The monument's three bridges are named from the Hopi tradition: Sipapu, the largest, takes its name from the gateway through which souls pass into the spirit world. Kachina is named for rock art on the bridge that resembles the ceremonial dancers of Hopi culture. Owachomo, the thinnest and most delicate, means "rock mound" -- a reference to a formation on its top. Each bridge illustrates a different chapter in the geological process of natural bridge formation. Flash floods drive streams through the white Cedar Mesa Sandstone, undercutting the walls of the canyon's meandering goosenecks until the rock separating two bends is finally breached. The stream punches through, abandoning its old loop and flowing beneath a newborn bridge. Over millennia, erosion and gravity widen the opening until the bridge thins beyond its structural limits and collapses. Evidence of at least two collapsed bridges lies within the monument -- a reminder that even stone is temporary.

Humans have inhabited this landscape since at least 7500 BCE, leaving behind rock art and stone tools at sites throughout the canyons. Around 700 CE, ancestors of modern Puebloan peoples arrived and built stone-and-mortar dwellings and granaries that share architectural kinship with the more famous structures at Mesa Verde, visible distantly to the east from the Bears Ears. Like the people of Mesa Verde, the residents of Natural Bridges departed around the year 1270 for reasons still debated by archaeologists. Horsecollar Ruin, visible from an overlook along Bridge View Drive, stands as one of the best-preserved Ancestral Puebloan sites in the region -- an undisturbed rectangular kiva with its original roof still intact, and two granaries whose oval-shaped doors resemble horse collars, giving the ruin its evocative name.

Europeans first laid eyes on the bridges in 1883, when gold prospector Cass Hite followed White Canyon upstream from the Colorado River and stumbled upon them near the junction of White and Armstrong Canyons. The National Geographic Magazine brought them to wider attention in 1904, and four years later, on April 16, 1908, Theodore Roosevelt designated the area a National Monument -- Utah's first. For decades afterward, the monument remained nearly impossible to reach. The superintendent's visitor log tells the tale: a trip from Blanding, the nearest settlement, required a three-day horseback ride. It was the uranium boom of the 1950s that finally brought roads to this part of Utah, and modern-day State Route 95 was not paved until 1976.

Natural Bridges operates entirely on solar power, generated by a large array near the visitor center -- a fitting choice for a park that takes darkness as seriously as daylight. The 2007 dark-sky designation recognized both the exceptional quality of the park's night skies and its deliberate efforts to protect them. The NPS Night Sky Team has monitored the skies here and found them unmatched anywhere in the national park system. For visitors willing to make the drive into this corner of the Colorado Plateau, the payoff is twofold: by day, the Bridge View Drive winds past all three bridges, with hiking trails descending to their bases through terrain rich with pinyon-juniper woodland, canyon wrens, mule deer, and cryptobiotic soil crusts that anchor the desert floor. By night, the sky opens up like nowhere else in the country.