and your shifting perspective dramatically recomposes the scene below.  The Sun arcing across the sky casts a kaleidoscope of slowly altered hues and shifting shadows over the land.  You peel off layers of clothing as the air rapidly warms—as much as 40 degrees F from dawn to late afternoon.  Thin air can leave you short of breath.  The high elevation that causes these effects also creates the climate that weathers the cliffs and hoodoos.  After sunset, as the chill returns, listen through the advancing twilight for the faint clatter or murmur of the stones tumbling in the distance.  At Bryce Canyon the forces of weathering and erosion never rest, not even for a day.  This dynamic, mesmerizing place is like no other.

                       

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Capital Reef we had seen before, but only quickly. I gained a new appreciation of this park.  A giant buckle in Earth’s crust stretches across south-central Utah.  This vast warping of rock, created 65 million years ago by the same great forces later uplifting the Colorado Plateau, is called the Waterpocket Fold.  Capitol Reef National Park preserves the Fold and its eroded jumble of colorful cliffs, massive domes, soaring spires, stark monoliths, twisting canyons, and graceful arches.  It is a place that humans used for thousands of years, from early indigenous peoples to Mormon pioneers. The village within the park was named Fruita since fruit trees grew naturally in the area.  This national park inspires poets, artists, photographers, and seekers of solitude.  The world of the Waterpocket Fold stretches 100 miles – and beyond.  Capital Reef National Park was established in 1971. 

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Canyonlands National Park was not my favorite. Canyonlands preserves a wilderness of rock at the heart of the Colorado Plateau.  Water and gravity, this land’s prime architects, cut flat layers of sedimentary rock into hundreds of canyons, mesas, buttes, fin, arches, and spires.  At center stage are two canyons carved by the Green and Colorado rivers.  Surrounding the rivers are vast, very different regions:  Island in the Sky on the north, The Maze on the west, and The Needles on the east.  They share a common primitive spirit and Wild West atmosphere.  Few people knew these remote lands and rivers well when the national park was established in 1964.  Only Native Americans, cowboys, river explorers, and uranium prospectors had dared enter this rugged corner of southeastern Utah.  Canyonlands remains largely untamed—its roads mostly unpaved, trails primitive, and rivers free-flowing.  Bighorn sheep, coyotes, and other native animals roam its 537 square miles.  Canyonlands is wild America. 

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Arches was the last national park that we saw in Utah on this trip.  It was the first one in 2015. 

 Established in 1971, the park lies on top of an underground salt bed that is responsible for the arches, spires, balanced rocks, sandstone fins, and eroded monoliths of this mecca for sightseers.  Thousands of feet thick in places, this salt bed was deposited across the Colorado Plateau 300 million years ago when a sea flowed into the region and eventually evaporated.  Over millions of years, residue from floods, winds, and the oceans that came and went covered the salt bed.  The debris was compressed as rock, at one time possibly a mile thick.  Salt under pressure is unstable, and the salt bed lying below arches was no match for the weight of this thick cover of rock.  The salt layers shifted, buckled, liquefied, and repositioned itself, thrusting the rock layers upward as domes, and whole sections fell into the cavities.   Faults deep in the Earth made the surface even more unstable.  Fault-caused vertical cracks later contributed to the development of arches. More than 2,000 natural sandstone arches are in the park.  The park contains the highest density of natural arches in the world.  Located in the Colorado Plateau in south east Utah, the park consists of 76,679 acres of high desert. 

Native Americans used this area for thousands of years.  The Archaic peoples, and later ancestral Puebloan, Fremont, and Ute peoples, searched the arid desert for food animals, wild plant foods, and stone for tools and weapons.  The first non-native explorers came looking for wealth in mineral forms.  Ranchers found abundant grasses for cattle and sheep.  Free roaming cattle abound.

Arches National Park is a very popular park because of its ever-changing characteristics.  Today new features are being formed as old ones are destroyed.  Erosion and weathering work slowly but relentlessly, creating dynamic landforms that gradually change through time.  Change sometimes occurs more dramatically.  In 1991 a rock slab 60 feet long, 11 feet wide, and 4 feet thick fell from the underside of Landscape Arch, leaving behind an even thinner ribbon of rock. 

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The national parks in Utah were truly amazing.  If you’re a geologist, science teacher, history teacher, rock climber, adventure seeker, off-road adventurist, or hiker you will benefit more than Buck and I did while visiting these five super terrific national parks.  I would like to encourage you to come while you are still physically able.  In Moab, where we camped while visiting Arches National Park, we saw a TV commercial for the adventures the national parks provide.  A guy from North Carolina was interviewed.  He goes every year to Utah with his off-road team to explore the wonders of these parks.  He’s young enough and physically able to really enjoy the national parks in Utah.

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As a retired educator I can't help but think of different ways to teach a lesson on the national parks in Utah.

We could begin with a lower level thinking skill:

1. List the 5 national parks in Utah and the date each was established.  
2. List the 5 national parks in Utah and their location in the state. 

Then we could move to middle level thinking skills:

1. Compare and contract the differences and similarities of the 5 national parks in Utah. You may use a graphic organizer or simply list them separately. 
2. Considering the location of each national park in Utah, determine from the article the cause for the creation of each park. 

Upper level assignments:

1. Research the national park of your choice and state the reasons for your decision.  Write a commercial for the public to learn about your chosen park. 
2. Based on the history of each national park, what would you predict to be the future of each park?

Sorry, I couldn't help myself.