At the start of the tour
Welcome to Zion Canyon Scenic Drive
Welcome to Zion Canyon. I'll be your guide on the way up the canyon, from the visitor center to the Temple of Sinawava, where the road ends.
Here's how this tour works. At each stop along the road, you'll hear a short story about the place around you. Between stops, I'll tell you about the place we're heading to. If you're on the shuttle, it pauses only briefly at most stops, and on the way up it rolls past three of them without stopping: the museum, Canyon Junction and Big Bend. The stories still play as you go by. Deep in the canyon, your phone can lose its location. If a story doesn't start, just tap it in the list.
People have lived here for thousands of years. The Southern Paiute moved into this area around eleven hundred AD. When President Taft first protected the canyon as a national monument in 1909, it took their name for the canyon: Mukuntuweap. Mormon pioneers, who arrived in the eighteen hundreds, had called it Zion, an ancient Hebrew word for a sanctuary or a refuge. In 1918 the monument took that name instead, and a year later Zion became a national park.
For most of the year, the road beyond Canyon Junction is closed to private cars. Before the shuttle began in May 2000, about four hundred parking spaces lined this road, and on the busiest days up to five thousand cars tried to use it. Now the canyon is quieter, and you get to look up.
Point 1 · At the stop
Zion Canyon Visitor Center
This is the Zion Canyon Visitor Center, the start of the shuttle line and of our tour. From here, the road follows the Virgin River north, up into the canyon.
Take a look at the rock around you. The lowest red cliffs near the visitor center are siltstone and sandstone, laid down by ancient streams. Above them rise the great walls of Navajo Sandstone, sixteen hundred to twenty-two hundred feet thick. That rock was once a desert of sand dunes covering about a hundred and fifty thousand square miles, and its cliffs here are believed to be the tallest sandstone cliffs in the world.
All of it was carved by one modest river, the Virgin. It doesn't look like much. Keep an eye on it anyway.
History, on the way there
On the way: Zion Human History Museum
Next, we're heading to the Zion Human History Museum, and it's a good moment to think about who was here first.
The park says the first people in this area, nearly twelve thousand years ago, hunted mammoths, giant ground sloths and camels. Much later, people settled down to farm, and the Virgin Branch Puebloans and the Fremont lived here. Then, around eleven hundred AD, the Southern Paiute moved in. The Virgin and Santa Clara Rivers became the core of their homeland, where most of their people lived.
On the park's own shuttle narration, a tribal member from the Kaibab Band describes Zion as part of his people's traditional homeland, which reaches into California, Nevada, Arizona and Utah. He says the Creator placed them here to care for this land, especially the places with water, medicinal plants, animals and minerals, and that elders still teach those responsibilities to the children today.
Point 2 · At the stop
Zion Human History Museum
This is the Zion Human History Museum. If you're on the shuttle heading up, it passes without stopping; it stops here on the way back down.
The low building opened in 1960 as the park's visitor center, part of the Park Service's Mission 66 program. It was built into the slope, so the front looks like a single story, with two more hidden at the back. Today it tells the human story of Zion, and its back patio looks out on West Temple and the Towers of the Virgin.
Point 3 · At the stop
Canyon Junction
This is Canyon Junction. On the way up, the shuttle doesn't stop here; it only stops on the way down.
The highway that branches off here climbs to the east in seven switchbacks, then through a tunnel more than a mile long, blasted through the cliffs between 1927 and 1930. Crews cut gallery windows into the cliff face to clear the rock and let in light and air. When the road opened in 1930, it tied Zion to Bryce Canyon and the Grand Canyon, and made the Grand Circle tour possible.
History, on the way there
On the way: Court of the Patriarchs
Next, we're heading to the Court of the Patriarchs. Along the way, this part of the canyon tells a story about how fast things can change here.
Over a few million years, erosion carved this canyon. The Virgin River has sliced through seven layers of sedimentary rock, including two thousand feet of solid sandstone, and it still carries away about a million tons of sediment a year, mostly in flash floods.
But one day, about forty-eight hundred years ago, the canyon changed in seconds. Part of the mountain called The Sentinel, on the west side of the canyon, broke away. A University of Utah study found that the rock avalanche rushed across the canyon in about twenty seconds, at more than a hundred miles an hour, and dammed the river. Behind it a lake grew and lasted about seven hundred years, until sediment filled it in. That's why the canyon floor upstream is so remarkably flat.
The old slide still moves. In 1995, part of it pushed the river against the road and the road collapsed. Several hundred people were stranded at Zion Lodge for a few extra nights.
Point 4 · At the stop
Court of the Patriarchs
This is the Court of the Patriarchs. The three peaks are named for Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. In 1916, a Methodist minister, Frederick Vining Fisher, explored the canyon with two local boys from southern Utah, and they gave religious names to many of the peaks they saw. Angels Landing got its name on that same visit.
A very short but steep path climbs from the shuttle stop to a viewpoint of the three peaks. From there you can also see The Sentinel, where that ancient landslide came from.
History, on the way there
On the way: Zion Lodge
Next, we're heading to Zion Lodge, which sits on the bed of that vanished lake. At its highest, the lake would have put the spot where the lodge stands under about three hundred and eighty feet of water.
Much later, settlers came. In 1863, a pioneer built the first homestead in the canyon, close to where the lodge is today. Around 1872, more pioneers, sent by Brigham Young, began settling the area. Flash floods and drought eventually pushed them out to better places.
Then came the visitors. In 1923, the Union Pacific Railroad finished a spur line to Cedar City, and its subsidiary, the Utah Parks Company, set about building a place for them to stay.
Point 5 · At the stop
Zion Lodge
This is Zion Lodge, completed in May 1925 for the Utah Parks Company. It was designed by Gilbert Stanley Underwood, the architect of many national park lodges. Its lumber came from the plateau high above: two hundred and sixty-five thousand board feet of it, lowered down the cliffs on a gravity-powered cable works.
The main lodge stood for over forty years, until a fire destroyed it on January 26, 1966. A new prefabricated building was open just a hundred and eight days later. The cabins were added over the years.
If you're getting off here, the trails to the Emerald Pools start across the road.
Point 6 · At the stop
The Grotto
This is The Grotto, a picnic area in the shade of big cottonwood trees, and the start of the trail to Angels Landing. The round trip is five point four miles, with almost fifteen hundred feet of climbing. Partway up are Walter's Wiggles, twenty-one steep switchbacks, named for the man who designed them, the park's first manager. The trail is on the National Register of Historic Places.
You can hike as far as Scout Lookout without a permit. The last half mile, along the chains on the ridge, needs a permit from the park's lottery.
History, on the way there
On the way: Weeping Rock
Next, we're heading to Weeping Rock, and its story starts on the rim far above it.
A local logger named David Flanigan was looking for a way to bring timber down from the plateau. Inspired, the story goes, by a Mormon prophecy, he and his brother hauled wire and gear into the canyon and built a single-line tramway: drums, pulleys and about fifty thousand feet of baling wire, strung between two wooden structures more than three thousand feet apart and over two thousand feet apart in height. It ran entirely on gravity, with brakes to lower the loads. By September 1901, it was carrying its first lumber down.
In 1908, a sawmill operator named Frank Petty bought the operation, swapped the baling wire for braided steel cable, and built a steam-powered sawmill nearby. Over the years, the Draw Works lowered hundreds of thousands of feet of boards, including the lumber for Zion Lodge. Fire and lightning struck it at least twice, and it was abandoned in 1927.
The lower end, near Weeping Rock, is gone. What's left of the top still stands at the edge of Cable Mountain, and it has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1978.
Point 7 · At the stop
Weeping Rock
This is Weeping Rock. A short, steep paved trail, less than half a mile round trip and sometimes icy in winter, leads to an alcove whose walls drip all year.
How does rock weep in a desert? High on the plateaus, rain and snowmelt soak into the Navajo Sandstone, which is porous like a sponge, and filter slowly down until they reach a layer the water can't pass through. The water is pushed sideways and out of the cliff as springs, feeding ferns and flowers that hang on the rock.
The trail was closed for almost two years after a rockfall in November 2023, and reopened in September 2025. The trails to Hidden Canyon and Observation Point that once started here are still closed.
Point 8 · At the stop
Big Bend
This is Big Bend. Going up, the shuttle doesn't stop here; it only stops on the way back down.
From here you can take in the Great White Throne, Angels Landing and Cable Mountain, where the old Draw Works stood. In the cooler months, scan the big walls for rock climbers. They're so small against the sandstone that they're hard to spot. In summer, look higher, for nesting raptors: the peregrine falcon, once endangered, and the California condor, which still is. In 1982, only twenty-two California condors were left in the world. A rescue effort saved them from extinction.
History, on the way there
On the way: Temple of Sinawava
Next, we're heading to the temple at the end of the road. Its name, Sinawava, comes from the Southern Paiute: the park explains that it is the name of one of a pair of twin creator gods.
In one account, published in a history of Utah's tribes, the elder brother carved people out of sticks and meant to scatter them evenly around the earth. But his younger brother cut the sack open, and the people fell out in bunches, all over the world.
The canyon is changing shape here, too, and the river is the reason. At the Temple, the Virgin River has reached a softer layer of rock beneath the sandstone. As water wears away its shale, the sandstone above is undermined and collapses, and the canyon grows wider. Above the Temple, the river is still cutting only through hard Navajo Sandstone, and the canyon pinches into a slot. That slot is The Narrows.
Point 9 · At the stop
Temple of Sinawava
This is the Temple of Sinawava, the end of the road: a natural amphitheater carved by the river's power and persistence.
The Riverside Walk starts here and follows the river upstream. It's about two miles round trip, mostly paved and rated easy, with a hanging garden along the way. Where the pavement ends, The Narrows begin, and from there the river is the trail. Only go in prepared, and never when flash floods threaten. Storms far upstream can raise the river under a blue sky.
If you came by shuttle, everyone gets off here. Buses head back down every few minutes, and on the way down they also stop at Big Bend, Canyon Junction and the museum. Check the time of the last bus.
That's the end of our tour, and thank you for coming along. A river, a fallen mountain and a lake that's long gone made the canyon you just came through, and the river is still at work.