Rainbow Bridge National Monument, Utah (1951)

UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR Oscar L. Chapman, Secretary
NATIONAL PARK SERVICE Arthur E. Demaray, Director
Remote in spectacular red canyon country stands majestically beautiful Rainbow Bridge, the most stupendous of its kind and one of the great wonders of the world.
The inspiration gained by a visit to Rainbow Bridge National Monument is supreme. The majestic beauty of the bridge affects people in many ways. The delicate balance, graceful sweep, symmetry, beautiful toning of color, and superb setting of this rainbow-shaped stone arch suggest Divine guidance during its creation. The aborigines must have sensed this, for they built altars here.
Rainbow Bridge stands in the semidesert country of southeastern Utah. It nestles among canyons carved by streams that wind their way from the northern side of Navajo Mountain toward the Colorado River. It spans Rainbow Bridge Canyon and the tiny streamlet in its bottom.
Rainbow Bridge is greater than any other known natural bridge in size, in color, and in its almost perfect symmetry. With a 278-foot span, the bridge gracefully arches to a height of 309 feet—large enough to straddle our capitol building in Washington, D. C. Thicker at the top than a three-story building (42 feet), it is wide enough (33 feet) to accommodate the average highway.
Rainbow Bridge stands in one of the most remote and inaccessible areas in the United States. So rugged is the surrounding Rainbow Plateau that few of the Navajo and Paiute Indians who live nearby have ever seen the bridge.
While leading an archeological expedition through southeastern Utah and northern Arizona during the summer of 1908, Dr. Byron Cummings, then Dean of Arts and Sciences, University of Utah, became interested in rumors of a great stone arch somewhere in the vicinity of Navajo Mountain. Mr. and Mrs. John Wetherill, of Oljato, Utah, related to him rumors of the arch which were prevalent among the Indians. Mrs. Wetherill later learned from Nasja, a Paiute Indian from Paiute Canyon, that his son, Nasja-begay, had actually seen the great stone arch and could return to it.