Backpacking the West Rim Path in Zion Nationwide Park is a journey via a number of the park’s most gorgeous and various terrain, starting within the high-altitude pine forests close to Lava Level and descending into the dramatic sandstone canyons that outline Zion. Over the course of 14.5 miles, the path gives sweeping views of deep canyons, slickrock expanses, and distant plateaus, with every flip revealing a brand new and awe-inspiring perspective. Campsites alongside the rim present quiet solitude and breathtaking sunsets, far faraway from the crowds beneath. As you strategy the southern finish of the path, the descent into Zion Canyon turns into more and more dramatic, culminating close to the spine-tingling heights of Angels Touchdown. Whether or not completed in a protracted day hike or as a leisurely in a single day trek, the West Rim Path delivers a quintessential Zion backcountry expertise full of each serenity and grandeur.
Trailhead elevation 7,454
Water 3 seasonal springs/test situations with the NPS
Do not miss campsite 5 if backpacking
Backpacking the West Rim Path (Prime-Down)
It’s mid-September, my second day again in Zion, and I’m up early on the wilderness allow workplace—an hour earlier than opening—to see if I can swap the allow I scored on-line a month in the past for the walk-in solely web site I’ve been eyeing: web site 5. I’m first in line and strike up a dialog with a pair from San Diego on a five-week nationwide parks highway journey, hoping to snag a coveted Subway allow. When the doorways lastly open, I hit it massive—web site 5 is mine. I toss my allow in my pack and stroll over to Zion Clothes shop, the place David from Pink Rock Shuttle is ready to take me on an hour experience as much as the West Rim Trailhead.
The hour-long drive passes shortly as David and I commerce tales about our favourite hikes in southwest Utah. He tells me he’s already tackled the West Rim Path twice this yr and calls it the perfect hike within the park—encouraging phrases to listen to as I’m about to set out. Alongside the best way, he factors out a landslide scar left by an earthquake fifteen years in the past, a spire featured within the Nineteen Eighties basic Romancing the Stone, a sequence of lava builds, and different fascinating landmarks that talk to the world’s wild geologic historical past. As we climb increased on Kolob Terrace Highway, he suggests a fast cease at Lava Level Overlook, the place the plateau is capped by a lava circulation 100 toes thick. From the overlook, the panorama stretches to the higher rim of Zion Canyon, with The Sentinel, West Temple, Mount Kinesava, and North Guardian Angel rising on the horizon. It’s a preview of the grandeur to come back earlier than he drops me on the trailhead.
Ten minutes later, after a winding climb up the slim highway, we pull into the trailhead parking space. The place is almost empty, save for a lone Honda CRF parked off to the aspect. It’s an ideal begin to the day—mid-60s with a crisp breeze, regardless of a forecast hinting at scattered showers and night thunderstorms. David and I shake fingers, and with that, I shoulder my pack and set off down the path.
The path wastes no time in revealing its grandeur. From the trailhead, it drops gently down, spilling me onto the good Horse Pasture Plateau. It stretches earlier than me like an outstretched finger pointing straight into the soul of Zion Canyon—an immense, degree tableland that whispers of each distance and discovery.
Nearly instantly, it slips previous the junction with the Wildcat Canyon Path, then presses onward towards the japanese fringe of the uplands. Forward, the horizon heaves upward in huge swells of earth, solely to be damaged aside by sheer, unforgiving partitions of blushing limestone—rock faces that bear the scars of time and the load of one thing everlasting. The trail holds its course atop the plateau, the place the panorama wears its scars overtly. Blackened stumps stand as solemn witnesses to the fury of lightning storms that rake the excessive nation.
Quickly, the pale cliffs encircling Goose Creek emerge beneath, glowing white towards the sweep of desert sky. From this overlook, the earth all of a sudden falls away, revealing the yawning canyon of the Left Fork. Standing sentinel past it rises the South Guardian Angel, its huge type commanding the horizon. Simply to the best, like a jagged fang tearing on the sky, thrusts North Guardian Angel—first glimpsed in profile, then slowly revealing its full, daunting stature because the path bends southward.
The path quickly slips from the crest of the plateau, narrowing onto a slender ridge that juts eastward earlier than funneling me right into a steep gully. The descent carries me into Potato Hole, the place open grassy meadows unfold like a secret chamber tucked deep throughout the excessive nation. Right here, thickets of timber hem within the views, guiding the trail alongside a slim valley towards a spring that also feeds an previous, rusting inventory tank—a relic of one other period.
Round it, the forest tells a narrative of change: the once-mighty aspens that guarded the spring now stand in ghostly silence, their bleached trunks like monuments to time’s passage. But beneath them, a brand new technology rises, their inexperienced shoots reaching skyward, desirous to reclaim the hole and breathe life again into its shadows.
From right here, the path swings south and begins its regular push again towards the excessive ridgetops, the trail rising with objective beneath my toes. The climb looks like a threshold, and as I crest the ridge, the land all of a sudden exhales—dropping simply sufficient to unveil one other sweeping vista, a grand stage set earlier than me.
The path clings to the rim and winds upward alongside the backbone of the ridge, threading via a sparse woodland of piñon, manzanita, and gnarled juniper. What had been a far-off rainstorm drifts nearer, its grey curtain sweeping the horizon, but I slip previous its attain and stay untouched.
Between the timber, the view unspools like a grand curtain parting: alabaster cliffs sculpted by the stressed headwaters of the Proper Fork of North Creek, the pale prow of South Guardian Angel rising like a ship’s sail above a maze of blood-red stone, and farther nonetheless, the Pine Valley Vary swelling broad and regular towards the far horizon. The land feels alive, huge and everlasting, and I’m however a fleeting determine strolling via its countless story.
Simply past, the path crests onto the summit of the plateau, and all of a sudden the horizon unfurls in each course. To the west lies Phantom Valley—a grand canvas of sandstone and time. The pale crowns of Navajo sandstone rise as fractured monoliths, weathered into domes and beehives by eons of wind and water. Beneath them, rust-red layers wealthy in iron plunge into shadowy fissures, carved by erosion’s affected person hand. Towering above all of it, Inclined Temple and Irvins Mountain stand tall, solemn guardians of the wild expanse. To the east stretches a kingdom of stone—an countless expanse of towering mesas and radiant white cliffs.
Clinging to the rim excessive above Phantom Valley, tucked beneath a cathedral of towering Ponderosa pines, lies campsite 5, my residence for the evening. With simply eight miles behind me, I shed my pack and sink into the second, grateful past phrases that I used to be in a position to commerce web site 6 for this throne within the sky. To the east, one other rain bathe drifts throughout the land, and for a fleeting breath of time, a rainbow arcs into being earlier than dissolving into mist. As night descends, the horizon erupts—sundown setting the world ablaze in a fury of shade, as if the heavens themselves have been portray for me alone.
As one other storm attracts nearer, I repair my rain fly and brace for its arrival. Not more than 5 minutes later, the wind howls, the rain hammers towards my tent partitions, but the sky spares my residence its lightning. Slowly, the fury wanes, the downpour softens, and I drift into sleep. It’s been a rare starting on the West Rim Path, and I can’t assist however think about what tomorrow will ship.
I wake to a panoramic dawn, the primary mild spilling throughout the crowns of West Temple, The Bishoprics, South Guardian Angel, and the distant peaks past. For ten, perhaps fifteen minutes, I sit in stillness, watching the glow cascade down into Phantom Valley beneath. With the air crisp within the low 40s, I lastly shake off the chilliness, break camp, and set out.
The path traces the canyon’s edge, providing one last, breathtaking glimpse into Phantom Valley earlier than surrendering to the cool shade of towering Ponderosa pines. From there, it bends southeast, dropping softly right into a shallow draw thick with oak, its path regularly guiding me towards the far southern rim of the Horse Pasture Plateau.
Inside half a mile, the earth appears to fall away: to the south, Heaps Canyon yawns in a chaotic tangle of sheer rifts and stone pillars. Swinging east alongside the rimrock, the views solely intensify—Behunin Canyon opening in an enormous cleft, completely framing the distant summits of the Mountain of the Solar and the Twin Brothers.
Throughout the nearer skyline, Mount Majestic and Cathedral Mountain sprawl in blocky splendor. Their flat summits are cloaked in a thick carpet of manzanita so uniform, so lush, that from a distance they resemble manicured lawns perched impossibly atop stone.
The path swings vast across the southern tip of the plateau, then zigzags downward, peeling away from the caprock till it settles onto the rim of the Navajo formation, the place it intersects with the Phone Canyon and West Rim Spring Trails. From the junction, I spot the mouth of Thriller Canyon, its rim guarded by towering stone pillars that preside over The Narrows far beneath.
From right here, the West Rim Path begins its true descent, chopping boldly throughout a sheer sandstone wall. Switchbacks, carved a long time in the past by the fingers of the NPS, steer me downward—one deliberate flip at a time—deeper into the canyon.
Close to the canyon flooring, I spherical a left-hand bend and slip right into a shaded gulch. Right here, the air noticeably cools and the forest shifts dramatically: Spruce and Douglas fir mingle with oak and bigtooth maple, a uncommon alpine group at such low elevation, nurtured by the gulch’s northern face and its deep reservoir of shade.
The path plunges onward, bending sharply to the best whereas colossal sandstone domes loom to my left. I cease, awestruck by their sheer immensity and odd type, earlier than urgent ahead throughout a sweeping expanse of slickrock—an open stage of stone the place the canyon reveals its magnificence in full.
The path bottoms out at a small bridge spanning a small aspect canyon, then begins one other steep switchback climb. To the north, the valley spreads vast, its flooring etched from windblown stone the place hardy pines cling stubbornly to cracks within the rock. Increased nonetheless, the Mountain of Thriller instructions the northern skyline, whereas to the south the sheer, wind-scoured cliffs of Cathedral Mountain loom shut at hand.
I energy via the final switchback, when all of a sudden Zion Canyon bursts into view. The silence I’ve carried for a day and a half—an unbroken solitude with out one other soul in sight—quivers on the sting of collapse. For forward lies one of many park’s crown jewels, a landmark so iconic and beloved that it attracts the lots like a pilgrimage, and my personal wilderness is about to provide solution to the roar of humanity.
100 yards later, the view explodes in glory: the Nice White Throne standing in stately energy on the far wall of Zion Canyon, whereas nearer, the blade of Angels Touchdown thrusts defiantly into the void.
Right here, the path forward begins to lose itself, fading into naked stretches of sandstone the place the trail vanishes altogether, leaving solely scattered cairns to information me throughout the open backbone of the ridge. The descent grows steeper, spiraling towards the bottom of Angels Touchdown till, finally, Scout Lookout is reached. And with it, the solitude shatters.
From Scout Lookout, the trail swings proper, slipping into Fridge Canyon. A pointy descent unspools into Walter’s Wiggles, a dizzying sequence of slim switchbacks chiseled into the stone. The air cools within the canyon’s depths, the place firs and maples flourish within the shadow of the cliffs. On the mouth of the cleft, the path plunges one last time, dropping to the ground of Zion Canyon.
The Virgin River greets me right here, its waters winding southward beside the trail, guiding the best way to the bridge that marks the Grotto trailhead—and the solemn, satisfying finish of the journey.
The West Rim was the whole lot I dreamed it could be—sweeping, wild, and unforgettable. Every mile revealed a brand new marvel, from towering stone cathedrals to hidden hollows the place silence reigned, and the surroundings left me awestruck at each flip. My time right here was a present, one I’ll carry with me and one I do know I’ll return to once more sometime. However the path doesn’t finish right here. Forward waits one other journey: I’m off to satisfy my dad, and collectively we’ll enterprise into Nice Basin Nationwide Park for 4 days of mountain climbing and backpacking beneath a model new sky. Till we meet once more, West Rim.
