The outstanding feature of Zion National Park is Zion Canyon, the stupendous red and white gorge cut by the Mukuntuweap River from the Kolob Plateau through more than 3,000 feet of the Jurassic sandstones of the White and Vermilion cliffs and down into lower beds of mauve sandstone and shales of purple and red. The floor of Zion is 4,100 feet above sea level; the dome of the West Temple rises to 7,650 feet. The canyon is about fourteen miles long and varies in width from about a mile at Springdale to scarcely more than the reach of a man’s outstretched hands in the upper Narrows where the river has cut a channel under the towering cliffs. Imagine, if you can, the overwhelming effect of these painted precipices, nearly 2,000 feet high and both close enough to be touched without moving.
The Temples of Zion
In places the canyon widens into courts and shrines of bewitching beauty, such as the Court of the Patriarchs and the Temple of Sinawava. From the vermilion walls have been chiseled individual buttes and peaks of monstrous greatness and surpassing majesty, among them Angels Landing, the Great White Throne and the Mountain of Mystery. And these soaring scarps and summits present such varied tints and hues of red that the expert in pigments is bewildered; from the delicate pink of a baby’s cheek to deepest carmine, and beyond—from bittersweet and orient pink through orange chrome, flame-scarlet, vermilion, jasper, Pompeiian red and Indian lake to mahogany, ox-blood, maroon and a red that is almost black. In places the walls are topped with creamy white and the green of pines. Everywhere they exhibit a wizardry of massive sculpture. The deep-set river is bordered with the verdure of cottonwoods, box-elders, pines, ferns and flowering shrubs; in mossy caves curtained by little waterfalls, deer cradle their fawns. The radiance of the morning and evening sun upon the tinted towers of Zion is among the finest of its spectacles.
Standing upon the edge of the Park near Springdale is The Watchman, a stately cathedral-like pile of red sandstone. About a mile beyond is Bridge Mountain upon whose upper slope may be discerned a great bow of stone, a natural bridge with a span of 100 feet. Among the Towers of the Virgin stands the Altar of Sacrifice, a buttressed white fane whose summit and wall are stained deep with flowing crimson, suggesting the bloody sacrificial place of some insatiable pagan god. The East Temple, on the right, is a splendid structure of pink and white surmounted by a carmine capstone.
On the left is the Streaked Wall bearing strange white cones, and beyond it is Sentinel Peak. The west wall then recedes to form the fine Court of the Patriarchs whence rise the three stately Patriarchs themselves, jagged pink and white pyramids. Above the east wall stand the Twin Brothers and the Mountain-of-the-Sun, the latter the first to glow in the light of dawn, the last to hold the evening rays. Lady Mountain, Mt. Majestic and Red Arch Mountain next appear, and Angels Landing, a sharp-shorn, pyramidal wedge of Pompeiian red that projects boldly into the canyon and throws off from its foot a fluted ox-blood mass called the Great Organ. Round this the river winds in a serpentine semicircle.
On the West Rim, Zion National Park
The Great White Throne
Just below the great bend in the Mukuntuweap River looms an isolated rock temple of prodigious bulk and imperial majesty, a truncated pyramid or mayhap a flattened dome, its lower half red, its upper half tinting from rosy buff to white, a forest of tall pines, acres in extent, upon its untrodden summit. This colossal butte, “one of the world’s great rocks,” is seen most effectively from the Temple of Sinawava, through the inverted maroon arch between the Great Organ and Angels Landing. It appears completely detached from the east wall, aloof and unscalable. While it has not been officially measured, its crest is probably more than 3,000 feet above the river.