City of Rocks National Reserve

City of Rocks National Reserve in southern Idaho preserves a landscape of enormous granite formations, towering spires, narrow passages, and weathered rock walls that seem to rise unexpectedly from the surrounding countryside. The unusual formations inspired the name “City of Rocks,” because early travelers thought the rocks resembled the ruins of an ancient stone city.

Beginning in 1843, City of Rocks became an important landmark for emigrants traveling west on the California Trail. Thousands of people passed through this area in wagon trains on their way toward California and Oregon. Later, travelers using the Salt Lake Alternate Trail also passed through the rocks.

For emigrants who had already traveled hundreds of miles across the plains, the distinctive granite formations served as both a landmark and a gathering place. Many stopped here to rest their animals and prepare for the difficult journey ahead. Some left their names behind, writing them on the rocks with axle grease. A number of these nineteenth-century inscriptions can still be seen today, providing a remarkably personal connection to the people who traveled the California Trail.

One of the best-known landmarks is Register Rock, where emigrants recorded their names and dates as they passed. Other formations acquired names such as Elephant Rock, Twin Sisters, and Camp Rock, becoming recognizable points along the trail.

The geological story reaches much farther back. The dramatic formations were created from ancient granite that formed deep beneath the Earth’s surface and was later exposed through uplift and erosion. Over millions of years, weathering, water, freezing and thawing sculpted the granite into the rounded domes, spires, fins, and unusual shapes visible today. Some of the rock within the reserve is more than 2.5 billion years old.

City of Rocks was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1964 because of its association with western migration. Congress established City of Rocks National Reserve on November 18, 1988, protecting both its remarkable geological landscape and its connection to the California Trail.

Today people come for very different reasons than the emigrants who traveled through here in the nineteenth century. The reserve has become especially well known for rock climbing, with hundreds of climbing routes among its granite formations. Visitors can also hike, camp, explore the historic trail and search for the names left behind by those who passed through more than 175 years ago.

I particularly like the description of City of Rocks as appearing to early travelers like a “dismantled, rock-built city of the Stone Age.” It is easy to imagine how extraordinary these formations must have appeared to emigrants approaching in their wagons.

City of Rocks brings together two stories that I enjoy discovering in our National Park sites:  the forces of nature that created the landscape over millions of years and the people who later traveled through it. The rocks were here long before the emigrants arrived, but for a generation heading west, they became an unmistakable landmark along the road to a new life.