Backgrounder

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Media contact
Rheya Tanner
352-123-4567
rheya.tanner@fakenps.gov

A brief history of Arches National Park

The area where Arches National Park now stands used to be a large ocean
millennia ago. Ocean water wore cracks into the sandstone seafloor and dug out large
underground alcoves. Once the oceans dissipated, further wind and water erosion peeled
back the top layers of sandstone, eventually revealing the alcoves we now know as
arches. The terrain has remained otherwise unchanged for at least 50,000 years.
The first known humans to settle around the arches were Native American hunter-
gatherers around 10,000 years ago. They came to the area seeking deposits of chert and
chalcedony, types of quartz used for making stone tools. Small debris piles from their
tool making can still be found around the park. Eight thousand years later, ancient
Puebloan tribes settled around Moab, Utah to grow crops. They are the people
responsible for the rock art that decorates Courthouse Wash. They remained in the area
until around 700 years ago.
The Moab area garnered little attention from colonial Americans until the early 1900s,
when Utahs settlements expanded farther from Salt Lake. Local prospector Alexander
Ringhoffer fell in love with arches and wanted to make the area a national monument. So in
1923, he helped generate publicity for the Arches by writing to the Rio Grand Western
Railroad company and convincing them to expand their line to southeast Utah.
Over the next few years, tourism to the area grew, and visitors continued to fall in
love with the area. On April 12, 1929, President Herbert Hoover signed an executive
order reserving 4,520 acres of land as Arches National Monument. It remained a national
monument for more than 40 years, but political officials slowly increased its acreage until
congress finally changed its status to national park in 1971.
But even then, Arches was underdeveloped. Official records still reported nearly
90 arches at Arches National Park. That is, until four men with geology backgrounds
developed a more standardized method for finding natural arches. Over the next 30 years,
the men known as the arch hunters documented more than 2,000 natural arches that
remained undiscovered.
Today, Arches National Park is undergoing road expansions that will hopefully
help the area grow more exponentially in the future.

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