Before you drive inAngels Landing needs a permit, and the canyon runs on the shuttle. The permit is a lottery on Recreation.gov. Entry to the park itself needs no reservation. The park’s own page on it.
Higher ground turns first, so the slopes above the road lead the valley by a few days.
No new reports from the ground here this week.
- 7,000–8,000 ftStarting to turnpeak Oct 1112%
- 6,000–7,000 ftStill greenpeak Oct 1735%
- 5,000–6,000 ftStill greenpeak Oct 2331%
- 4,000–5,000 ftStill greenpeak Oct 3018%
Height off 3DEP inside the park’s own boundary; each band carries the date our model gives that elevation, corrections and all. The percentage is how much of the park stands in it.
That’s 1 day later than our model alone would say. This September has been running warm, which shifts peak color.
The place
There are parks you visit and parks that rearrange you. Zion is the second kind. You drive through a tunnel bored into a cliff, round a corner, and the canyon opens below you like the earth split itself apart and forgot to close. The walls are 2,000 to 3,000 feet of Navajo sandstone, stained red and orange and cream by iron oxide and desert varnish, and in late afternoon light they glow like something that should not be geologically possible. We have photographed more than 400 public lands across the country. Zion still stops us cold.
Established 1919. About 4.7 million/year visitors.
If you can only come on certain days
Set the days you can be here. Everything under them answers for those days, not for peak.
Saturday 24 October to Sunday 25 October
You’ll find it fading up high, nearly peak lower down.
Up at 7,000 feet the stands peak around Oct 11; down at 5,000 feet they hold on until about Oct 30. Pick your elevation for the day you come.
- 7,000–8,000 ftFadingpeak Oct 11
- 6,000–7,000 ftJust past peakpeak Oct 17
- 5,000–6,000 ftPeak colorpeak Oct 23
- 4,000–5,000 ftNearly peakpeak Oct 30
- Where to drive
- Boulder Mountain (UT 12), about 101 miles · Fish Lake Scenic Byway (UT 25), about 112 miles
- What turns
- Gambel oak, bigtooth maple, quaking aspen, serviceberry
- Entrance
- $35
What turns, and when
- Gambel oak41%
- bigtooth maple35%
- quaking aspen12%
- serviceberry12%
Also named across Utah, outside what the canopy read measures here: Narrowleaf Cottonwood, Rocky Mountain Maple.
Utah's fall is a dual show: aspens turn gold on the high plateaus while bigtooth maples along the Wasatch Front go vivid scarlet, creating one of the most colorful mountain fronts in the West.
This forecast is built from the species that stand here, their elevation and this September’s weather, and corrected in season by cameras, foresters and our own crew. Out here we score it against NASA's satellite record of when the canopy shuts down, read inside each unit’s own boundary: two dates in three land within 12 days of it. How this map is made