Arches National Park

Indigenous peoples

In a 2016 ethnographic study by Richard Stoffle and University of Arizona colleagues, representatives of the Pueblo of Zuni (A:shiwi), the Hopi Tribe, the Southern Ute Indian Tribe, the Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah and the Kaibab Band of Paiute Indians visited five study areas in the park; each, the report says, regards Arches as a very powerful place. In their shared view the park was primarily a place of ceremony for the people who farmed Moab Valley; the arches are portals in space and time, and the hoodoos sentient beings. [3]

Hopi representatives call the region Pavayoykasi, the Place of Rainbows; Zuni representatives describe a clan migration through the park in their origin narrative; Ute representatives identified the park’s Purple Sage area as one of three known Ute gathering areas for that medicine in the Southwest. The report cautions that its summary is not an exact representation of their voices. [3]

Women

In 1982 Sherma E. Bierhaus became unit manager of Arches, a post she held until 1986. Purcell’s 2019 administrative history calls her appointment the first time a woman filled the role of superintendent at any national park, a milestone, he notes, at a time when only 22 of 333 other Park Service units were headed by women. When the state worried in 1984 that a new boundary fence would cut 100 head of cattle off from a spring-fed pond 200 feet inside the park, she replied that, given the cliffs used in the fence line, the pond would remain open to them. During her illness for much of 1983, Anna M. Fender served as acting unit manager. [2]

Climate & environment

A 2025 NPS science report used satellite images to track the park’s vegetation from 2000 to 2019, which it calls a very dry period. Dry years and multi-year dry spells caused substantial declines in plant cover that largely rebounded by the study’s end, and by then the growing season was starting on average 11.9 days earlier and ending 10.2 days later. The report offers its findings as a guide to what, where and why vegetation may change as the climate does. [4]

Labor & the New Deal

No funds were allocated for development at Arches until 1940, when a Civilian Conservation Corps camp of 200 men, NP-7-U, was built near the mouth of Moab Canyon for the monument’s exclusive use. Its crews began the entrance road up the Moab Fault, blasting the sandstone with large quantities of dynamite, and built most of the custodian’s stone residence, the Rock House (95 percent complete when the camp withdrew, by the custodian’s estimate), at a cost of 3,214 man-days and $5,830.20. [2]

The enrollees came from the Carolinas and other Deep South states and were unaccustomed to Utah’s climate. On December 18, 1940, they struck over what they felt were harsh working conditions in bad weather; the leaders were demoted, the camp telephone line was cut along some 40 poles, and the commanding officer resigned. The camp was withdrawn on May 31, 1942, with less than a mile of the scenic drive finished. [2]