SONG OF ZION

The glories of southwestern Utah aren’t confined to the boundaries of its famous national park. HERMIONE HOBY tours Greater Zion’s red sandstone canyons by hiking trail and horseback— and while suspended a thousand feet in the air.

- HERMIONE HOBY

DRIVING WEST LAST OCTOBER through the stretch of southern Utah where the Mojave Desert, Great Basin, and Colorado Plateau collide, I found myself reflecting on the word ‘greater’. The name Greater Zion was coined in 2019 to encourage visitors to think beyond the spectacular yet relatively small Zion National Park, which is a mere 601 square kilometres, compared with, say, Yellowstone’s 8,992. The new designation is an implicit reminder that Zion itself is just one chunk of beauty within an excess of staggering scenery. Following roads that wound through blazing canyons and valleys of russet-coloured Navajo sandstone, I began to consider ‘greater’ less as a geographical or marketing term and more as a superlative. Greater as in more beautiful, more awesome, more sublime than anywhere else.

Like so many places of natural wonder in the US, Greater Zion—a region of more than 6,216 square kilometres—saw a growing number of visitors amid the pandemic. “Folks were cooped up and confined and looking for places to get some mental freedom again,” Kevin Lewis, the area’s director of tourism, told me. “They are coming to have an open-space experience.”

So was I. I was travelling with Ben, my boyfriend and comparably awestruck chauffeur, from our home in Boulder, Colorado, to Under Canvas Zion, one of a collection of nine campsites near national parks around the country that seek to make roughing it a bit more glam. From there we’d take in the region by foot, on horseback, and, most adventurously, by rope and ladder.