A Park Called Zion

The naming was done by the early Mormon settlers who came to farm this part of Utah and who considered the valley of the Virgin River a place of safety. Before the coming of the Mormons in the mid-19th century, this had been the country of the Southern Paiute Indians. Their name for it was Mukuntuweap; they considered it a place of spirits and did not stay here at night.

The name given by the Mormons—Zion—suggested both an end to their wandering and a place of refuge. And, one thinks, something more. The features of this park are awesome, in the oldest and truest sense of the word. Gaze on them and, if your sensibilities are of a certain kind, you will see the hand of God.

At a more prosaic level you will marvel at the park’s features as masterpieces of geology—the work of time and water and wind on rock. The rock is mostly desert sandstone that’s been cut by wind, polished by water, and assuming all manner of shapes, most of them imposing, making one feel small and insignificant.

The ceaseless carving by the Virgin River and lesser streams has left canyons, many of them easily accessible. On the winter day I walked the Emerald Pools Trail, I stopped to talk with a man in a wheelchair who was coming out. He ran out of superlatives when describing what he had seen and the fact that he was able to experience it, thanks to the well-maintained and intermittently hard-surfaced trail.

On further, much further, there is another kind of trail, one that is as much water as dry land. As you go deeper into the canyon, it begins to squeeze down on you, with huge and formidable rock buttresses on each side, sometimes less than 30 feet apart. You experience, on this walk, that same wonderful feeling of puny insignificance that comes over you on a summer night when you look up into a sky so full of stars that there are too many to count.

This trail, Angels Landing, is one of Zion’s signature hikes. It is not easy physically, and it can be daunting given the amount of what mountain climbers call “exposure.” There are places where you feel.  .  . well, exposed. You think about falling because you are out there, on a narrow ledge, and for a long way below you, there is nothing but air. At some points, the Park Service has installed handrails for protection, and you find yourself grateful for the kindness. The trails follows a narrow sort of spine up a face of rock, up some 1,500 feet to a sort of platform where the views are majestic and worth both the walk and the nerves.

There are many other trails of varying length and difficulty. And there is the backcountry where, with the proper permits and planning, you can camp and stay for a while. But the planning part is important. There is the question of water, always. Dehydration, especially in the summer, is a constant risk. This is, after all, the high desert.

And then there is the danger of water in abundance. The canyons are narrow and the streams are shallow, and sudden heavy rains, even some distance away, can bring on flash flooding. Seven people perished last September when Keyhole Canyon flooded.

But Zion is, for all that, a very agreeable park. It is possible to take in much of its formidable beauty from the road, though it would be a shame to stay in one’s car. My wheelchair acquaintance made it up a trail, after all, with no complaints. And when you get out, you do not have to go far before you feel that liberating sense of being alone in big, big country.

The bigness includes a number of sheer faces that draw rock climbers. There are hundreds of climbs, some of them extending upwards more than 2,000 feet, so the “rock jocks” come from all over. The park’s 230 square miles include a lot of country that is good for both horses and mountain bikes. It is, as well, a feast for photographers, with the light on those rock faces bringing up colors you have no name for and plenty of wildlife to capture with a lens.

On my most recent visit I came around a bend in the trail and found myself facing a buck mule deer. So I began paying attention, walking more slowly and checking the ground. A little further up the trail I found tracks that could not have been made by anything but a mountain lion. They didn’t look especially fresh but I could feel my internal threat level rising a notch or two. I hoped to see that cat but it didn’t happen. But I got some good pictures of the deer and of the great rock faces and formations that bracket the trail. Zion is a user-friendly park that way. Which is why it’s among the ten most visited National Parks.

For all that there is to do, however, it is what there is to see that makes Zion so indelible. It’s no coincidence that it came to be a park after it had been painted by an artist named Frederick S. Dellenbaugh in 1903. Dellenbaugh was intoxicated by Zion Canyon, and a series of his paintings created a stir when they were exhibited at the World’s Fair in St. Louis the following year.

In Scribner’s Magazine, Dellenbaugh wrote of Zion, “One hardly knows just how to think of it. Never before has such a naked mountain of rock entered into our minds. Without a shred of disguise its transcendent form rises pre-eminent. There is almost nothing to compare to it. Niagara has the beauty of energy; the Grand Canyon, of immensity; the Yellowstone, of singularity; the Yosemite, of altitude; the ocean, of power; this Great Temple, of eternity.”

Again, the theological note—inescapable, perhaps.

The attention stirred by Dellenbaugh led, a few years later, to President William Howard Taft’s designation of the area as Mukuntuweap National Monument. Which, of course, led to indignant protests from people in the area accustomed to the name “Zion” and from Mormons who, by then, had appropriated, in spirit, this land that Brigham Young had declared, when he visited in 1870, to be “not Zion.” Young was looking for good farmland. Cotton was one of the Mormon crops, and this was no country for cotton.

Still, the name Zion seemed to stick in spite of Young, and in 1918, the acting director of the National Park Service changed the name to Zion National Monument.

All of which seems monumentally unimportant when you are actually there. If it is to be “Zion,” then that certainly fits. It is a place that leaves one with a feeling of breathless reverence, that makes one aware, in an immediate and almost tactile way, of the great forces of time and geology. It is just rock. But what magnificent rock.

On my winter visit, with the sun going down and business awaiting me in Las Vegas, three hours away, I took one last trail. I climbed for a while and then followed a ledge. There was enough exposure in spots that some railings had been installed for protection. From my ledge, I could see a line of formidable rock, almost flat, with the sun beginning to set behind it and causing it almost to glow.

There was one hard white slab of this rock with a noticeable section looking like it had been smeared red.

This was when I heard the voice call out about the great view of the Altar of Sacrifice.

I stayed in that spot for 15 minutes or so taking pictures and recalling, imperfectly, the lines from the Book:

An altar of earth thou shalt make unto me, and shalt sacrifice thereon thy burnt offerings, and thy peace offerings, thy sheep, and thine oxen: in all places where I record my name I will come unto thee, and I will bless thee.

Zion National Park is a place of play, certainly, and one of the park system’s jewels. But you don’t have to work very hard to imagine it—even to believe it—a holy place.

Geoffrey Norman, a writer in Vermont, is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.