Founded in 1901, Grand Canyon Village is a historic, national park community located on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, 5,000 feet above the Colorado River. Originally composed of several privately-owned businesses catering to tourists, 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…

Dubbed “America’s Aquarium in Stone” by the National Park Service, Fossil Butte is exceptional because it has many well-preserved fossils, especially those of aquatic animals. It is considered by researchers to be one of the richest paleontology…

Earl Douglass was a paleontologist working at Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 1909, Douglass traveled to Utah to look for dinosaur fossils. Years before, he had nearly completed an entire Diplodocus skeleton from Wyoming. The…

During the Triassic Period, northeastern Arizona’s Colorado Plateau was near the equator on part of the prehistoric supercontinent Pangea. Due to the different climate, there existed massive trees and rivers all over the area. Some trees fell into…

By the late 1870s, the United States government was fully engaged in the process of forcing American Indians in the West onto reservations. In 1855, Nez Perce in Oregon, Idaho, and Washington signed a treaty in which they accepted a…

For centuries, American Indians used natural resources available in what now constitutes Yellowstone National Park as part their seasonal migration cycles. One band of Shoshone, the Tukudika or Sheep Eaters, lived in the higher elevations of…

The Crow, also known as the Apsaalooke or Absaroka, historically lived in parts of Northern Wyoming and Southern Montana. The largest division, the Mountain Crow, claim a region including the eastern half of Yellowstone National Park as their…