Zion National Park

Zion Canyon carries two names that tell two different stories. The Southern Paiute people, who used the canyon for hunting and gathering for centuries, called it something closer to "straight canyon." Mormon pioneers who settled the valley in the 1860s renamed it Zion, the Hebrew word for a promised refuge, after Brigham Young reportedly told one settler the canyon was "not Zion" at all — a rebuke that did not stop the name from sticking. Congress protected the canyon as Mukuntuweap National Monument in 1909, and a decade later, in 1919, redesignated and renamed it Zion National Park, the first national park in Utah.

The thousand-foot sandstone walls that define Zion were cut by the Virgin River, which still carves through the park's narrowest stretch, a slot canyon called the Narrows barely wide enough in places for a hiker to touch both walls at once. Mormon settlement, encouraged directly by Brigham Young as part of a deliberate colonization strategy, pushed the Southern Paiute off land they had used seasonally for generations, and by the time the federal government began protecting the canyon's scenery, Paiute communities had already been confined to a small fraction of their original territory.

Zion's popularity has outpaced the roads built to handle it. The park now draws more than four million visitors a year into a canyon only a few hundred feet wide at its narrowest public stretches, forcing the National Park Service to close Zion Canyon to private vehicles in 2000 and run visitors in on a mandatory shuttle instead — one of the first national parks in the system to make that trade. Its most famous overlook, Angels Landing, requires hikers to grip a chain bolted into exposed sandstone along a trail that drops hundreds of feet on either side.