Zion National Park United States

Legendary

Enjoy the spectacular reddish and tan-colored walls of the canyon eroded by the Virgin River.

Photo by Alan Levine

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Zion nearly kept a completely different name. When it became a national monument in 1909, President William Howard Taft called it Mukuntuweap, a word explorer John Wesley Powell believed was the Paiute name for the canyon.

Local settlers hated it. They found it hard to say and refused to use it.

In 1918 the National Park Service gave in and changed the name to Zion, a word from the Bible meaning a place of refuge. A Mormon farmer named Isaac Behunin had been calling the canyon that since the 1860s.

Congress made it a full national park the following year, on November 19, 1919. It was the first national park in Utah.

People lived here long before any of that. Small family groups arrived about 8,000 years ago, hunting and gathering across the canyons.

Later, farming communities settled in permanent villages. By around 1300 those groups had moved on, and Southern Paiute peoples lived here when the first settlers arrived in 1858.

The canyon itself is the reason everyone comes. Zion Canyon runs 15 miles long and drops as much as 2,640 feet, with walls of red and tan sandstone carved by the Virgin River.

The highest point in the park isn't in that canyon at all. Horse Ranch Mountain rises 8,726 feet in the Kolob Canyons section, in the park's quieter northwestern corner.

That section was originally protected separately in 1937. It didn't officially join the park until 1956.

Zion sits where three very different regions meet: the Colorado Plateau, the Great Basin, and the Mojave Desert. That's why one park can hold desert, river banks, woodland, and pine forest all at once.

Hike the Narrows by wading straight up the Virgin River between canyon walls that close in overhead. Take the shuttle up Zion Canyon Scenic Drive, since private cars aren't allowed most of the year. Drive out to Kolob Canyons for red cliffs and almost no crowds.