Zion National Park

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 on November 19, 1919, as Utah's first national park, Zion protects 147,243 acres of canyon country in the southwest corner of the state. The park sits at the intersection of the Colorado Plateau, the Great Basin, and the Mojave Desert, which gives it a biological diversity most desert parks cannot match. You will find ponderosa pines growing on the same ridgelines as prickly pear cactus. You will see California condors circling 2,000 feet above the canyon floor. Nearly 4.7 million folks come through the gates every year, making it one of the five most visited national parks in the country. That number should not scare you away. It should tell you something about the place.