Saint George and the Mighty Five Onramp

Saint George, Utah is the gateway to the Colorado Plateau's canyon country, and the traffic on Interstate Fifteen tells you so. The junction for Utah Highway Nine, the road into Zion National Park, is a few miles north of here. It is not subtle.

The red Navajo sandstone cliffs that begin to appear around Saint George are the same formation that walls Zion Canyon. They are deposited sand dunes, an ancient desert, lithified, carved by the Virgin River over millions of years into what is now one of the most visited National Parks in the country. Zion received nearly five million visitors in two thousand twenty-two.

The canyon is fifteen miles long and half a mile deep. The Narrows, where you wade upstream through the river with canyon walls touching overhead, is one of the more extraordinary physical experiences available in the American West. The Paiute called this canyon Mukuntuweap, a name that the first national monument designation in nineteen-oh-nine actually used.

The name was changed to Zion, a Hebrew word, by a later Park Service official who felt that Mukuntuweap was insufficiently dignified. The Paiute people lived in and around this canyon system, using the rock shelters and springs and hunting corridors that the landscape provided. The Ancestral Puebloan peoples had farmed the canyon bottom in an earlier era.

The canyon did not become Zion until someone decided it should have a name more legible to the people who were going to be marketed to. That decision, which seemed administrative at the time, is a policy with consequences: what a place is called shapes what kind of relationship people think they are allowed to have with it.