One look at Bryce Canyon National Park and you’ll feel like you just stepped onto Mars! Take a day tour to Bryce Canyon, or explore it alongside Zion National Park.  If you want more time, Stay Overnight!

Bryce Canyon is located in southwestern Utah. It not actually a canyon, but a series of natural amphitheaters and colorful hoodoos (tall pillars of rock) all formed by the powerful forces of wind, water, and ice erosion over millions of years.

Like most of the surrounding National Parks in the desert southwest, there is archaeological evidence that Native American tribes had been living in the area for over 10,000 years. The most recent being the Paiutes, who later moved out when overgrazing by the earlier settlers became a problem. Today, there are no Native Americans living in the Bryce Canyon area.

The first European Americans to settle in the area were sent by the Mormon church in the 1850s. One of those settlers was Ebenezer Bryce who grazed his cattle and grew crops right inside what is today’s current park borders. The area became known as “Bryce’s canyon” and the name stuck when the area later became federally protected.

By the early 1920s, the Bryce Canyon area was becoming a nationally recognized tourist destination. Increased visitation combined with unregulated grazing and logging still occurring started the movement to protect the area, and in 1923, President Warren G. Harding declared Bryce Canyon a National Monument. Five years later, in 1928, Bryce was upgraded to a National Park.