In the summer of 1910, every step through the forests in the Bitterroot Mountains between Idaho and Montana could meet with a resounding crunch from the arid twigs and leaves. The season had been extremely dry, with no rain at all from May through…

The Columbia River has a unique and essential history involving indigenous people from across the Columbia Plateau, spanning thousands of years and dozens of tribes. A gathering place and trade site for many, the Columbia River has long provided its…

Desert National Wildlife Refuge (Desert NWR), the largest national wildlife refuge in the contiguous United States, spans vast tracts of land in Nevada. Adjacent to the Nevada Nuclear Test Site and overlapping the Nellis Air Force Range, the refuge…

In addition to hosting the longest active program for astronomy in the National Park Service, Byce Canyon National Park also holds the honor of being a Gold Tier International Dark Sky Park, so designed by the International Dark-Sky Association in…

A little over half-a-century after a Latter-day Saint missionary discovered 800-year-old Ancestral Puebloan ruins on the Colorado–Utah border in 1856, Jesse Walter Fewkes of the Smithsonian Institution led a survey of the sites in 1917–1918. Fewkes…

In 2015, the International Dark Sky Association accepted the Kaibab Paiutes’s application to acknowledge their reservation on the borderlands of Utah and Arizona as a Dark Sky Community. International Dark Sky Community’s official name, Thunder…

First designated a national monument in 1929, Congress declared Arches a national park on November 12, 1971. Arches National Park is one of the “Mighty 5” national parks of Utah, and in 2019, the International Dark-Sky Associated recognized the…

Flagstaff’s history of dark sky conservation began even before the International Dark Sky City designation in 2001 when it issued the world’s first outdoor lighting ordinance in 1958. Lowell Observatory, founded in 1894 by Percival Lowell to study…

Along with two of his friends, Hector Lee, a student from Fillmore, Utah, discovered a camel skull in a cave in the lava beds of nearby Meadow Hot Springs in 1928. He passed it along to professor A.L. Matthews of the University of Utah, who then…

As an instrumental wagon route across the Rocky Mountains, the Mullan Road carried much of the traffic between Fort Benton in what is now Montana to Fort Walla Walla in present-day Washington. With the discovery of placer and quartz mines in places…

Kingman’s newspaper, The Mohave County Miner, reported on February 25, 1893 that the “Red Ghost” had finally been laid to rest. The Red Ghost, the story explained, was a camel reported to have trampled a woman near Eagle Creek. On later sightings,…

In Virginia City, camels arrived in 1865 to convey salt. Nevada, famed for its Comstock lode and peppered with mining towns such as Virginia City, derived much of its wealth and population from ore deposits. However, translating these deposits into…