🇺🇸 United States · Rocky Mountains
Zion National Park, in southwestern Utah, is one of the most spectacular and most visited parks in the United States: a deep canyon of red and cream sandstone walls rising more than 600 meters, carved by the Virgin River over millions of years. Unlike other canyons you look down into from above, at Zion you walk the canyon floor, looking up at the imposing walls and monoliths around you.
Zion is famous for its legendary hikes: Angels Landing, a dizzying climb along a ridge with chains and drop-offs on both sides, and The Narrows, a route up the river through a narrow canyon of towering walls, wading through the water. Alongside these adventures, the park offers overlooks, gentle trails, lush vegetation along the river and wildlife that includes deer, bighorn sheep and California condors.
This guide covers the essentials of Zion with a practical eye: the shuttle system that is compulsory in season, the big hikes (Angels Landing, The Narrows, Emerald Pools), the overlooks on the Zion-Mount Carmel Highway, the permit you need for Angels Landing, how to get here from Las Vegas and where to stay in Springdale. It is an accessible and overwhelmingly beautiful park, ideal to combine with Bryce Canyon and Utah's other parks.
The canyon was inhabited by ancestral peoples (the Basketmaker culture and the Ancestral Puebloans) and later by the Southern Paiute, who called it Mukuntuweap. In the mid-19th century Mormon settlers arrived and named it 'Zion', for its character as a sacred refuge. First protected as a national monument (Mukuntuweap, 1909), it became Zion National Park in 1919, the first in Utah. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The state of red canyons and Mormon pioneers: ancestral territory of Utes, Paiutes, Goshutes and Navajos, settled by Brigham Young's saints from 1847, home of the Great Salt Lake, of the Golden Spike that joined the railroad from coast to coast and of the five most spectacular national parks in the country.
Read the history of Utah →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
It seems impossible that a river as modest as the Virgin —often barely a thread of water you can wade across— could have carved a canyon more than 600 meters deep. The secret is not its size but its load: the Virgin carries so much sand and sediment that it works like liquid sandpaper, and in a single day of flood it can move more rock than in months of quiet flow. That patient work, repeated over millions of years, sculpted Zion Canyon, whose geological story spans more than 250 million years. The park's spectacular walls are formed mainly of Navajo sandstone, a rock layer more than 600 meters thick in places, laid down by the giant sand dunes of an ancient desert, one of the largest known accumulations of fossilized dunes. The curving lines (cross-bedding) visible in the rock are the petrified trace of those wind-driven dunes.
Later, the uplift of the Colorado Plateau raised the whole region, giving the rivers the energy to cut down. The star of the canyon's carving was the Virgin River, an apparently modest watercourse with enormous erosive power: loaded with sand and sediment, it has been sawing through the rock, deepening the canyon over millions of years until it created the narrow gorges you walk today in The Narrows.
Zion's characteristic colors —reds, pinks, creams and whites— come from the iron oxides and other minerals in the sandstone. The result is one of the most imposing canyon landscapes on the planet, where the visitor, unlike at other canyons, walks the floor looking up at the colossal walls.
Zion Canyon has been inhabited by humans for thousands of years. The first peoples were Archaic hunter-gatherers, followed by the Ancestral Puebloans (sometimes called Anasazi) and the Fremont culture, who farmed and left petroglyphs and remains across the region. Later came the Southern Paiute, who occupied the area in historic times and knew the main canyon as Mukuntuweap, with a deep bond to the land.
Spanish explorers and missionaries passed nearby in the 18th century, but it was not until the mid-19th century that settlers of European origin arrived: the Mormon pioneers, expanding from Utah and colonizing the southern valleys. Drawn by the fertile land beside the Virgin River, they settled in the area and farmed the canyon floor.
It was one of those settlers who gave the place the name that stuck: struck by the almost supernatural grandeur of the canyon, he called it 'Zion', a biblical term for a place of refuge, peace and sanctuary, deeply meaningful to the Mormon faith. The name reflected the perception of the canyon as a sacred place, a natural cathedral.
Official recognition of the canyon's value came at the start of the 20th century. The expeditions and accounts of explorers such as John Wesley Powell, who traveled the region and recorded the Paiute name Mukuntuweap, made the place known. In 1909, President William Howard Taft established Mukuntuweap National Monument to protect it.
A few years later, in 1918, the monument was enlarged and renamed with the name the settlers had popularized, Zion, partly because it was thought that this more familiar name would draw more visitors than the Paiute place name. In 1919, Congress upgraded the site and turned it into Zion National Park, Utah's first national park.
In the following decades, infrastructure opened Zion to tourism: in the 1920s the spectacular Zion-Mount Carmel Highway tunnel was built, connecting the park with Bryce Canyon and the Grand Canyon, and the railroad and the lodges drove visitor numbers up. Over time, Zion became one of the most popular parks in the country, which forced the park, in the 21st century, to bring in the compulsory shuttle system and, more recently, the lottery permit for Angels Landing, in order to manage the enormous crowds and protect the canyon's fragile environment.
Although the national park had existed since 1919, what really opened it to mass tourism was the railroad. In the early 1920s, at the request of the first director of the National Park Service, Stephen T. Mather, the Union Pacific Railroad decided to invest in the tourist development of Zion, Bryce Canyon and the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, creating in 1923 a subsidiary, the Utah Parks Company, devoted exclusively to that end. The company laid a rail line as far as Cedar City and organized bus tours around the different parks, a circuit that would become known as the 'Grand Circle'.
It was in that context that the Zion Lodge was built in the mid-1920s, designed by the architect Gilbert Stanley Underwood in the national parks' so-called rustic style (NPS Rustic), which sought to harmonize buildings with the landscape using local stone and timber. Underwood, together with the landscape architect Daniel Hull, would define the architectural language later repeated in other great western lodges, such as those at Bryce Canyon and the Grand Canyon. The original log lodge burned down in 1966 and was rebuilt, though keeping the same rustic spirit. Union Pacific held the Zion tourism concession until 1972, when it withdrew from the parks' hotel business.
The success of that pioneering tourism eventually created, decades later, a problem of scale: around the turn of the millennium, the explosive growth in visitors and private vehicles completely saturated the narrow Zion Canyon, with traffic jams and overflowing parking lots that damaged both the experience and the natural setting itself. The solution came in the year 2000, when the park brought in a free compulsory shuttle system that closed the main canyon to private cars for most of the year, one of the first and most successful solutions of its kind in the United States national park system, and a model that other overcrowded parks in the country have adopted since.