Can dogs hike in Zion National Park?

Open

Look up. The walls on either side of this canyon rise more than two thousand feet, and nearly all of that height is one layer of stone, the Navajo Sandstone, made from the sand of the largest known desert in the history of the planet. This is Zion National Park.

Before the park

Long before it was a park, this was Paiute country. The Southern Paiute call themselves Nuwuvi, which means the People. Their homeland runs across more than thirty million acres of southern Utah, northern Arizona, southern Nevada and southeastern California.

People have used this canyon for thousands of years. Ancestral Puebloan farmers lived along the river from about the year seven hundred to the year twelve hundred, and one of their granaries still clings to a cliff nearly two hundred feet above the canyon floor. Paiute families had moved in by about eleven hundred, farming beside the Virgin River, and their name for this place was Mukuntuweap, the straight canyon.

The Paiute are still here, and they govern themselves. The Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah, whose five bands include the Shivwits, governs from Cedar City, and the Kaibab Band of Paiute Indians holds a reservation just across the Arizona line. The park counts both among its traditional landholders.

Outsiders came late. A Spanish expedition crossed the Virgin in seventeen seventy-six, and the trapper Jedediah Smith followed the river fifty years later. Mormon settlers arrived in the eighteen fifties, and in the words of the Utah historian Ronald Holt, their arrival destroyed Paiute sovereignty and the old way of life.

Making the park

The settlers tried to farm the canyon itself. Isaac Behunin built a log cabin near where the lodge stands now, in eighteen sixty-three, but flash floods and drought made farming here a losing game. It was Mormon settlers who gave the place its name: Zion, a Hebrew word for sanctuary, or refuge.

In nineteen oh eight, eight ranchers from southern Utah asked the federal government to survey the canyon, and the survey's report persuaded President William Howard Taft. In nineteen oh nine, Taft signed a proclamation creating Mukuntuweap National Monument, almost sixteen thousand acres. A national monument, in this sense, is land a president sets aside with a proclamation, without waiting for Congress.

The Paiute name did not last. The parks advocate Robert Sterling Yard asked for a new one, and in nineteen eighteen President Woodrow Wilson enlarged the monument to almost seventy-seven thousand acres and renamed it Zion. In November of nineteen nineteen, Congress made it a national park, in a bill sponsored by Senator Reed Smoot of Utah.

The railroad did the selling. A railroad agent began promoting the canyon in nineteen seventeen, and by nineteen twenty-four the Union Pacific had spent more than a million and a half dollars on a rail spur to Cedar City and a lodge with forty-six cabins. The first superintendent, Eivind Scoyen, bought out the farmers who still held land inside the park. The Paiute had lost theirs decades before.

One story

By the late nineteen twenties, the Park Service wanted a road east, to tie Zion to Bryce Canyon and the Grand Canyon in one grand circle of parks. Between the canyon and the high country to the east stood a wall of sandstone. The engineers decided to go through it.

Crews from Utah and Nevada blasted openings into the face of the cliff first, like windows, and then drove small pilot tunnels between them. At least one man was killed by a rockslide.

The road and the tunnel took from nineteen twenty-seven to nineteen thirty and cost almost two million dollars. When Utah's governor, George Dern, dedicated it in July of nineteen thirty, the tunnel ran one point one miles through solid rock.

It worked. Visits to the park nearly doubled, from about thirty-one thousand in nineteen twenty-eight to about fifty-five thousand in nineteen thirty, the year the tunnel opened. A pillar inside it gave way in nineteen fifty-eight, and the tunnel has been braced with concrete ribs and watched by monitors around the clock ever since. One point one miles of tunnel.

Today

Zion now draws close to five million visits a year, the second most of any national park.

The crowds brought the shuttle. Since two thousand it has replaced some twenty-five hundred cars a day competing for two hundred fifty parking spaces, and from March through November the canyon's scenic drive belongs to the buses. The argument of the moment is whether visitors should need a reservation to get in, and Utah's members of Congress oppose it. Angels Landing, the famous ridge climbed with a chain for a handrail, now takes a lottery permit.

From the main road east of the tunnel, look for Checkerboard Mesa. Its sloping lines are the layers of ancient sand dunes, crossed by cracks. This is Zion.