Latest / Wildlands Podcast — National Parks, Public Lands & Survival / #005 - Zion, Part 1: The History | The Virgin River, Navajo Sandstone & the Fight Over the Name

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#005 - Zion, Part 1: The History | The Virgin River, Navajo Sandstone & the Fight Over the Name · Wildlands Podcast — National Parks, Public Lands & Survival

0:10
There is a river in southern Utah, so determined,
0:14
so relentlessly stubborn, that it carved a canyon
0:18
2 ,600 feet deep through solid sandstone. Not
0:23
over millions of years, well, yes, over millions
0:26
of years, but the point is it never stopped.
0:29
Flood, drought, earthquake, landslide. The Virgin
0:32
River just kept going. And the result is one
0:35
of the most jaw -dropping pieces of real estate
0:37
on the surface of the earth. And here's the thing
0:40
that gets me every time. From the rim, looking
0:43
down at the canyon, that river looks like nothing.
0:47
A thin silver thread way down there. You'd step
0:51
over it in your backyard without thinking. And
0:54
yet, it did all of this. Every cubic foot of
0:57
that canyon. hauled away grain by grain by something
1:00
that looks like it couldn't carry a canoe. This
1:05
is Wildlands. I'm Sean Spanauer. Know the land
1:08
before you reach it. Today, we start the Zion
1:12
Trilogy. Part 1. The history of the place itself.
1:17
And as with Great Basin, we're going to build
1:19
it the way the land built it. Stone first. Then
1:23
the people who lived here. for thousands of years
1:26
before anyone else arrived. Then the settlers,
1:30
the explorers, the name fights, and the road
1:33
that changed everything. And unlike Great Basin,
1:37
which most people drive past without knowing
1:39
it exists, Zion is now one of the most visited
1:43
parks in the country. The story of how it got
1:45
there is worth knowing. Let's start with The
1:50
Rock, because it's what every story here is built
1:53
on, literally. The formation that makes Zion
1:58
look the way it does, those massive sheer red
2:00
and cream walls, those cliff faces that go straight
2:05
up for 2 ,000 feet, like the side of a building
2:08
God forgot to put windows in, is called Navajo
2:11
Sandstone. And Navajo Sandstone started out as
2:15
sand. Specifically, it started out as an enormous
2:19
desert about 180 million years ago in the Jurassic
2:23
period. This part of what would become North
2:26
America was covered by a vast dune field. Geologists
2:30
believe it may have been one of the largest deserts
2:34
that ever existed on the planet. Think the Sahara,
2:38
but bigger. Stretching across much of the Colorado
2:42
Plateau, layer after layer of windblown sand,
2:45
dune stacking upon dune, building up for millions
2:49
of years. And then it got buried. Other sediments
2:54
piled on top, and the weight and chemistry of
2:57
that burial slowly cemented the sand grains together,
3:00
compressed them, fused them, turned them to stone.
3:03
What you're looking at on those canyon walls
3:06
is Jurassic Desert, hardened into rock. The ripple
3:10
and cross -bedding patterns you can see in the
3:12
cliff face, those tilted diagonal lines that
3:14
look like someone painted brushstrokes in the
3:16
stone, those are the preserved faces of ancient
3:18
dunes. Wind patterns from 180 million years ago.
3:23
frozen in sandstone. I find that genuinely wonderful.
3:29
And the scale of the Navajo sandstone is worth
3:33
sitting with. In some places, the formation is
3:36
over 2 ,000 feet thick, 2 ,000 feet of sand dunes,
3:39
compacted and cemented into rock. The walls of
3:42
Zion Canyon are not thin slabs, they are massive,
3:45
as deep as they are tall. and the cliff faces
3:48
you look at are simply where the river cut in
3:51
and exposed the interior. When you're standing
3:54
in the canyon looking up at those walls, you
3:56
are looking at the inside of a Jurassic sand
3:58
dune that got turned to rock, then lifted 10
4:01
,000 feet into the air, then sliced open by a
4:04
river. That's not a metaphor. That's actually
4:07
what happened. The canyon is the cut surface
4:11
of an ancient dune. The dune is the canyon. The
4:17
Navajo is not alone. The geologic formations
4:20
in Zion represent roughly 250 million years of
4:24
sedimentation. Everything from ancient shallow
4:27
seas to swamps to river plains to that great
4:30
desert, all stacked up like the pages of an impossibly
4:33
long book. The whole sequence is part of what
4:36
geologists call the Grand Staircase, a series
4:39
of rock layers that steps down from Bryce Canyon
4:42
to Zion to the Grand Canyon. Here's a fun orientation
4:45
trick. The rocks you're standing on at the bottom
4:48
of Zion Canyon are roughly the same age as the
4:51
rocks at the rim of Bryce Canyon. And the rocks
4:54
at the bottom of the Grand Canyon are far older
4:56
than anything you'll see at Zion. It's all one
4:59
connected story, running in layers, and you can
5:03
read it right off the walls. Now, how do you
5:08
get from a flat stack of ancient sediment to
5:11
a canyon 2 ,600 feet deep? Two things. Lift it
5:16
up, then cut it down. Ha! Starting about 13 million
5:22
years ago, the Colorado Plateau began to rise.
5:26
The forces driving that uplift are still debated
5:29
by geologists. The Earth is not always forthcoming
5:32
with its reasons, but the effect is not debated
5:34
at all. The plateau rose, and rising ground steepens
5:38
rivers. A river running across flat ground is
5:43
lazy. It meanders. It deposits. It doesn't have
5:47
much urgency. Tilt that ground upward, and suddenly
5:51
the same river is falling faster, and faster
5:54
water carries more energy, and more energy means
5:57
more cutting power. The Virgin River, which had
6:00
been a perfectly polite drainage, suddenly found
6:02
itself with something to prove. It started cutting
6:05
down, and down, and down. The scale of what it
6:11
accomplished is worth stating plainly. Geologists
6:15
estimate the Virgin River cut roughly 1 ,300
6:17
feet of canyon depth in the last million years
6:20
alone. A million years sounds like forever. In
6:24
geological time, it is a sprint. And it has not
6:28
stopped. In 1998, a single flash flood temporarily
6:34
raised the Virgin's flow from around 200 cubic
6:37
feet per second to 4 ,500 more than 20 times
6:41
its normal volume. and that flood damaged the
6:44
road through the canyon. Every one of those events
6:48
carries rocks and sediment that grinds against
6:51
the canyon floor like a belt sander. Every flood
6:55
is another increment. The canyon you will visit
6:59
is not the canyon that was there last century,
7:01
and it is not the canyon that will be there next
7:04
century. It is a living cut in living rock still
7:08
being made. The Navajo Sandstone. for all its
7:13
imposing bulk, has a useful weakness. It's vertically
7:17
jointed, cracked in long straight lines, running
7:20
up and down through the rock. The river and its
7:22
floods exploit those cracks, driving water into
7:26
them, freezing, expanding, wedging, until whole
7:29
vertical slabs shear off the walls. That's why
7:33
Zion Canyon's walls are so sheer. It doesn't
7:36
erode in gentle curves. It fractures in great
7:39
flat sheets. In every flash flood, every time
7:42
the Virgin runs brown and wild and full of debris,
7:46
the canyon gets a little deeper and a little
7:49
wider. The river carried out 1 ,300 feet of depth
7:52
in the last million years alone. It is, in geological
7:56
terms, moving fast. And it hasn't stopped. Zion
7:59
Canyon is still being carved, right now, every
8:02
time it rains upstream. The colors are worth
8:06
a moment, too, because they're not random. The
8:09
lower parts of the Navajo are a deep, burnt red.
8:12
That's iron oxide that leached down from the
8:15
iron -rich layer above it. Higher up the walls,
8:18
the sandstone shifts to cream and pale orange
8:20
and almost white in places where the iron never
8:23
reached. So the canyon's color gradient red at
8:26
the base, paler toward the rim, is a map of where
8:29
the chemistry stopped. The canyon is telling
8:31
you the story if you know how to read it. I have
8:34
stood in that canyon at first light. when the
8:38
walls go from orange to scarlet to something
8:41
close to copper, and the river is still in shadow
8:44
below. And I can tell you, the light here does
8:48
something to you that is hard to explain until
8:51
you've seen it. That morning is part of why this
8:54
show exists. People have lived in this canyon
8:58
country for a very long time. The archaeological
9:00
record in and around what is now Zion National
9:03
Park shows human presence going back about 8
9:06
,000 years. That's not a round number for effect.
9:10
That's what the evidence says. The earliest inhabitants
9:14
were archaic period hunter -gatherers, small,
9:18
mobile groups following game and seasonal plants
9:21
through the canyon country. No permanent settlements,
9:24
no farming. Just people who knew this landscape
9:27
deeply enough to live in it for generation after
9:30
generation after generation. Their tools and
9:34
campsites show up in the archaeological record.
9:37
but they left no buildings. They traveled light,
9:40
and lightly is how we find them. A scatter of
9:43
stone knives here, a fire ring there, the faint
9:46
outline of a temporary camp. Around 2 ,000 years
9:51
ago, the picture changes. Two distinct cultures
9:54
settled more permanently into this country. The
9:58
ancestral Puebloans, sometimes still called the
10:01
Anasazi, though that term has fallen out of favor
10:05
because it's a Navajo word meaning roughly ancient
10:08
enemy, which is not a name the descendants prefer.
10:12
The ancestral Puebloans were farmers and builders.
10:17
They grew corn, beans, and squash on the river
10:20
terraces using the Virgin River the same way
10:23
people everywhere have always used reliable water.
10:27
They built villages. They made pottery. Their
10:31
architecture? Their storage granaries, their
10:34
cliff structures, show up throughout the canyon
10:36
country. The granaries are the detail I keep
10:41
coming back to. Small stone rooms, tucked into
10:44
cliff overhangs and caves high up, hard to reach,
10:48
deliberately placed where moisture couldn't get
10:50
in and where you'd have to know they were there
10:52
to find them. In the right conditions, those
10:55
storage rooms could keep corn and seeds viable
10:58
for years. They're not dramatic to look at. They're
11:02
just small stone boxes jammed into a rock face.
11:05
But they represent something sophisticated, a
11:08
food security strategy, an insurance policy against
11:11
drought, built by people who had learned the
11:14
hard way what the desert does when the rains
11:16
don't come. And they built here, in this canyon
11:19
country, for over a thousand years. A thousand
11:23
years of farming, building, living, making art
11:26
on the canyon walls. That is not a brief chapter.
11:30
That is longer than the entire span of European
11:32
presence in North America. Alongside them, across
11:37
a slightly different territory, were the Fremont
11:40
people, a separate culture, also farming, also
11:44
building, but distinct enough in their material
11:47
culture that archaeologists give them their own
11:49
name. The Parowan Fremont, in particular, occupied
11:53
much of southern Utah. Both cultures left petroglyphs
11:56
and pictographs on the canyon walls. Images pecked
12:00
and painted into the rock that are still there.
12:02
You can see them today in the park. People made
12:05
art in this canyon 2 ,000 years ago, and it survived.
12:10
I find myself standing longer in front of those
12:13
panels than I intend to every single time. There
12:16
is something about art that survived 2 ,000 years
12:19
in an open canyon that adjusts your sense of
12:21
what permanence means. And then, around the year
12:25
1300, Both cultures vanish from the archaeological
12:29
record of the region, not just at Zion, across
12:32
the entire Colorado Plateau. The Virgin Anasazi
12:36
and the Parowan Fremont are simply gone. The
12:39
leading explanation is a combination of prolonged
12:41
droughts the 11th and 12th centuries were punishing
12:44
in the Southwest, mixed with catastrophic flooding
12:47
and the kind of cascading ecosystem collapse
12:50
that follows, when farming communities push marginal
12:54
land too hard. It's a story that echoes in a
12:58
lot of places. The land gives and the land takes
13:01
back. Their replacements, or more accurately,
13:05
their successors, because these were related
13:07
peoples following related traditions, were the
13:10
Southern Paiute, the Nuovi, as they called themselves.
13:13
They arrived in the canyon country sometime after
13:16
1300 and were still here when Euro -American
13:20
settlers showed up in the 19th century. And they
13:24
are still here today. The Southern Paiute's relationship
13:28
to this landscape was fundamentally different
13:31
from the settled farmers who came before. They
13:33
were mobile, seasonal, strategic, deeply calibrated
13:37
to the rhythms of the land. The canyon itself
13:40
was part of their territory. They called it Mukuntuweb.
13:44
meaning something close to straight canyon, or
13:46
straight -up land, a name that perfectly captures
13:49
the vertiginous quality of standing in the gorge
13:52
and looking up at those walls going straight
13:54
into the sky. They hunted deer and rabbit. They
13:57
gathered the agave, the pinyon nuts, the berries,
14:00
the seeds. Every useful plant in this canyon
14:03
had a use, and they knew them all. The canyon
14:06
was not a wilderness to them. It was home, a
14:09
larder, a spiritual space, a place of creation
14:12
stories. All of the canyon country is sacred
14:15
in Southern Paiute understanding because it is
14:18
where they were made. The name Mukuntuwep itself
14:22
gives you a clue to how they understood this
14:25
place. Straight up land, straight canyon. The
14:29
name is not decorative. It is descriptive in
14:32
the most precise way. You stand on the canyon
14:35
floor and look up. and the walls go straight
14:38
up, sheer and vertical and overwhelming, and
14:41
the sky becomes a narrow blue band between them.
14:44
The Paiute named the place for exactly what it
14:48
does to you when you stand in it. That is not
14:50
primitive naming. That is accurate naming. And
14:53
every canyon, every spring, every mesa in their
14:56
territory had names like that precise, earned,
14:59
descriptive, a landscape mapped to the resolution
15:02
of people who actually lived in it, not passed
15:04
through it. I want to stay with this for a second,
15:08
because it matters to how you understand everything
15:11
that comes next. I have spent a lot of time in
15:14
canyon country, and I am still learning to read
15:16
it. The Southern Paiute read it at a resolution
15:19
I cannot fully imagine. When the first Mormon
15:23
settlers came into this canyon, they came into
15:25
a place that was already someone's home. Not
15:28
historically, not once currently. The Southern
15:31
Paiute were still here. still living in and moving
15:35
through this country when the settlers arrived.
15:37
That fact tends to get compressed in the park's
15:40
official story, and I'd rather you have it clearly
15:42
than not. In 1858, a southern Paiute guide led
15:48
a young Mormon missionary named Nephi Johnson
15:51
into the Upper Virgin River country and Zion
15:54
Canyon. Johnson was the first Euro -American
15:57
on record to enter the canyon. He wrote a favorable
16:00
report about the agricultural potential of the
16:03
area. The canyon floor had good soil and reliable
16:06
water, two things in short supply in the Utah
16:09
desert, and went back to his community with good
16:12
news. The Mormons were not casual settlers. They
16:17
were a people who had been driven out of Missouri,
16:19
out of Illinois, and had crossed the plains to
16:22
Utah looking for a place they could finally be
16:24
left alone. Their whole theology was organized
16:26
around the idea of Zion, the biblical place of
16:30
peace and refuge. And when they came into this
16:32
canyon and saw those walls, that word came naturally.
16:35
In 1863, a settler named Isaac Bahunin farmed
16:40
the canyon floor corn, tobacco, fruit trees,
16:43
and he's the one credited with calling it Zion.
16:47
He reportedly said, a man can worship God among
16:50
these great cathedrals as well as in any man
16:52
-made church, which, I mean, he wasn't wrong.
16:56
The story of Brigham Young's reaction is too
16:59
good to skip. Young, the leader of the LDS church,
17:02
visited the area years later and was not impressed
17:05
with the men who lived there. He had concerns
17:07
about their moral fitness. He rejected the name
17:10
Zion entirely. According to the history, he said,
17:14
no, it is not Zion. Zion is where the pure in
17:19
heart dwell. He then refused to visit and locals
17:23
started calling it not Zion. The name Zion eventually
17:27
prevailed. The canyon had a way of making the
17:31
arguments around it seem small. The settlers
17:35
who came into the canyon were tough, genuinely
17:37
tough. Farming flood -prone canyon land in the
17:40
desert is not a gentle life. They built homes
17:43
and fences and orchards on ground the Virgin
17:46
River, flooded regularly, and they kept building.
17:49
They also, in the way of settlers the world over,
17:52
displaced the people who had been there before.
17:55
The southern Paiute's ability to hunt and gather
17:58
through their traditional territory was eroded
18:00
by the farms and the cattle and the changed landscape.
18:03
Relations between the Mormon settlers and the
18:05
Paiute were, by the historical accounts, relatively
18:08
peaceful, but peaceful doesn't mean equal, and
18:10
it doesn't mean fair. The Paiute adapted, because
18:13
they had no other choice. What the settlers built
18:17
in Zion Canyon was real. Hard -won farms on a
18:21
canyon floor that flooded unpredictably. Orchards
18:24
watered by irrigation channels dug by hand. Communities
18:27
of people who had already crossed a continent
18:29
and decided to stay even here, even in this.
18:33
And what they made of the canyon, the names,
18:35
the farms, the sense that this place was worth
18:39
the sacrifice fed directly into the park that
18:42
exists today. The Mormon name Zion is the park's
18:45
name. The names the settlers gave the formations
18:48
Great White Throne, Angels Landing, Court of
18:51
the Patriarchs. Temple of Sinawava, those are
18:54
still the names on every map and every trail
18:56
sign. The settlers left the canyon. Eventually,
18:59
the park bought out the remaining private land
19:02
over decades, but their vocabulary is still the
19:05
canyon's vocabulary. The park is, in that sense,
19:08
both theirs and not theirs. And the Paiute name
19:12
that got erased in 1918 is still the truest description
19:15
of the place. Straight up land. Stand in the
19:18
canyon and look up, and you'll know exactly what
19:21
they meant. While the settlers were farming the
19:25
canyon floor, a very different kind of visitor
19:28
was coming to look at it. John Wesley Powell
19:31
is one of the great characters in American exploration
19:34
history. One armed Civil War veteran lost the
19:37
arm at Shiloh's self -taught geologist, brilliant
19:39
organizer, and the man who led the first documented
19:42
expedition through the Grand Canyon by boat in
19:45
1869. In 1872, Powell came through the Zion area.
19:50
He was mapping, classifying. trying to put names
19:53
on a landscape that Eastern maps either left
19:55
blank or got completely wrong. He named the canyon
19:59
Mukuntuwep, though historians have since noted
20:01
he may have slightly mangled the Paiute word
20:04
or applied it to the wrong canyon, but his intention
20:07
was to preserve the indigenous name, which was,
20:10
in the context of the 1870s, a relatively enlightened
20:14
instinct. Powell's surveys also brought photographers.
20:20
John Hillers traveled with the survey and produced
20:23
some of the earliest photographs of Zion Canyon
20:25
glass plate photographs, heavy and fragile, hauled
20:29
through slot canyons and up -cliff faces. Hillers
20:32
described waiting the canyon for four days and
20:35
nearly freezing to death to get his shots. Then
20:38
in 1903, a painter named Frederick Dellenbaugh
20:41
came back to Zion. He'd been with Powell as a
20:44
teenager on the 1871 expedition. the assistant
20:49
cartographer at 17 years old, and the canyon
20:52
had never left him. He spent a summer there painting,
20:55
and the resulting canvases were exhibited at
20:58
the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904 and published
21:02
in Scribner's magazine in 1905. The Scribner's
21:07
article deserves a little more attention because
21:09
it is a genuinely fascinating piece of media
21:12
history. The article ran with Dellenbaugh's paintings
21:15
and some of Hiller's photographs. and it reached
21:17
the kind of audience that actually made decisions,
21:19
educated, moneyed, the people who took the new
21:22
railroads out west for leisure travel. Those
21:26
readers saw a canyon that looked like a cathedral,
21:29
towers of red rock named the Temple of Sinawava,
21:32
the Great White Throne, the Court of the Patriarchs,
21:35
names the settlers had put on the landscape in
21:38
the language of their faith, and those names
21:40
did exactly what Dellenbaugh's paintings did.
21:44
they made the canyon legible to an eastern audience
21:46
that needed the familiar wrapped around something
21:49
unfamiliar. Call it the Great White Throne, and
21:53
suddenly a 2 ,000 -foot slab of sandstone feels
21:56
like something a person from Ohio has a framework
21:59
for. The names did their marketing work, just
22:02
as Albright's name change would do a decade later.
22:05
Those paintings and photographs did what art
22:08
always does when it encounters a landscape people
22:10
haven't properly seen yet. They made people want
22:13
to go. Eastern readers looked at Dellenbaugh's
22:16
paintings of those red walls and thought, I need
22:19
to see that, which immediately created a problem
22:23
because there were essentially no roads into
22:25
the canyon, no accommodations when you got there,
22:28
and no real reason the federal government had
22:30
given the place any protection at all. Something
22:33
needed to happen. In 1908, Eight southern Utah
22:39
ranchers applied for a survey of the canyon lands.
22:42
Their reports reached Washington, impressed the
22:45
right people, and on the 31st of July, 1909,
22:49
President William Howard Taft used the Antiquities
22:53
Act to designate roughly 15 ,000 acres as Mukuntuweb
22:57
National Monument. And then, the fight started.
23:01
Not over whether to protect it. Over the name?
23:05
Um... The Mormon settlers hated Mukuntuweb. They'd
23:09
been calling this place Zion for 40 years. An
23:13
indigenous name that they found unpronounceable
23:15
felt like an insult, and they said so loudly
23:18
and continuously for nearly a decade. But the
23:21
Park Service's argument for changing the name
23:23
wasn't exactly a noble one either. In 1917, acting
23:27
director Horace Albright visited the monument
23:30
and fell immediately in love with it. He described
23:32
it as one of the most sublime places he had ever
23:35
seen. He also noticed that fewer than a thousand
23:38
people a year were making the trip. Part of the
23:41
problem, Albright concluded, was the name. In
23:44
his reasoning, and he was being honest about
23:47
the biases of his era, not endorsing them, people
23:50
wouldn't visit a place they couldn't pronounce.
23:52
The historian Hal Rothman put it plainly later.
23:56
The new name, Zion, had greater appeal to an
24:00
ethnocentric audience. They renamed a Paiute
24:03
place with a Mormon name. to make it more appealing
24:06
to eastern white tourists. That's not ancient
24:08
history. It happened in 1918. President Woodrow
24:12
Wilson signed the name change that year, and
24:15
the monument officially became Zion. Congress
24:19
upgraded it to full national park status on the
24:22
19th of November, 1919, making Zion the oldest
24:27
national park in Utah. That year, 1 ,800 people
24:31
managed to visit. The contrast... with what Zion
24:35
sees today as almost incomprehensible. The place
24:38
has changed. We'll get to that in part two. Getting
24:43
people to Zion was still a genuine problem. The
24:46
canyon had a park designation now, but no real
24:49
way in. And the Park Service had a vision that
24:52
was, in retrospect, both inspired and a little
24:55
grandiose. Stephen Mather, the first director
25:01
of the National Park Service, loved Zion so much
25:04
he visited every single year from 1919 to 1929.
25:08
He had a theory, call it the Grand Loop, a tourist
25:12
circuit that would connect Zion, Bryce Canyon,
25:14
Cedar Breaks, and the north rim of the Grand
25:17
Canyon. Visit them all in one trip, see the whole
25:20
staircase. It was good thinking. It's essentially
25:22
still what people do today. But it required roads,
25:26
real roads, through some of the most rugged country
25:30
in the American West. The solution they landed
25:34
on for Zion, and this is the part of the story
25:36
where the ambition becomes genuinely staggering,
25:39
was to build a highway straight through the mountain.
25:42
The Zion -Mount Carmel Highway began construction
25:45
in 1927. The centerpiece was a tunnel, a mile
25:49
and a tenth of tunnel, bored through solid Navajo
25:52
sandstone, connecting the canyon floor to the
25:55
east side of the park. Six large windows were
25:58
cut through the cliff face. to allow light and
26:01
air in during construction. You can still see
26:04
those windows today, looking like the portholes
26:07
of a ship buried in the rock. This was not a
26:12
small undertaking. The 1920s did not have the
26:15
drilling and blasting technology we take for
26:17
granted now. Workers were drilling and blasting
26:19
through sandstone by hand and early machine,
26:22
lowered on ropes down cliff faces, working in
26:25
dust and heat and constant rockfall danger. The
26:29
tunnel took three years. The Zion -Mount Carmel
26:32
Highway opened in 1930, and it transformed the
26:36
park almost overnight. Visitation jumped. The
26:40
east side of the park checkerboard mesa, the
26:42
great pale slick rock country, was suddenly accessible.
26:45
Mather's Grand Loop became real. The 1930s brought
26:50
another wave of building, this one born out of
26:53
the Depression. The Civilian Conservation Corps
26:56
sent young men from across the country into the
26:58
national parks, unemployed men, many of them
27:01
teenagers, given tools and wages and put to work
27:04
building things meant to last. Zion got a share
27:07
of those crews, and the infrastructure they put
27:09
in is, in large part, what you are still hiking
27:11
on today. The trail systems, the foot bridges
27:14
over the Virgin, the campground infrastructure,
27:17
much of it traces back to CCC work in the 1930s.
27:22
worth knowing when you're walking those trails
27:24
they were built by hand by people who needed
27:27
the work badly and they were built to last i
27:30
think about that sometimes when i'm on a well
27:32
-made trail in steep country somebody put real
27:35
care into this um and a quick practical note
27:40
on that tunnel because it matters if you're going
27:43
it's still there still the only way in from the
27:45
east and it has a size limit large rvs and vehicles
27:49
over a certain width require an escort and pay
27:52
a special fee to go through. The tunnel is a
27:55
piece of history, and it was built for 1930s
27:57
cars. Keep that in mind when you're planning.
28:00
But we'll cover all of that in part two. Before
28:04
we close out the history, I want to spend a few
28:07
minutes on the land itself. The living park.
28:10
Not just the stone and the human story. Because
28:13
Zion is not just a canyon. It's a convergence.
28:19
The park sits at the junction of three major
28:21
geographic provinces, the Colorado Plateau, the
28:25
Great Basin, and the Mojave Desert. Three different
28:28
worlds meeting in one park. And that triple overlap
28:31
creates a range of ecosystems that is, by any
28:35
measure, remarkable. The park holds four distinct
28:38
life zones. Desert at the bottom, riparian along
28:42
the river, woodland on the slopes, and coniferous
28:45
forest up high. Within those four zones live
28:49
289 species of birds, 75 mammals, including 19
28:55
species of bat, and 32 reptiles. For a park in
28:59
the middle of the desert, it is extraordinarily
29:01
alive. The Virgin River is the reason for most
29:06
of it. In a landscape this dry, a permanent river
29:09
is the organizing principle of everything. The
29:12
riparian strip along the Virgin, the willows,
29:15
the cottonwoods, The lush greenery is so starkly
29:18
different from the surrounding desert that wildlife
29:21
congregates there from miles around. And the
29:23
hanging gardens, those improbable patches of
29:27
ferns and mosses and columbine growing directly
29:30
out of the cliff walls, where springs seep through
29:33
the porous sandstone, are one of the park's quieter
29:36
wonders. Water working through the rock for decades,
29:40
finding a crack and a garden blooms on a vertical
29:43
stone wall in the desert. Life is stubborn in
29:47
the same way the river is. Weeping Rock is the
29:51
most famous example. Water falls through the
29:54
poorest Navajo sandstone for hundreds of years,
29:56
soaking down through the dune rock grain by grain
29:59
until it hits the impermeable Kayenta layer below
30:02
and has nowhere to go but sideways and out. It
30:05
seeps from the canyon wall in a constant slow
30:08
weep. That's where the name comes from. And in
30:11
that seep lives a garden. Maidenhair ferns. monkey
30:15
flower, Zion shooting star, moss that shouldn't
30:19
be here in a desert canyon, a garden watered
30:22
by rain that fell centuries ago, moving through
30:25
stone at the pace of stone, emerging exactly
30:27
where the geology says it must. There is a patience
30:31
in that process that I find almost meditative.
30:34
I have sat under that overhang in July when the
30:37
canyon was baking outside, and the cool air and
30:40
the sound of the drip and the smell of fern in
30:42
the desert is one of those sensory combinations
30:44
that just stops you completely. The rain fell.
30:48
Centuries passed. The fern grew. The canyon does
30:52
not rush anything. The Zion snail is worth a
30:57
mention too, because it's the most extreme example
30:59
of what isolation does. The Zion snail, Physa
31:03
zionis, lives only in Zion's hanging gardens,
31:06
and only there, nowhere else on Earth. A species
31:10
evolved specifically for the seeps on these particular
31:13
canyon walls, so dependent on one microhabitat
31:17
that if those hanging gardens went dry, that
31:20
snail would cease to exist. It's a small thing,
31:23
a tiny shell you'd step right over, and it exists
31:26
nowhere else. When I think about what protection
31:29
actually means for a place like this, I keep
31:32
coming back to that snail. One wrong decision
31:35
about a water source, and something that exists
31:37
nowhere else on Earth is gone. So step back and
31:42
look at what Zion is as a place. 250 million
31:46
years of geology stacked in layers, seafloor,
31:49
swamp, desert. River lifted 10 ,000 feet into
31:53
the sky and cut open by a river. that should
31:56
not have been able to do what it did. 8 ,000
31:59
years of human presence, built up in layers of
32:03
its own archaic hunters, then farmers, then the
32:06
Paiute who named it, then Mormon settlers who
32:09
renamed it, then a painter whose canvases made
32:12
the world want to come. 300 visitors in 1914,
32:17
1 ,800 in 1919, and today, somewhere north of
32:22
4 .5 million people a year. making it one of
32:25
the three most visited parks in the country.
32:27
That arc from near -unknown monument with an
32:30
unpronounceable name to one of the most crowded
32:33
patches of ground in the American West is going
32:36
to be the central tension of Part 2, because
32:39
Zion's popularity is the story now, and navigating
32:42
it well is what separates a great trip from a
32:44
miserable one. But before we get there, do yourself
32:48
a favor and just hold that image for a second.
32:51
That river. thin as a thread from the rim, cutting
32:55
2 ,600 feet of canyon out of sheer stubbornness.
32:58
The walls going straight up, those dune lines
33:01
frozen in the rock, 8 ,000 years of people reading
33:04
this landscape like a book they were born knowing.
33:07
The snail that lives only here, the light at
33:10
sunset turning those walls from orange to red
33:13
to something close to fire. Zion is one of those
33:16
places that defies the idea that familiarity
33:18
breeds contempt. The more you know about it,
33:22
the better it gets. That's the history of Zion.
33:27
Next episode, part two, The Visit. The shuttle
33:30
system, the permit lottery for Angels Landing,
33:33
the Narrows, flash flood awareness, and how to
33:36
actually enjoy one of America's most overcrowded
33:38
parks without losing your mind or your safety.
33:43
And the Field Skills episode following the Zion
33:45
Series flash floods is directly tied to the Narrows,
33:48
so if slot canyons are on your agenda, don't
33:51
skip that one either. Upstream weather and clear
33:53
skies can still kill you in a canyon. We'll get
33:56
into exactly how. Everything for the Zion Series
34:00
is at wildlandsnews .com. Maps, current permit
34:03
information, and trail conditions. I'm Sean Spanauer.
34:09
This has been Wildlands. Know the land before
34:13
you reach it. See you Thursday.