Zion National Park — national park
Image by Pexels from Pixabay

Zion National Park

  • 1 min read
  • 37.203° N 112.988° W
  • Dark Sky Place

Interesting facts

  • When President Taft protected the canyon in 1909, he gave it the Southern Paiute-derived name Mukuntuweap National Monument; it became Zion only later.
  • In the Narrows the Virgin River runs through a gorge as little as 20 feet wide between walls up to 2,000 feet high.
  • The Zion–Mount Carmel tunnel, opened in 1930, runs for about 1.1 miles through the sandstone, with windows cut into the cliff.
  • Elevations in the park range from about 3,666 feet at Coalpits Wash to 8,726 feet on Horse Ranch Mountain, creating very different habitats.
  • In 2014 rangers confirmed the first successful breeding of endangered California condors inside the park.
  • Some 289 bird species and 79 mammals, including 19 kinds of bat, have been recorded in the park.
  • Kolob Arch, in the park's northwestern Kolob Canyons section, ranks among the longest natural arches in the world.
  • In 2009 Congress designated about 85 percent of the park as protected wilderness.
  • Nearly five million people visited in 2025; since 2000 the main canyon has been served by a shuttle bus system instead of private cars for much of the year.

Why it is worth it

The cliffs that make Zion look otherworldly are, geologically speaking, fossilised weather. The dominant rock, Navajo Sandstone, started out around 180 million years ago as an enormous field of wind-blown sand dunes — think Sahara-scale — and the diagonal cross-bedding cutting through the rock faces is literally the shape of those ancient dune slopes, frozen in stone. Over roughly 150 million years, nine separate rock formations stacked up here, and then the Virgin River spent a comparatively short geological instant — a few million years — cutting straight down through all of them to produce the canyon, which is still an active process: the river is still carving, the walls are still shedding rock, and Zion Canyon is technically unfinished.

Long before it was a park, it was a landscape with a name problem. Mormon pioneers who settled the area in the 1860s and 70s named it "Zion," the biblical term for a place of refuge, but not everyone agreed it deserved the name — one prominent local dissenter is said to have insisted it should be called "Not Zion," on the grounds that no ordinary canyon, however striking, should claim a name reserved for paradise. The federal government settled the argument in its own way, designating the area a national monument in 1909 and upgrading it to full national park status in 1919, making it one of Utah's, and America's, earlier parks.

Zion's darkness is as much a resource as its rock. Away from the sandstone glow of sunset, the park carries International Dark Sky Park status, meaning its night skies are protected from light pollution seriously enough to show the Milky Way clearly on a clear night — a designation that's becoming rarer nationally even as more people learn to value it, and one that rewards anyone willing to stay past the point when the tour buses leave.

Getting there

27 km from Hurricane. Cedar City Regional Airport (CDC) is about 56 km away.

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Utah 16The Most Beautiful Places in the United States 228The Most Beautiful Gardens, Parks and Forests Seen on Screen in the United States 5The Most Beautiful National Parks in the United States 9The Most Beautiful National Parks Seen on Screen 10The Most Beautiful Nature Sanctuaries in the United States 12The Most Beautiful Nature Sanctuaries Seen on Screen 14The Most Beautiful Gardens, Parks and Forests Seen on Screen 22The Most Beautiful Film Locations in the United States 24The Most Beautiful Gardens, Parks and Forests in the United States 25The Most Beautiful National Parks 61The Most Beautiful Nature Sanctuaries 91The Most Beautiful Film Locations 221The Most Beautiful Gardens, Parks and Forests 232

From the encyclopaedia

Zion National Park is a national park of the United States located in southwestern Utah near the town of Springdale. Located at the junction of the Colorado Plateau, Great Basin, and Mojave Desert regions, the park has a unique geography and a variety of life zones that allow for unusual plant and animal diversity. Numerous plant species as well as 289 species of birds, 75 mammals, and 32 reptiles inhabit the park's four life zones: desert, riparian, woodland, and coniferous forest. Zion National Park includes mountains, canyons, buttes, mesas, monoliths, rivers, slot canyons, and natural arches. The lowest point in the park is 3,666 ft (1,117 m) at Coalpits Wash and the highest peak is 8,726 ft (2,660 m) at Horse Ranch Mountain. A prominent feature of the 229-square-mile (590 km2) park is Zion Canyon, which is 15 miles (24 km) long and up to 2,640 ft (800 m) deep. The canyon walls are reddish and tan-colored Navajo Sandstone eroded by the North Fork of the Virgin River. The park attracted 4,984,525 visitors in 2025.

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37.20262, -112.98785per Wikidata