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Zion
National Park Overview
By Golden Webb
The Colorado Plateau has always fired the imagination of man, inspiring awe, belles-lettres—and even a peculiar kind of piety. As historian Jared Farmer relates, “George Stevens, director of The Greatest Story Ever Told, wanted a backdrop with biblical feel. He found the perfect location: Glen Canyon in southern Utah. ‘Not scenery like that of the Holy Land,’ remarked Charlton Heston, who played the Baptist, ‘but more as the Holy Land should be, still with the fingerprints of God on it.’” The Plateau’s numinous qualities resonate in the names it bears: a strange mixture of Athabascan, Uto-Aztecan, and Semitic terms—Agathla, Paunsaugunt, Moab, Zion—mythic names for a mythically-proportioned landscape, plucked directly from the sacred traditions of ancient desert tribes.
Nowhere is this spirit-of-place more evident than at Zion National Park, a high desert plateau-land of colossal monoliths, sinuous finger canyons, and Yosemite-like vertical walls that inspires equal doses of wonder and reverence in all who venture here. Zion is most famous for its water-sculpted pinnacles and domes—sandstone palisades cut to an Olympian scale—and for the Virgin River Narrows of Zion Canyon, considered by many to be the most beautiful slot canyon in the world. It’s said that the Paiute Indians regarded Zion and Parunuweap canyons—the North and East Forks of the Virgin—too spiritually potent to farm or hunt.
Nor was the majesty of the place lost on white settlers when they arrived in the 1860s; they paid the ultimate compliment by reaching into their religion to name what they saw. Court of the Patriarchs, Great White Throne, Tabernacle Dome, Altar of Sacrifice: in any other place biblical names like these would seem a bit contrived, but here at Zion they’re perfect. “There is an eloquence to their forms which stirs the imagination with a singular power and kindles in the mind . . . a glowing response,” wrote one early explorer, geologist Clarence Dutton. “Nothing can exceed the wondrous beauty of Zion . . . In coming time [Zion] will, I believe, take rank with a very small number of spectacles each of which will, in its own way, be regarded as the most exquisite of its kind which the world discloses.”
My grandfather first encountered Zion as a boy growing up in the nearby town of Virgin during the Great Depression. His memories of North Creek, which drains the highlands of the Kolob Plateau on Zion’s western border, took on an intense spiritual quality toward the end of his life. “I never tired of watching the changing shades and shadows of the red-black hills and sand dunes,” he wrote, “never tired of listening to the goodnight song of the white crowned sparrows as they settled in for the night in the wild roses. Never tired of walking the mesas, or lying on my belly, pulling fish from under rocks up on North Creek . . . I went to bed hungry many times . . . but even now, I can literally feast on the exquisiteness of a warm, star-bright evening in the never-never-land that is [Zion].” North Creek was a lost and future home to my grandfather—the place he wanted to go when he died; and if I take him at his word, that’s where he is right now: walking the mesas, listening to the sparrows, and watching an eternity of star-bright evenings pool in his sweetheart Eleanor’s eyes.
Zion was the source of much that was good in my grandfather’s life: his eye for beauty, his sense of manhood, his love of fishing and wild waters—the very things that remain alive in his children and grandchildren long after his death. If the power of a place like Zion could so have infused his soul, then maybe it got into his blood. And if the sand of North Creek flowed in my grandfather’s blood, then maybe a few of those grains found their way into my blood, too.