⛰️ Zion: What You Will Find

Zion is Utah's oldest national park and the fourth most visited in the whole United States: over four and a half million people a year. Most of them come for one canyon, twenty-four kilometres long and in places eight hundred metres deep.

It was cut by the Virgin River — a river that looks like a brook and can be waded in summer. It carries away over a million tonnes of material a year, though, and in a storm it can rise several metres in an hour.

Petrified Dunes

The canyon walls are Navajo sandstone. It is a petrified desert: a hundred and eighty million years ago the largest sand dune anybody has ever documented was here, and its layers still lie tilted exactly as the wind heaped them.

The layer is seven hundred metres thick in places. In the walls it shows as slanting lines meeting at different angles — each group of lines is one dune and each break is a day the wind turned.

That is also why the sandstone is so colourful. The iron in it is rusty at the top and white at the bottom, because the upper layers were leached more by water.

Angels Landing

The park's most famous route. The last kilometre runs along a narrow ridge with a four-hundred-metre drop on both sides, and the only aid is chains set into the rock.

Since April 2022 you go there only with a permit from a lottery. It was brought in because two-way queues were forming on a ridge that is a metre wide in places — and on that ridge you can neither pass nor turn round.

Anyone without a permit, or who cannot bear heights, can take the same trail as far as Scout Lookout. That is the turning just below the ridge; the view is almost the same and there are no chains.

The Narrows

The park's second famous trail is not a trail. It is a river.

In the upper part of the canyon the walls close in until there is no bank left between them, and the only way onward is through the water. The canyon is six metres wide and three hundred metres deep in places, so you walk in twilight even at noon.

You go upstream, usually knee-deep, sometimes waist-deep, and neoprene boots and a stick are hired for it. It is not so much the water as the stones on the bottom, which you cannot see.

What matters most is the weather that is not there. A storm fifty kilometres away can send a flash flood down the canyon even with the sun shining above you. The rangers announce the risk every morning, and when it is high the canyon is closed. This is not caution; people die here.

No Cars in the Canyon

Since 2000 the main canyon road has been closed to private cars from March to November, and a free shuttle runs along it.

The reason was simple: there were four hundred and fifty parking spaces in the canyon and five times as many cars arriving. People parked in ditches, on meadows and on each other. Today it is one of the most cited examples of how a park can be saved by throwing the cars out of it — and, remarkably, nobody complains, because the bus comes every seven minutes.

Another traffic curiosity is the tunnel of 1930 on the eastern side, over a kilometre and a half long. It was built for the cars of the thirties, so today's motorhomes have to be threaded through the middle of it with a ranger holding up the traffic while they pass.

Condors

California condors fly above the canyon — a bird with a wingspan of over two and a half metres, the largest in North America.

In 1982 twenty-two of them were left in the world. All were caught, bred in captivity, and released again from the nineties on. Around eighty now fly in the area of southern Utah and northern Arizona, and they carry numbered tags on their wings, so you can tell which one you are looking at.

If you see a large black bird circling over Angels Landing, look at the head: a condor's is bare and pink, the bearded vulture does not live here, and vultures have a smaller wingspan.

Where the Name Comes From

The valley was settled by Mormon farmers in the 1860s, and one of them, Isaac Behunin, gave it the name Zion — the biblical place of peace and refuge.

When the church leader Brigham Young visited and saw that people drank and smoked here, he declared that this was no Zion. The settlers solved it in their own way: for a while they called the place Not Zion.

The name came back in the end. The federal administration had meanwhile named the park with the Paiute word Mukuntuweap, which the locals never used, and in 1919 it went back to Zion — among other reasons because it is easier to pronounce and more people came.