Zion National Park is a gorge up to 800 metres deep cut by a river you could wade across in summer. The Virgin River has been sawing down through the Colorado Plateau for millions of years, leaving walls of Navajo sandstone that rise some 600 metres off a narrow green floor. The rock is banded red, cream and orange, and it holds the colour even in shade. The canyon runs about fifteen miles from a wide mouth to a point where the walls close to a slot a few metres across. Mormon settlers gave the monoliths names to match: the Great White Throne, Angels Landing, the Court of the Patriarchs, the Watchman. Because the floor is watered and the plateau above is not, you get cottonwoods, ferns and hanging gardens inside a desert.
What sets Zion apart is that you walk into the rock rather than look at it. One route climbs the knife-edge fin of Angels Landing on bolted chains, with 300-metre drops on both sides, and permits for it now come by lottery. Another leaves dry ground entirely and goes up the Virgin River into The Narrows, wading between walls that lean in until only a ribbon of sky shows. For much of the year private cars are barred from the canyon and a free shuttle runs the length of it. In low morning sun the cliffs glow copper; after rain, temporary waterfalls come over the rim and the seeping hollows fill with ferns. Flash floods close The Narrows without much warning, and the river runs too high to enter through most of the spring melt. When the shuttle stops and night falls, Zion turns into one of the darkest skies in the American West — certified an International Dark Sky Park in 2021.