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…

The Union Pacific Railroad and its subsidiary, the Utah Parks Company, completed a railway line near Cedar City in 1923, granting visitors of Zion National Park an easy and convenient method of travel from the railway station to the park by…

In the 1930s, the Civilian Conservation Corps removed Moraine Lodge from Rocky Mountain National Park in an initiative to restore the land to its original state. They converted the lodge’s remaining assembly hall into a museum in 1936 and the…

The first development at the Beaver Creek Administrative Area in what became Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Park was in 1908, when Forest Service ranger Al Austin built the Stewart Ranger Station in what was then known as Teton National Forest.…

In the 1920s, the National Park Service gave the first permanent concession on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon to the Union Pacific Railroad and its subsidiary Utah Parks Company. From 1901, the railroad provided transportation for tourists to the…

By the early 1900s, the scenic qualities of the two-thousand-foot Navajo Sandstone cliffs in Zion Canyon had been recognized as a potential destination for tourism. In 1909, President Theodore Roosevelt signed an executive order designating…

Established in 1872, Yellowstone National Park had been selected by the Park Service to be the inaugural project for Mission 66 since it was the first national park. Like most national parks, planning for new building projects started well before…

On January 26, 1915, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Rocky Mountain National Park Act, establishing Rocky Mountain as a national park and securing its boundaries. Lodge keepers owned private lands throughout the park where they maintained roads,…

In the 1850s U.S. Army Lieutenant Amiel Whipple passed through the Painted Desert while surveying a route along the 35th Parallel. Impressed by the deposits of petrified wood, Whipple documented the finding, recording the first published account of…

In 1909, Earl Douglass, a paleontologist from the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, discovered a site riddled with fossilized dinosaur bones in the northeastern corner of Utah and created a camp where he began excavating remains. In the following six…