City of Rocks

The sign's gold rush visitor has a name, and probably a different date. The National Park Service gives these words to Wakeman Bryarly on July 19, 1849, and where the sign has a lowly thatched cottage, the Park Service has a lovely one; its own historic resources study once credited the line to Alonzo Delano instead. Diarists filled pages with steeples, domes and castles in these rocks for a decade. The granite stands sixteen miles away as a national reserve, where the trail ruts and Pinnacle Pass can still be walked.

What the plaque says

City of Rocks A vast display of towering granite rocks (16 miles southeast of here) attracted emigrants who were on their way to California. A gold rush visitor, July 14, 1849, reported that "you can imagine among those massive piles, church domes, spires, pyramids.... with a little fancying you can see anything from the Capitol at Washington to a lowly thatched cottage." Emigrants who never had seen anything like that before were impressed by so many "rocks of the most singular shapes." City of Rocks is a National Historic Landmark as well as a National Natural Landmark. 344 Text prepared by the Idaho Historical Society Marker made & installed by Idaho Transportation Department

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• City of Rocks National Reserve — 15 mi
  Two granite spires the emigrants steered by. They look like twins and formed about 2.5 billion years apart.

More markers nearby

• Milner Dam — 18 mi
• Albion State Normal School — 19 mi
• Diamondfield Jack — 19 mi
• Starrh's Ferry — 19 mi