Zion National Park Lodge
A historical gem along the "Grand Loop Tour"
Zion National Park is the third most visited national park in the United States and today the canyon can easily be reached by a half-hour drive from Interstate 15. A hundred years ago this area was isolated and challenging to navigate. The Union Pacific Railroad and its subsidiary, the Utah Parks Company, worked on infrastructure to open the area up to tourists.
Old wagon roads were upgraded to the first automobile roads starting about 1910, and the road into Zion Canyon was built in 1917 but it only went as far as The Grotto.
Mukuntuweap National Monument is Formed
In 1872, explorer John Wesley Powell named the canyon Mukuntuweap using a Paiute word meaning "straight canyon." In 1909, President William Howard Taft designated Mukuntuweap National Monument using the power granted to the President by the 1906 Antiquities Act. As I had mentioned, the park lacked the infrastructure needed to support visitation at that time.
Zion National Park
Mukuntuweap’s popularity grew, and President Woodrow Wilson issued an executive proclamation in 1918 to enlarge the monument from 15,840 acres to 76,800 acres and to change its name to Zion National Monument as many felt the previous name was too hard to pronounce. In ancient Hebrew, the word Zion means refuge or sanctuary. The following year, Congress passed a bill elevating Zion to a national park.
After Zion was designated a national park, the National Park Service (NPS) Director Stephen Mather (1867-1930) had a vision to create a series of national parks in southern Utah linked to the Grand Canyon by rail or highway to make a "Grand Loop Tour" the center for tourism in the Southwestern United States.
Prior to Zion Lodge there was Wylie Camp
By the summer of 1917, touring cars could reach Zion Canyon, and the Wylie Camp, a tent camp providing the first visitor lodging, was established. William Wylie from Bozeman, Montana had created successful tent camps in Yellowstone in the 1880s. In 1917, he brought the idea to Zion and built a camp consisting of a central assembly hall, dining room, and ten tent cabins with Wylie’s signature green and white striped canvas. Wylie, a former school superintendent, recruited schoolteachers and college students to provide guiding and interpretation for visitors.
Each tent had two double bed, separate dressing area, screen doors and were lighted with gas lanterns. Meals were served in the dining tent on oilcloth-covered tables with linen napkins.
The Utah Parks Company (UPC) acquired Wylie Camp in 1923 and operated it during the 1923-24 seasons while a new lodge was built north of the camp.
Zion Lodge
The lodge was designed in 1924 by Gilbert Stanley Underwood (1890-1961) as a compromise between the UPC, which wanted a large hotel, and NPS director Mather, who desired smaller-scale development.
The original lodge was built using local materials, including 265,000 board feet of lumber transported down from the plateau via a wire and pulley tramway called the “Cable Mountain Draw Works.” (The remnants of the Cable Mountain Draw Works still exist and can be visited by guests.)
The lodge opened in 1925 and the current Western Cabins were constructed in the late 1920s.
Unfortunately, the main lodge was lost to a fire during renovations in the winter of 1966. The lodge was “rebuilt” in 108 days by putting up a prefabricated building. In 1990, the lodge was remodeled to restore the original design. Until 1976, the Lodge even had a swimming pool which was built in 1928.
Historic lodges within national parks offer more to the visitor in addition to breathtaking scenery; their distinctive rustic architectural designs, intended to harmonize with the natural environment, have helped coin the term “parkitecture.”
How to Visit
Zion National Park Lodge is the only lodging inside Zion National Park and is open year-round. It consists of modern hotel rooms and historic cabins. Xantera is the current concessionaire for the lodge and reservations can be made online.
Zion Canyon Scenic Drive (the road that starts north of Canyon Junction) is closed to private vehicles when park shuttles are operating however lodge guests with overnight stays are allowed to drive to the Lodge using the permit mailed to them. This permit will need to be validated by the front desk, and displayed while the vehicle is parked.
It is difficult to get reservations at Zion Lodge. I was, however, lucky to get three nights in the hotel rooms (two years in a row!!) by keeping the website up on my computer and refreshing it every few hours hoping for cancellations. I like staying at the lodge as my time in Zion is not restricted by the schedule of the shuttle buses. You are also free to drive into Springdale, the gateway town, to eat or get groceries.
Next Time
If you’ve driven through Zion, you’ve driven through the Zion-Mount Carmel Tunnel. Before the tunnel’s construction, any visitor to Zion had to approach the park from the southwest and, once there, it was a dead end, necessitating a return via the same route.
At the time it was completed in 1930 it was the longest tunnel of its type in the United States. We’ll take a look at the great engineering feat next time.
Thank you @Jan Spell for this wonderful historical essay on Zion National Park. I’ve visited several times. I remember one particular visit I was there to help a friend stage a dance concert in the outdoor theater. The shows were beautiful and ethereal against the mountainous back drop. ✨💖✨
I visited Zion some decades ago. Here is my Substack post of it, posted a couple of years ago.
https://kenbarber.substack.com/p/zion-national-park
I did violate Park rules and stopped in the tunnel to get out of the Jeep and take some photos out of one of the viewports carved therein. For some reason, I didn't include any of those in the Substack post. Perhaps I feared admitting in public that I had violated the rules.