Top 10 Park Landmarks #Part2

6. Cumberland Gap National Historical Park

Photograph by Christian Heeb, laif/Redux

This landmark is the opposite of a high prominence, but to American immigrants in the late 1700s, it was an extremely important geographic feature. Settlement of the bluegrass region of Kentucky was held up for decades by Native American tribes, who prized it as a hunting territory, and also by the physical barrier of the Cumberland mountains. Eventually, war and politics ended the claims of native people, and a flood of
settlers poured through the Cumberland Gap. The route was originally a Native American footpath called the Warriors’ Path. In 1775, Daniel Boone hacked out a wider track that became famous as the Wilderness Road. By 1820, despite sporadic warfare and the inherent challenge of life on the frontier, some 300,000 settlers had passed through the gap on their way west. Today the highway runs underground, leaving the gap almost as peaceful as ever. Modern travelers get a fine view of it and the surrounding mountains from the Pinnacle Overlook, a four-mile drive from the park visitor center.

7. Chimney Rock National Historic Site

Photograph by Danita Delimont, Getty Images

Days could get long for immigrants headed to Utah, Oregon, and California. Starting at Independence, Missouri, where wagon trains formed up so people could travel together, trundling toward the sunset at the pace of a walking ox, settlers entered a world more open than most could imagine: no trees, little water, and grass that grew thinner as the miles went by. What Francis Parkman described in 1846 as “the same wild endless expanse” stretched through tomorrow into forever. On a route with few notable mileposts, Chimney Rock, in today’s Nebraska, stood out. Most diarists commented on the sight of it. Quite a few people climbed the slope at its base to scratch their names in the soft sandstone. Needle-shaped, 326 feet high, and a short walk from their camps on the North Platte River, the rock told travelers that they were nearing the end of the prairies and would soon be in the mountains.

8. Devils Tower National Monument

Photograph by Peter Scott Barta

As a landform, it seems almost impossible. From the relatively flat surrounding land, the treestump-like tower’s sides form smooth upward arcs, drawing our thoughts to the sky. The summit, hovering 1,267 feet above Wyoming’s Belle Fourche River, is flat, not visible from below, and therefore mysterious. Plains tribes—Lakota, Shoshone, Crow, Blackfeet, Kiowa, Arapaho, and others—consider the tower a sacred object and call it by evocative names like Bear’s Lodge, Mythic-owl Mountain, Grey Horn Butte, Ghost Mountain, and Tree Rock. Legends tell of heroes, creation, and redemption. The tower’s ongoing importance is reflected by ceremonies and rituals conducted every year by regional tribes. The geologic story, not fully understood, credits an intrusion of molten igneous rock that took shape beneath overlying sedimentary layers, where it hardened and was eventually exposed by erosion. In the process of cooling, the rock formed vertical hexagonal columns that, parallel but separate, give the tower its distinctive striated appearance. Rock climbers find the columns irresistible. Most are happy to gaze upward from the base where, in 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed the first national monument.

9. Island in the Sky in Canyonlands

Photograph by Ron Niebrugge, Alamy

One pleasure of being in the red rocks of Utah is how intimate the landscape can be. Narrow canyons, room-size alcoves, little rounded peaks, streams you can step across, waterfalls and pools sized for a single person. Or two. The opposite pleasure is to get far above it all, up in the wind and weather, where the view is limited only by the arc of the Earth. Such a place is Island in the Sky. It is reached by driving south toward the tip of a huge triangular mesa. Side roads beckon toward Mineral Bottom, on the Green River, and Dead Horse Point State Park, perched above the Colorado River. Save them for later. Carry on to the apex where the triangle, clawed by erosion from both sides, comes to a jaw-dropping halt overlooking the confluence of the two great rivers and a vast spill of brightly colored sediments, intricately carved and at the same time massive in scale. The sediments lie in orderly horizontal layers. The carving slices them into psychedelic patterns. The rivers lend a sense of life and motion, and the sky—well, you just have to go and see for yourself.

10. Bering Land Bridge National Preserve

Photograph by Tim Thompson, Corbis

Whether, in the days of its use, anyone viewed the Bering Land Bridge as a landmark is doubtful. It wasn’t a bridge at all but rather a 1,000-mile-wide connector between Asia and North America. Sea level fell when Ice Age glaciers took up vast quantities of water and rose when those glaciers melted. In turn, the bridge appeared and disappeared. People lived on it and moved east across it as conditions permitted. Some continued south as the continental glaciers melted. Genetic evidence indicates that these Asian immigrants were the true first Americans. The bridge is still there, beneath the relatively shallow waters of the Bering Sea. The landmark means more to modern people as we ponder our heritage, study our maps, and consider the mere 50-mile separation between Asia and North America. The preserve, not precisely on the tip of Alaska’s Seward Peninsula, is a larger-than-Yellowstone chunk of pure roadless arctic wildness. See #Part1
From the National Geographic book The 10 Best of Everything—National Parks
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