Angels Landing: The Trail Congress Had to Regulate

The chain-assisted section at the top of Angels Landing is roughly a quarter mile long. On a busy day in summer, the chain is always occupied. People coming up and people going down negotiate the same narrow spine of sandstone, moving past each other over drops of several hundred feet on either side. The wind can be strong. The rock is sometimes wet.

Angels Landing rises one thousand four hundred fifty-eight feet above the canyon floor over a five-point-four-mile round trip. The trail is not technically a climb in the mountaineering sense; it is a steep hike that ends in a scramble up a fin of sandstone that would be described, in any other context, as exposed ridge walking with minimal protection. The NPS installed the chains in nineteen twenty-six to make the final section manageable for ordinary hikers. Multiple hikers have died on the trail over the years, part of the safety concern that led officials to regulate access.

In two thousand twenty-two, the National Park Service implemented a permit lottery for the chain section, the first such requirement for safety reasons on any trail in the national park system. The permit does not restrict access to Scout Lookout, the viewpoint below the chain section, which offers roughly ninety percent of the view without the final quarter mile.

The trail was named by a Methodist minister named Frederick Vining Fisher who visited in nineteen sixteen and remarked that the summit was so high that only an angel could land there. The name stuck. The permit system, the crowds, and the deaths are part of the same story: a place that was named for its inaccessibility became one of the most-visited trails in the American West.