Zion National Park

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Zion National Park is primarily comprised of a narrow canyon carved by the Virgin River. It's not a terribly large park. Oh, and it's super popular. Those facts combine to create a bit of a mess.


There is literally a single road heading up the canyon. Zion realized years ago that it couldn't handle the crush of traffic, so it closed the road to the public during the busy season. It runs a series of free hop on/off shuttle buses instead. The shuttles run frequently, and they work well, but the fact that they are even necessary just shows how we're loving our parks to death. How can you get as many folks into parks as possible without completely trampling them? It's a tough balancing act, and I don't envy the folks charged with making it work.

We arrived around 9ish, and we couldn't even get in. There is a town right outside the front gate, and we had to park in a private lot in the town. It's an easy walk into the park from there, but that's another $30 just due to the massive crowds.

The trail everyone wants to do at Zion is the one to Angels Landing. This hike is not for the faint of heart as the end of it involves a few hundred feet of 4-5' wide rock with thousand foot drop offs on each side. There is a chain to help. But the payoff is spectacular.

Julie wasn't going to do it with me due to the height, and Jordan had little interest because it involved hiking more than 0 feet. The boys were game, and I'm confident they are old enough to have done it, but we unfortunately ran out of time. Because we were beholden to the shuttle schedule, we had to make sure we didn't miss the last one. While we could have finished the hike before dark, we probably couldn't have finished it before the last shuttle ran. We decided not to risk it. Darn overcrowding.


My favorite story about Zion is courtesy of our Mormon friends. As many people know, the Mormon influence is outsized in Utah in general and this part of Utah specifically. In many cases, Mormons were the first white settlers to these areas. Zion National Park is named after the Mormons' name for the area, the obvious implication being that it was so beautiful that it rivaled the promised land.

The story goes that Brigham Young visited the area one time and bristled at the comparison to the Zion of the promised land. While the land was beautiful, he felt it was wholly inappropriate to compare it to the promised land. He therefore preferred to call the area "Not Zion." Unfortunately, "Not Zion National Park" apparently didn't catch on!
Location: Zion National Park, Utah, USA

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