Theodore Roosevelt traveled over 14,000 miles, visiting over 25 states, in the span of nine weeks in the early summer of 1903. His western tour was filled with speeches, commemorations, and his favorite thing to do: exploring the outdoors. His tours of Yosemite and Yellowstone are widely known, but in between them, he visited the Grand Canyon on May 6, 1903. He said, giving a speech, “In the Grand Canyon, Arizona has a natural wonder which, so far as I know, is absolutely unparalleled throughout the rest of the world.” Astounded, he said, “I shall not attempt to describe it, because I cannot. I could not choose words that would convey or that could convey to any outsider what that canyon is.” The majesty of Earth’s beauty there led him to explore more. Riding a mule down Bright Angel Trail, he met two natives from the Havasupai tribe who lived in the Indian Garden with their families. For 1,000 years, the tribe lived in this region without outside contact, until Spanish priest Francisco Garces explored the area in 1776. As a result of the Santa Fe Railroad in the early 18th century, the Havasupai had increasingly more contact with other explorers and settlers. When Roosevelt and his regiment visited, he asked them to leave to make the canyon a National Park. To gain the status of a national park, all private development on the land would be illegal according to Congress. This resulted in the Havasupi’s relocation to a 518-acre reservation in Havasu Canyon instead. Roosevelt was also concerned about the commercialization and exploitation of the land due to encroaching mining and timber interests. On June 8th, 1906, he signed the Antiquities Act, which authorized the president to “declare by public proclamation historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest that are situated upon the lands owned or controlled by the Government of the United States to be national monuments.” Subsequently, this act was used to establish the Grand Canyon National Monument on January 11th, 1908. It was made a National Park in 1919. Roosevelt Point and Trail were named in the President’s honor for the efforts he provided. A placard at Roosevelt Point reads another part from his speech advocating one request, “Leave it as it is. You can not improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it. What you can do is to keep it for your children, your children's children, and for all who come after you, as one of the great sights which every American, if he can travel at all, should see.” Poetically, he wrote a letter to John Hay, former Secretary of State, summing up his experience on his Western tour and paying special attention to the Grand Canyon, “To me the most impressive piece of scenery I have ever looked at. I don’t exactly know what words to use in describing it. It is beautiful and terrible and unearthly. It made me feel as if I were gazing at a sunset of strange and awful splendor.” Today, almost 5 million tourists continue to explore this canyon that Roosevelt cared so profoundly to preserve.

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In 1874, Bryce Canyon became part of a cattle ranch owned by Ebenezer Bryce. His ranch was unsuccessful, but automobile tourism revitalized the area when passable roads reached what is now Zion National Park in 1917. In 1921, Utah’s state legislature accepted a proposition from Park Service director Stephen Mather that protected Bryce Canyon as a state park. Utah made no attempt to develop the area for public use, but the Union Pacific Railroad spurred development in Bryce Canyon by creating the Utah Parks Company in 1923. This connected the Union Pacific’s Cedar City spur line to Bryce Canyon, the North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park, and Zion via bus lines. By establishing a network of parks and resorts, the Union Pacific aimed to compete with other successful railroad companies such as the Northern Pacific, Atchison-Topeka Santa Fe, and Great Northern. These companies had established successful tourist attractions at the South Rim of Grand Canyon, Yellowstone National Park, and Glacier National Park. As tourism brought in profit, road construction improved access to rural points of interest like Bryce Canyon. In 1924, Congress established Utah National Park, and the Utah Parks Company constructed Bryce Canyon Lodge and Deluxe Cabins in the same year to provide visitors with accommodations. Congress enlarged Utah National Park and renamed it Bryce Canyon in 1928.  The Utah Parks Company enlisted Gilbert Stanley Underwood, one of the Union Pacific’s consulting architects, to design Bryce Canyon Lodge. Underwood’s designs are notable for their commitment to rustic architecture, which used natural materials and textures to blend a building with its natural surroundings. He utilized locally quarried stone and large, exposed wooden details throughout the structure, figuratively connecting the building to its location. After the company completed the original building in 1925, it added two new wings in 1926 to make room for an increasing number of visitors. The Utah Parks Company constructed fifteen deluxe guest cabins the following year in a pine grove near the main structure. Their design used rough stone and natural wood to imitate the design of Bryce Canyon Lodge.  During the 1950s, the National Park Service renovated Bryce Canyon Lodge to make room for updated amenities. The hotel originally housed a barber shop, but the Park Service replaced it with a soda fountain. The Park Service also enlarged a road at the hotel’s front entrance to make room for larger vehicles, but the Park service expanded a plaza outside Bryce Canyon Lodge’s front entrance by removing the original bus lane in 1989. In 1985, the Park Service removed sixty-one of the lodge’s original sixty-seven standard cabins. The Sunrise Motel and Sunset Motel replaced them. In 1995, the National Register of Historic Places officially listed forty-two buildings in Bryce Canyon, including Bryce Canyon Lodge. This restricted future renovations, allowing the complex to retain most of its architectural significance. Today, Bryce Canyon Lodge operates as a historic hotel alongside five standard cabins and fifteen deluxe cabins.

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Before the Atchison-Topeka Santa Fe Railway reached Grand Canyon Village in 1901, only a few rudimentary hotels served the Grand Canyon’s South Rim. These establishments relied on a local stagecoach line, which operated between Flagstaff, Arizona and a ranch near the rim. Because the twenty-dollar journey took three days to complete, the railroad provided a more efficient way to reach the canyon, and its arrival shifted the center of activity at Grand Canyon Village away from Thurston’s stagecoach line. Fred Harvey, a hospitality company whose Harvey houses provided quality food and lodging to passengers on the Santa Fe Railway, constructed El Tovar near the railroad tracks to draw in train passengers. The hotel cost $250,000 to construct, providing the Grand Canyon’s first luxury lodgings.  Opened in 1905, El Tovar hotel predated the Grand Canyon’s designation as a national monument in 1908 and a national park in 1919. As a national monument, the Grand Canyon received less funding and attention than established national parks like Yellowstone. However, as tourism increased, calls for the area to receive further protections intensified. Ford Harvey, who served as president of the Harvey company until 1928, routinely advocated for Grand Canyon’s national park status at conferences. Conservation efforts gained strength when Arizona became a state in 1912, but many Grand Canyon residents opposed the national park proposal due to concerns about land and mineral rights. Regardless, President Woodrow Wilson officially signed the bill that established Grand Canyon National Park on February 26, 1919, and the Harvey company secured a hospitality contract from the new National Park Service (created in 1916) in 1920. Architect Charles Whittlesey’s design for El Tovar used the rustic architectural style, which aimed to establish a connection between buildings and their environment. Whittlesey designed the log siding on the first floor to resemble the wall of a log cabin. Natural building materials like rough stone and logs appear throughout the building, reinforcing this style. Whittlesey combined these rustic features with the architecture of traditional luxury resorts, which catered to Victorian tastes and a desire for exotic destinations. Decorative wooden poles known as balusters, which mimic Swiss chalet architecture, enclose El Tovar’s porches and balconies. The design also includes a small round tower known as a turret, which echoes resort architecture.  El Tovar originally featured luxurious amenities, including hot running water and electric lighting. In the 1950s, the Harvey company added a new cocktail lounge to the hotel’s dining area. A 1983 renovation exchanged the hotel’s sparse public restrooms with private facilities, added carpeting, replaced windows, and included a new heating system. For this reason, El Tovar currently houses seventy-nine rooms instead of the original ninety-five. In 1968, Hawaii-based hospitality company Amfac purchased the Harvey company and gained control of El Tovar. In the 1990s, Amfac created Xanterra Parks and Resorts to control its concessions at the Grand Canyon, and Xanterra still manages El Tovar today. 

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Following the Great Fire of 1910, which devastated much of the northern Rocky Mountains, the Forest Service prioritized wildfire suppression. By the mid-1910s, it constructed three small platforms along the Canyon’s edge to spot fires. The North Rim platform, constructed at Bright Angel Point, provided forest rangers and tourists with impeccable views of the forests which lined the Canyon.

As one of the natural wonders of the world, the Grand Canyon is widely considered one of America’s environmental gems. Federal attempts to preserve the Canyon date all the way back to the late nineteenth century, when the then Indiana Senator, Benjamin Harrison, proposed three bills in the 1880s to set aside the canyon as a national park. Though each of the bills failed, President Harrison eventually granted the Grand Canyon status as a Forest Reserve in the waning days of his presidency in 1893. After President Theodore Roosevelt visited the area in 1903, he granted the site status as a National Monument in 1908, replacing Harrison’s reserve . The National Park Service wouldn’t be founded for another eight years, so the Monument fell under control of the fledgling US Forest Service.

The Grand Canyon gained status as a National Park in 1919. The Park Service continued the Forest Service’s policy of fire suppression, and in 1928, it replaced the platform with a seventy five-foot tall steel tower. Topped with a tiny observation cab, fire lookouts lived in a small cabin beneath the structure. Under contract, the Aeromotor Company constructed the Bright Angel Lookout Tower. Aerometer also designed and produced the iconic windmill water pumps which became a symbol of the American West during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

During the 1930s, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) updated much of the North Rim’s infrastructure. This included moving the Bright Angel Lookout roughly fourteen miles away to the Park’s northern entrance. In 1933, the CCC renamed the structure the North Rim Lookout Tower.

From the late 1960s to the early 1970s, writer and environmentalist Edward Abbey spent four seasons working in the tower. Abbey’s time in the station inspired his book Black Sun, a novel which tells the story of a fire lookout in the Grand Canyon who falls in love with a tourist. When she goes missing, the lookout is blamed for her mysterious disappearance. In his book Fire on the Rim, Stephen Pyne references Abbey as the reason the Park ceased lookout tower operations. “Whether [Abbey] was even in the tower, no one could say. He was a writer, and the only smokes he reported were the ones in his novels… he was absent so often that he demonstrated that we did not need a lookout, because having [Abbey] in the tower was the same as having no one.” Ultimately, the Park opted for aerial fire spotting instead.

Though abandoned, North Rim Lookout Tower is still accessible. Hikers can reach the site via a short hike from the Park’s northern entrance toll booth.

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Designed by architect and Santa Barbara, California native Francis W. Wilson, the Grand Canyon Train Depot is one of fourteen log depots ever constructed in the United States and is now one of only three remaining. Out of these, the Grand Canyon Depot is the only one built mainly from logs and the only one still operating today. The building features a central two-story section and a wing on each side one-story in height. The unique design of the wood—three flat sides and one rounded—allowed the building to give off a frontier appearance while keeping out moisture and maintaining structural integrity. The original copper lettering on the front spelled out “Grand Canon,” but workers replaced it in 1911 to spell “Grand Canyon.” Between the late-1920s and mid-1950s the depot underwent structural and functional renovations which added office space and upgraded lighting. Before 1901, a trip to the Grand Canyon required a bumpy, sixty-five-mile stagecoach ride on dirt roads to reach the South Rim. To rectify this—and simultaneously capitalize on interest to the park—in 1901, the Santa Fe Railway built a line of tracks connecting their depot in Williams, Arizona to what would become Grand Canyon Village. Instead of going by stagecoach, visitors to the Grand Canyon could ride the train and relax while enjoying the view on the way to one of the greatest natural wonders in the world. The arrival of the railroad in 1901 shifted the tourist experience to what became the Grand Canyon Village. In 1905, the Santa Fe Railroad completed the El Tovar Hotel between the track and the canyon. Santa Fe then partnered with the Fred Harvey Company and the National Park Service to add more buildings to accommodate the growing number of tourists, including Hopi House, Bright Angel Lodge, and the Red Horse Cabin. Architect Mary Jane Colter designed many of these structures. Popularity for the railroad dwindled as the automobile industry grew, however; in 1968, the Grand Canyon Railway made its final passenger run, and the Santa Fe Railway left the buildings it owned to the National Park Service. Freight transportation continued on the line, but soon after, in 1972, the railway discontinued passenger services to the Grand Canyon. In 1989 the formation of the Grand Canyon Railway revived the route when entrepreneurs Max and Thelma Biegert funded the restoration of the Grand Canyon Line: tourists once again could travel to the park by train. For visitors today, the station represents the idea of western national parks as rustic and scenic. Often the first experience guests have when they step off the train, the depot remains one of the best structures from the National Park’s rustic period.

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