In an epoch long ago, the forces of good and evil clashed along a primordial lake. At the end of the battle, the defeated evil forces were frozen where they stood, their ghoulish figures suspended in time at a place called Fantasy Canyon.

So goes one of the origin stories told about this strange Uintah County locale. Though Fantasy Canyon’s wonderfully weird rock deposits bear a passing resemblance to warriors from a fantasy epic, its unique sandstone features probably owe their existence more to geology than mythology.

Despite its mystical moniker, Fantasy Canyon is, indeed, a real place. The 10-acre Bureau of Land Management recreation site sits about 40 miles south of Vernal, surrounded by a maze of roads servicing oil and gas development rigs.

The self-guided, .6-mile Fantasy Canyon Loop Trail is lined with interpretive signs pointing out the unusual natural wonders. Hiking the trail takes less than an hour, but more time is necessary for visitors to appreciate the sci-fi-like scenery and imagine what creatures the rock formations resemble, like children staring up at the ever-morphing shapes of clouds in the sky.

Historically, American Indian tribes admired but were wary of the area. In 1972, Ute elder Muse Harris told The Salt Lake Tribune a legend his people tell about this landscape.

“One day, the story goes, the evil creatures of the nether regions, tired of living in the dark and dank, decided to dig up to the surface and take over everything above and below the earth,” Harris said. “They dug, and the ground trembled and rumbled in their work.”

The story explains that coyotes, eagles and wild horses summoned the world’s most powerful medicine man, who asked the western wind god and the rain god for help but was unsuccessful in trapping the evil invaders. The medicine man then turned to the god of the north, who used ice and snow to freeze the beings.

“The Devil Chief, the Great Mother Witch, the Magician and all the rest stand there just as they stood at the instant the cold struck long ago,” Harris said. “When the warmth came back, again the West Wind blew, and as the ice melted, the dust took its place and now the monsters stand in the pit they dug, all of them turned to stone. It is a warning to the evil ones down in hell to leave the good green earth alone.”

Early Anglo visitors also associated the strange formations with hellish creatures. Famed paleontologist Earl Douglass, who discovered the fossil quarry at Dinosaur National Monument, called Fantasy Canyon “Hades Pit” as part of a larger region he plotted on maps as “The Devils Playground.” Though Douglass didn’t discover dinosaur fossils here, modern paleontologists find ancient mammal bones and tortoise shells nearby.

Fantasy Canyon’s eerie pillars and pinnacles are made of quartzose sandstone formed 38 to 50 million years ago. Back then, the surrounding basin was occupied by a 150-mile-wide, half-mile-deep lake called Lake Uinta. The canyon is along the east shore of the former lakebed.

Sediment eroded from the surrounding highlands, and loose sand, silt and clay melded into sandstone and shale. After centuries of erosion, durable sandstone remained, while easily weathered siltstone and shale washed away, exposing the curiously shaped formations.

Striped between the sandstones and shales are black ribbons of coal-like material along the small washes on the trail. Some of these ribbons bear magnetite, a magnetic mineral sometimes used for manufacturing steel. Also present is Gilsonite, a solidified hydrocarbon named after Samuel H. Gilson, who in the 19th century promoted the mineral as a unique varnish, a waterproof coating for wooden pilings and wire cable insulation, among other uses. Today, Gilsonite is still mined near Bonanza, about 15 miles away.

Fantasy Canyon’s existing geologic wonders will eventually give way to weather and erode into sand, but new formations will appear as topsoil washes away. Locals refer to the canyon as “Nature’s China Shop,” because the formations are so fragile. A formation known as the Teapot was an example of the canyon’s delicate nature. The feature, popularized by photographs taken by visitors until the early 2000s, toppled of unknown causes and shattered on the canyon floor in September 2006.

Though the twisted rock formations evoke images of fantastical animals – some are named Flying Porpoise, Diving Duck and Prairie Dog, for example – real wildlife such as jackrabbits, raptors and western pygmy rattlesnakes inhabit the area less conspicuously. Visitors should give special care not to disturb the venomous reptiles when exploring the environment.

A visit to Fantasy Canyon is like viewing the melting waxy subjects of a Salvador Dali masterpiece in an outdoor museum. The landscape is not a painting, desert mirage or experience evoked by hallucinogenic substances but instead an experience more unbelievable than any tale of make-believe.