Established in 1967, Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area now encompasses 197,349 acres of land in Southern Nevada. In 1990, its status was changed from Red Rock Recreation Lands to a National Conservation Area. It was just the seventh to be designated in the country.
A short 17 miles from the glitz and glam of the world-famous Las Vegas Strip, Red Rock Canyon is actually visible from there. But it is best experienced up close, as over 2 million visitors find out every year. In addition to its natural beauty, the park also features a particularly robust exhibit at the Visitor Center. Check it out before setting off on the 13 mile scenic loop.
Red Rock Canyon’s dramatic landscape developed through a fascinating geologic history. Over 600 million years, the land transformed from a seabed, to great sand dunes, to the Keystone Thrust we see today. It features colorful and jagged sandstone walls rising up to 3000 feet tall.
The natural environment is also an oasis in the desert, playing home to hundreds of species of plants and animals due to its perennial water supply and cooler temperatures. And while we weren’t lucky enough to see any desert tortoises, we did manage a couple of close encounters with two of the area’s more than 100 bird species.
Situated just a half hour from the bright lights and buzz of the Las Vegas Strip, Red Rock Canyon stands out as a natural refuge for residents and tourists alike.
We’d never really thought of Theodore Roosevelt National Park until we decided to make touring national parks one of our major goals for this journey. To be fully honest, we didn’t know much about what North Dakota had to offer other than what we gleaned from a few North Dakota tourism airport advertisements featuring notable local Josh Duhamel beckoning visitors to his home state. And while there is a lot of what you might imagine – open roads over vast, nondescript plains – we were taken by the unexpected natural beauty and fascinating history of the state’s sole national park.
In 1883, a 24-year-old Theodore Roosevelt visited North Dakota and fell in love with the frontier life he found there. Investing in two ranches, he was eager to develop his hunting, ranching, and other cowboy skills as well as confront his physical issues with asthma. When he tragically lost both his wife and mother on Valentine’s Day the following year, he returned to the badlands of the Little Missouri River Valley, now found in the national park in his name, to grieve and to find solace. He frequented the rugged region throughout his life, even crediting his ascension to the Presidency and conservationist mission to his time spent there.
In 1899, Roosevelt gave his famed “The Strenuous Life” speech, in which he extolled the virtues of rejecting ease and seeking out hard work: “I preach to you, then, my countrymen, that our country calls not for the life of ease but for the life of strenuous endeavor… [L]et us shrink from no strife, moral or physical, within or without the nation, provided we are certain that the strife is justified, for it is only through strife, through hard and dangerous endeavor, that we shall ultimately win the goal of true national greatness.” The speech reflected the very core values that he lived out in North Dakota.
Theodore Roosevelt – Rough Rider, Conservationist, President [Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library (520.14-008)]
The focus on the importance of this place to President Roosevelt sets this park apart from every other national park that we’ve seen. While boasting the natural splendor visitors typically seek out from national parks, Theodore Roosevelt National Park felt like a much more personal experience. If you allow yourself the time to stop and take in your surroundings – the awe-inspiring badlands and vast herds of buffalo roaming nearby – you can feel first-hand why Roosevelt came here for both physical and emotional healing, as well as personal growth.
Teddy Roosevelt helped save bison from extinction, and many still roam his namesake parkMany prairie dogs also call this place homeI call it “Squirrel Rock”
While Theodore Roosevelt National Park might not be the most famous of national parks, it certainly ranks high on our list!
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