- [Robert] To view Zion National Park is to gaze at history through millennia.

The Southern Utah treasure has been home to ancestral people, pioneer settlers, and explorers who championed its protection.

Today, it attracts millions of visitors each year, those first experiencing it and those compelled to return, all making the pilgrimage to the canyon sculpted by water, wind, and time.

When people first encounter Zion Canyon's Navajo Sandstone towers, words often fail.

They stand transfixed.

Artists through the decades have found ways to articulate their awe, creating works that capture a moment in time and endure like echoes through canyon walls.

"Call of the Canyon, Zion National Park."

- [Presenter] Funding for "Call of the Canyon, Zion National Park" comes from the Utah Department of Cultural & Community Engagement and the Utah State Legislature.

- My name is Thalia Guerrero from the Kanosh Band of the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah.

We acknowledge the ancestral keepers of the land we're about to explore, the Southern Paiute.

May we celebrate and discover their traditional homeland and recognize their continued presence in the area's culture and tradition.

- [Robert] A stroke of a paintbrush has the power to unlock the essence of Zion National Park, a point of entry illuminating its grandeur.

Oil painter Kate Starling lives just outside the park in Rockville, Utah.

Her early career as a geologist informs her passion as a landscape artist today.

- I did a lot of outdoor activities when I, starting in high school, backpacking and climbing and hiking and all that.

Every time that I went to someplace that was breathtakingly beautiful, it made me feel something, but I had no way of expressing it until I learned how to paint.

I think most of the ideas I have come from being outside.

I try to get out as much as I can because even though I might have an idea of what I want to paint, as I'm out there, even maybe set up to paint something that I went there specifically to paint, by being there and calming down and it makes me see and see in a different way.

The landscape is inspiring, and there are elements for me as a painter that I have to see, and one of them is just the way that light or sunlight hits the rock form.

So that's the consistent thing in my paintings, the way that the light defines the form, and you can't find a better place to have that with these big landforms.

Their geomorphology is such a huge part of that, and that's why I am really lucky to live in a place where there are so many places that are defined by the light hit something.

Every element makes the painting what it is, but there are certain things that I have to have to start with and that's light.

Zion Canyon is a difficult place to paint.

It's so beautiful and so inspiring to paint, sometimes it's hard to find a way in.

That's why a lot of what I paint is outside of the main canyon.

So the east side is good for that because you can get a lot of foreground and there's something in the middle ground and then you can actually see background.

Kolob Terrace are particularly good for that 'cause you can see miles and miles and miles of layers.

I think it's the foreground that helps you feel like you're inside.

For me, it helps me feel like I have a place to go, to go from here to there, and what I think I want is for people to feel like they can look at my painting and find themselves finding a way, a pathway to get to what's back there.

I think it makes my paintings more interesting to me, and hopefully from that, then interesting to other people, and in doing so, describing to them the importance of this country, the landscape that we have, hopefully a desire to keep it from being degraded.

I think it all goes together.

- [Robert] It happened over the course of 150 million years.

Streams eroded the solid rock of what would become Zion National Park.

The Virgin River, a tributary of the Colorado River, cut its way through, widening as walls sloughed off and washed away, leaving peaks, towers, mesas, and spires.

For nearly 8,000 years, water from the Virgin River has been the source for sustaining human life in the area, beginning with archaic humans, then the ancestral Puebloans, whose later descendants were the Southern Paiutes.

Cultural consultant Shanandoah Anderson of the Shivwits Band preserves the memory of her ancestors, sharing their stories with future generations.

- Water, to the Southern Paiutes, when our creation story began, it was nothing but water on this land.

In the whole world, it was water, and Ocean Woman was the only one, her daughter and the Wolf and the Coyote.

Those were the four creator beings that lived on the water.

And she created an island for them, and from there, from her skin, she would scratch her skin and all of the dead skin would fall onto the ground, and from that, she created the earth.

We came from the water to begin with.

And because Ocean Woman created the land, she is our Mother Earth, and so the water that flows through the land is her power like her blood veins.

And so her veins are our life.

- [Robert] In the 19th century, some members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, known as Mormons, migrated to Southern Utah from the Midwest, fleeing religious persecution and seeking a new place to settle.

- When my ancestors came here in the 1850s and 1860s, they encountered the Southern Paiute people, who were here and had been here for centuries.

Some historians feel there may have been as many as 1,000 people that lived along the Virgin River up in and toward the canyon.

- They were the Water People, the Pa'rus.

Pa'rus is the Virgin River, and they were Pa'rusits, which were farmers.

And they lived all along that and along the Santa Clara River.

Because they made first contact with the Mormon settlers, they were the first to die.

Zion is a special place for the Southern Paiutes, for all of the bands to go and to visit and to remember the people that once were.

- There aren't any remaining people from that Pa'rusit Band.

The last member of that band died in 1945, but there are many Southern Paiute who still live in this area and relate to this canyon in sacred ways.

- Hello, my name is Mars Jake.

I'm a roll member of the Shivwits Band from the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah, and I will be playing the Native American flute.

- We had to adapt and change our whole lifestyle.

We used to have Pueblos like the Hopis and all of the Pueblo tribes.

We had permanent homes, and the elder people would stay there and we would go migrate to the different seasonal areas to go gather.

But we always had a home to come home to.

Zion and along the Santa Clara River, those were permanent homes.

Of course, settlers come in and want the water, and so they wanted all of the Paiutes out of there.

We had the wickiups, which were just really simple homes that we could just leave behind.

We didn't have the teepees and the pueblos, where they could come and kill all of us and wipe the whole bands out, so we learned to always be on the go.

The settlers coming in and taking all of the water sources, it was a big struggle for us because we had no flowing waters anymore.

- Documenting the people that were here before the US became the US is incredibly important as part of history and understanding the evolution of where we are today.

- It was an education for me about the public lands, the importance of stewardship, the importance of knowledge about how we got here, who was here first, the whole historical perspective.

- The ancestral Puebloan people were here and then the Southern Paiute, and those people were, of course, here first.

The first white people to even come through were the trappers and, of course, even before that, Dominguez and Escalante in 1776.

But they never came into what we call the cliffs of Zion.

So on the maps of the middle 1800s, all there was was a big blank area in here, until John Wesley Powell got the funds to explore this area.

- [Robert] John Wesley Powell, an explorer, geologist, geographer, ethnologist, and Civil War veteran, led two expeditions down the Colorado River, surveying and mapping large tracts of land for the US Geological Survey.

Powell broadened understanding of the landscape, luring more people west.

- When John Wesley Powell came through exploring the area and actually mapping it out, he brought with him artists and photographers to record what was there.

Well, the photographers could only record in black and white.

But the painters could record in color.

One of the important ones that he brought with him was Thomas Moran.

- Of course, Thomas Moran was everywhere.

He was so important to the history of painting in the West.

First of all, Moran was in Yellowstone in 1871, and his "Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone" was used as one of the reasons to make Yellowstone a national park in 1872.

In 1873 then, he finally got to Zion with invitation from John Wesley Powell, and he went with John Hillers and a man named Colburn, who was the writer for the New York Times.

Thomas Moran painted beautiful watercolors during that time that he used for references for when he got back to his studio to paint monumental pieces.

- Those artists had a huge impact because what they did was they took the pictures back to Congress, and those people had not really seen this part of the country, but they'd heard about it, and now they heard a lot more about it.

- [Robert] Another artist who explored the area with John Wesley Powell was Frederick Dellenbaugh.

- He started off in 1872 going down the Grand Canyon with John Wesley Powell, which was no small feat.

That was a terrifying trip.

And 1871-1872, where he was the topographer, the geologist, and the artist.

So he did multiple tasks and kept a very good journal of his trip down that really harrowing and terrifying river.

- [Robert] Frederick Dellenbaugh would return three decades later to spend dedicated time in the canyon.

He was a Zion chronicler who could not only write but paint.

His work played an important role in opening the eyes of the country to the importance of setting aside Zion Canyon as a national park.

- He became enamored with the place to the point that 30 years later, he came back, and that was in the summer of 1903.

He spent several weeks going up into the canyon, sketching, taking photos, taking notes, and the result of that was this series of oil paintings.

- [Robert] Dellenbaugh's response to his first view of the temples and towers of the Virgin came in words as powerful and moving as any photograph or painting.

His article published in the January 1904 edition of Scribner's Magazine, and later that year, his paintings exhibited in the World's Fair in St. Louis played a key role in propelling Zion National Park into being.

- When he described Zion, he said, "There is almost nothing to compare to it.

Niagara has the beauty of energy, the Grand Canyon of immensity, the Yellowstone of singularity, the Yosemite of altitude, the ocean of power, this great temple, meaning Zion, eternity."

Hundreds of thousands of people read Scribner's Magazine.

It exposed the story of this place to so many people.

But the images in that article were all in black and white because of the technology at the time, and so people were getting a wonderful word picture of the place, but it wasn't until his paintings appeared in the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, that people then had their eyes opened to the color, the actual color.

- [Robert] In June 1909, Leo Snow, a native son of Southern Utah, sent a dispatch to Washington, DC.

He had been commissioned to a detailed survey, township 40 south, range 10 west from Salt Lake City.

- His report was supposed to be an objective report, but he got subjective just like anyone who comes to Zion does.

The last line of that report is, "I believe this place should be a national park."

- [Robert] Little more than a month later, the secretary of the interior placed a proclamation on the desk of President William Howard Taft, declaring 15,840 acres in Zion Canyon Mukuntuweap National Monument.

The president signed it the same day under the 1906 Antiquities Act, which empowers the United States president to protect public land for cultural, historic, and scientific purposes.

- When the national monument was declared, it was just assumed we will call this place what the Indigenous people here called it, and that was Mukuntuweap.

- The elder from Shivwits that told me, and he explained it really good.

He said that mukuntus is something coming up out of the ground.

Tuweap is earth, so it was the earth was coming up out of the ground, and it rose and made all of those tall cliffs.

So Mukuntuweap is just coming up out of the earth.

- That name stayed for those 10 years until it became a national park.

The National Park Service was actually established in 1916, and Stephen Mather was that founding director.

His assistant director was Horace Albright.

Mr. Albright is one of those people that we really should look to as one of the great fathers of Zion National Park.

Once he had a chance to come here and really get a sense of Zion, he went back to Washington and just helped move not only the work of the Utah congressional delegation, but all the other efforts.

And it was in 1919, the Mukuntuweap National Monument then became Zion National Park.

The word Zion to the Latter-day Saint people has all kinds of deep meaning, but it has meaning to all Christian people and to the Judeo-Christian history.

The interpretation most used here is a place of refuge, a place of sanctuary, but also a place where God is near, which is basically what those early Latter-day Saints were looking for at the time was a place of peace and sanctuary.

- [Robert] Horace Albright of the National Park Service suggested that Mukuntuweap might be difficult to pronounce.

He noted the local people referred to the area as Zion and changed the name to Zion National Monument.

In 1919, the monument became Zion National Park.

- I love both names, and I actually find myself using Mukuntuweap as much as I do Zion simply because that's what this place was called for centuries.

- [Robert] The heart of Zion National Park is its expansive canyon, soaring from 3,666 feet at Coalpits Wash to 8,726 feet at Horse Ranch Mountain.

Variations in elevation encourage biodiversity, where bighorn sheep wander among juniper-studded cliffs and turkey and mule deer graze on the forested plateaus.

Zion is home to dozens of species of mammals, reptiles, and amphibians and hundreds of species of birds.

- We acknowledge everything in life.

The wind that's here, the wind is something that flows by you.

So in sign language, we acknowledge that the wind is there.

We acknowledge the sun, we acknowledge the moon.

We acknowledge and we're grateful for the plants.

So we're a simple people.

We didn't have a lot of ceremonies, but we did give thanks for everything that's here today.

- [Robert] The diversity of flora spans the landscape's extremes, from desert plants to ferns, orchids, and primroses in the hanging gardens.

For the 1920s, changes were happening in the park.

Workers blazed trails and added chain rail supports on steep hikes.

While the canyon was still inaccessible to the new automobile and the roadway for wagons and buggies was rough, plans were underway to improve road access.

- West Rim Trail and the Walter's Wiggles and that Angels Landing and all of that, all of that was done in the 1920s.

The original park superintendent, Walter Ruesch, was very proactive in getting a lot of those things done.

If we look at history, you realize the '20s was a can-do decade when so much was happening.

And if you dreamed it, you could do it.

- [Robert] President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal created jobs for unemployed workers during the Great Depression.

Across the country, programs, including the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration, helped accelerate the development of the National Park System infrastructure, including Zion National Park's roads, trails, and lodges.

- During the Great Depression, this all was under the New Deal under Roosevelt.

One of the first programs to start was the CCC, the Civilian Conservation Corps.

That was the program that actually put people back to work.

Zion had three camps of 200 people in each camp, so roughly 600 people working in the park.

And those people were tasked to build roads, to build rock barriers along the sides of roads, to build flood mitigation on the Virgin, and so there were a lot of people working at the time.

- Many of those things are still extant on the landscape right now.

We consider those historic structures, and they receive preservation treatments periodically, but they're still used by the public.

Their work was just extraordinary, all in that rustic architecture, which fits obviously with the park.

- The best of America came out of that WPA project to preserve these areas.

And I think people feel that.

I think they feel the quality in the sign, when you come into Zion, that was done by WPA artists or those walls along the road that are so beautifully done.

That's craftsmanship that you don't see these days.

Nothing's done as well as that.

It's not only the canyon, but it's also this sense of what America did and how beautifully they did it.

- The CCC were indispensable and wonderful and amazing in the infrastructure of the park.

You still see and experience, and a big part of the park experience is what the CCC did in the 1930s.

- We had an artist, Ranch Kimball, who was trained in Salt Lake City, then trained in New York.

He worked in Manhattan and Chicago.

And he came back to the Depression, didn't have work.

So he found work in Zion, painting the things that were happening with the Civilian Conservation Corps.

He did a painting of flood control on the Virgin River.

I love paintings where you paint something where people are in it and they're doing something and you get a sense of what's happening in the canyon, and they were building stone fences to mitigate the flooding.

I'm sure there were a lot of flash floods that came through there and destroyed things.

So it shows the men, I think four people on one side of the fence and four on the other, and they're just stacking up rocks and working, and that's what they're doing.

He did another painting of the entrance to Zion.

There's a building where somebody would take tickets or where you would hand out maps to people who were visiting Zion.

And that was very patterned and had very muted tones.

It was brilliantly done.

You had the feeling that it had modern texture, and the trees were painted in a very rounded modern way.

But it was nice that we have those anecdotal works from that time.

An interesting artist is Chester Don Powell.

He ultimately lost his job like almost all artists did at the time and had to go to work for the WPA.

He was sent to Berkeley where he started doing signs for the national parks, and he did 14 major posters for 13 parks.

And he did the iconic symbols.

So it was Old Faithful in Yellowstone, the Great White Throne in Zion.

And so when you looked at it, even from afar, which oftentimes you're doing, if it's a poster's up on the side of the road or something, you would see Old Faithful, or you would see the Great White Throne instantly.

So he, in very few strokes, was able to make it understood that this is what that he was portraying.

In a way, early branding.

- [Robert] Leading up to the Great Depression, the California artist Maynard Dixon enjoyed success illustrating books and magazines, revealing the expansive American West.

- Maynard Dixon was really successful in California.

He married Dorothea Lange, the famous photographer, but by 1933, neither of them had work.

It was the height of the Depression.

So they both decided to travel and spend the summer in Zion.

At that point, Maynard Dixon was really healthy.

He could hike up to these really high vistas and paint, and he loved to do the bird's-eye view looking down into a canyon.

But he did it really well.

He also liked painting at night.

So he painted a beautiful moonlight scene of a wall that's very monochromatic with lots of light blues, dark blues, but really only one color.

That summer in Zion in 1933, he produced 40 paintings.

It was an incredible body of work, among his best work because he was at the height of his prowess at the time.

- [Robert] Less than a decade later, Dixon built a home in Mount Carmel Junction, Utah and lived there with his second wife to be near Zion National Park.

The stunning vistas and seemingly endless skies would inspire the paintings of his final years.

- He and Dorothea Lange divorced a couple of years later, and he married Edith Hamlin, and they moved to Mount Carmel just outside of Zion.

- It's just awesome how a place like Zion and our national parks, how they inspire art, and whether it's the written word or the painted piece or music as well and the music that Hal Cannon and 3hattrio create here in the canyon, it's just an extension of that.

It's art that comes right out of the walls of the canyon, and it's just amazing.

- [Robert] A descendant of the first Mormon pioneer settlers in Utah, musician and folklorist Hal Cannon has performed with the group 3hattrio across the US and Europe.

Now he resides in Virgin, Utah and draws inspiration from the surrounding desert.

- We call it American desert music 'cause we didn't feel like we fit into roots or Americana or folk quite.

Our violinist is a classical trained guy, and our bass percussion guy is a reggae player, Caribbean player, and I'm sort of a cowboy folk guy.

So when we play, we feel like we're really influenced by where we live.

Our songs are about life here.

And so we said why don't we just call it American desert music?

Just living in a place that's so awe-inspiring, it's hard to explain because when you're in it, you feel it, but then when you leave it, you know that you had this experience.

The first year that I lived here, I'd take out my banjo every day and I'd just look out the window and I'd improvise for the moment.

And I'd never done anything like that, and it was such a revelation of my soul coming out in music, and it just changed my life.

- Our national parks are really part of our national heritage.

Quite a unique system of protected areas, historical sites, recreation areas, and some of the best of the best landscapes in the world exists within our national parks.

And they're important because they are these vestiges of history, culture, and protected areas, protected ecosystems that are still intact.

- The National Park Service is made up of over 400 units, and that's not just national parks like Zion.

There's a lot of different spaces that people come to to not only see their story, but live someone else's story.

- We have two things that we're focused principally on, and this comes from our congressional mandate, which is first and foremost to protect the park resources and allow the public the opportunity to enjoy them.

- [Robert] For visitors, Zion Canyon offers hiking in the Narrows and the challenging Subway area.

Ascend the switchbacks to Observation Point and see the eternal spire of the Sundial, the red wash table of the Altar of Sacrifice against the cloud-swept horizon, or dare to brave the rigorous hike to Angels Landing where sheer cliffs hug the chain-led trail to the apex and its stunning view.

- Most of the visitors to Zion, their aim is to go up canyon.

They'll start at Canyon Junction and take the shuttles up, and they're gonna want to see the Great White Throne and the Temple of Sinawava and the Court of the Patriarchs and Big Bend and the places that you'll see on the calendars or places like that.

And of course those areas are the most crowded.

- Yeah, Walter's Wiggles was tough.

Just decided to push through and then made it to the top, which was great.

Definitely huffing and puffing at the end, but now we're gonna continue on and we'll see what happens.

Definitely a tough one for one of my first hikes ever, but good, yeah.

Excited to finish it.

- I'm just so happy that our government sets them aside, like Yosemite and Yellowstone and Zion.

And Zion, I think it's wonderful because there's places here for everybody.

I was here with a older couple and we took a hike to Emerald Pool, and it was perfect 'cause they could do it and it was fun.

And I just think it's a great, great park.

- Because who has a backyard like this?

And for future generations to be able to come and be exposed to this kind of wilderness and nature, I think that's extremely important.

- I think we're learning more and more about how to be more inclusive, but it really has come to the forefront over the past few years.

And how are we systematically engaging diverse populations and representation of who America is today?

- The Concrete to Canyons was a grant that was awarded to Zion to bring urban youth into the national parks, to introduce them to our beautiful public lands.

Rainbow Dreams Academy at the time was about 95% African American.

It was 70-plus percent free and reduced lunch.

And so a number of the kids who were in the school had never had an opportunity to be a part of their neighborhood parks, and to have the opportunity to come to a national park, cross state lines on this wonderful bus, and an introduction to this park was just amazing.

This was a life-altering experience for me.

- [Robert] Today, more than four million people a year from across the United States and around the world visit Zion National Park.

The National Park Service is charged with maintaining this place and welcoming an ever-growing number of visitors.

Its mission is to sustain these canyons unimpaired for generations to come.

- Visitation, it has increased.

However, from basically 2010 to 2018, it doubled.

So when you think about that, that's a lot within 10 years.

And it's continued, the trajectory has continued.

- Zion National Park, about 90% of the land area is backcountry and formally designated wilderness, and the remainder is what we call frontcountry or transition between front and backcountry.

And in the frontcountry areas, this is where, nearly all the visitors will be in that frontcountry area at some point in time, particularly Zion Canyon.

- We see the park now with visitation increasing, and it's been on a continuum, right?

That the parking lots are full early morning.

So when we think of the balance of trying to come up canyon and get that experience, having our shuttles versus having hundreds of cars potentially, and just the access.

- And so the shuttle system, which was instituted in 2000, has been absolutely essential to providing that access.

As we're looking at how do we balance that visitor experience, we have to remember that we have animals, plants, and soils that can be damaged with overuse, and so we have to balance that carefully.

- What we have in Zion, it is a huge challenge.

The word in the Act is unimpaired.

(laughs) That's a tough word.

When you've got 4 1/2 million people coming into a canyon as small as Zion, keeping it unimpaired for future generations is a huge challenge.

- When you're not able to escape the crowding and the noise and you have that expectation of some form of escape, then I think that does negatively impact a visitor experience and probably inhibits one's ability to fully experience the values that the park has been set aside for.

Overall, the visitor experience is what you make it, and generally when people go to parks and if it's crowded, oh well, we're here, we're experiencing Angels Landing or we're hiking up to Weeping Rock.

We're still seeing these places we've always wanted to see.

- What's amazing to me is that people know that it's gonna be crowded, but they still come.

They still want to come and see it, maybe more so because it's so crowded.

- People do come here with the list of the things that have to be done.

Maybe that's okay.

You don't have to actually be in the boundary of the park to see it.

Because from a long way away, you can still see the West Temple or Mount Kinesava, and the places you can go to hike and see that are absolutely beautiful too.

I think there's a lot of diversity, and people can find what they want.

- I could just say, well, when do they all go home?

But you know what?

They're discovering Zion for the first time like I did.

- There are a number of challenges.

Certainly the issue with increasing visitation, needing to manage that more intensively than we ever have in the past.

Development around the parks, certainly air quality and night skies and soundscapes are not confined to the boundaries of the park, so these are regional issues.

- If we do more regional planning, there are a range of experiences within a region.

Some places are gonna be crowded, and we're just gonna say, you know, those places need to be hardened and figured out for crowds.

That's the way it's gonna be.

But if we have the range of experiences that we can still offer, I think that's the best way to go.

But if we continually bump crowds to crowds to crowds, then people will think that you go to a national park and you experience a crowd.

And we'll have lost the memory of what solitude might be like or a dark night sky that's quiet or being on a trail alone and seeing a random buck go by or whatever.

We'll lose that forever.

- Even now with the traffic and the crowds that are there, I know how to get away from the crowds in Zion, and I have my places where I can go where I know there's gonna be peace and quiet.

- [Robert] Seeking peace and quiet in Zion for nearly 40 years, painter Roland Lee records his discoveries with pencil and watercolor.

A longtime art teacher, his works reflect his personal interaction outdoors among canyons and peaks.

- I've always done art all my life.

As a child, I drew on everything, and so art has been my thing really.

I never assumed that I would be an artist for a living, but it did turn out that way.

I never verbally said that, but I did have some people start introducing me as the painter of Zion National Park.

And I'm going, like, yay, I've made my mark.

But I've probably done over 600 paintings of Zion.

En plein air is just a French term meaning out in the outdoors, under the sky, open sky.

So much fun to be out there and have that experience.

Even if you're a terrible painter makes no difference.

So being outdoors and sketching and drawing while you're out, you remember everything about that place because you've invested all of your senses in it.

For me, I just love the peace and the solitude, the serenity.

We've traveled all over the world, of course, to paint, but this place is home for us, the Zion National Park.

I never tire of being here, feeling the peacefulness of the place, the magnitude of it or the magnificence, and then also the solitude and the intimacy is just beautiful.

We owe a lot of this to the fact that those artists who came before let the rest of the nation know that this is a place that needs to be preserved, and so we have that same aim today.

And we have an obligation to be good stewards of that land for the next people that come along.

- [Robert] The majesty of Zion National Park draws out the storytelling in Waddie Mitchell.

He co-founded the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering.

His composition "Queen Zion" implores visitors to be stewards of Zion.

Today's decisions impact the park for generations to come.

Kevin and Stacy McLaws have operated Zion Mountain Ranch outside the park since 1999.

Today, they are collaborating with the Park Service to develop property outside Zion's east entrance to help relieve pressure on the town of Springdale.

Their plans respect the natural landscape and include a conservation-focused visitor center to be managed in cooperation with the Park Service.

- Yeah, East Zion Initiative really was generated by the McLaws family that owned property along Highway 9 at our east entrance area.

Their concern for an area that's relatively undeveloped and how to do some economic development, but yet can serve those park-like values that we see both outside the park and then inside the park.

- On a gateway area, what happens outside the park really affects the inside of the park.

How do all those individuals stakeholders outside of the park in the local area, how do they contribute or create those challenges?

You've got a gateway community like West Yellowstone or Springdale or Gatlinburg.

You have a lot of people that are in those communities that spend advertising dollars, and they more or less market the key attractions, the Angels Landing, for instance.

We have to come up with creative ways to expand the experience.

You can't cram any more people into the main canyon and have it be a good experience.

And that can't happen within the silo of the national park boundary.

It has to happen with a community approach, and that's the East Zion Initiative.

- They're trying to create more of an outdoor recreation appeal on that side of the park with a visitor center and more information about hiking and biking not only within the park boundaries, but adjacent to the park.

So it's really spreading the value of what the park brings to the community to a more regional level, and I think that's really encouraging.

- Creates the trails, the electric shuttles, and then all the accommodations.

Preserves aspects of the environment that you want, like the night sky, the soundscapes.

All of that is something that the park has to rely on the community to join arms and help out and not create the liabilities that have been created in a lot of gateways.

- When you think about it, having a major gateway to a national park that's 100 years old that hasn't been developed and having a chance to kind of start from scratch, I think is a rare opportunity.

- And there's a lot of partnerships that are working together to make that happen.

And nothing is happening in isolation, so a lot of feedback into what might be best for those private lands, public lands.

And I think that's when you see more of a win-win scenario.

- [Jeff] We're working with the local landowners, with Kane County, the Office of Tourism, UDOT.

The list goes on and on of partners that are engaged in this.

And everyone sees the opportunity, and let's make it right, let's do this right.

- Special places do not remain that way by accident, and this is one of those places.

It's not gonna remain that way by accident.

People just do their thing outside of the park, and the park tries to do its thing inside of the park.

I think the time has come that we all get together and think a different way.

You look at the exposure of Zion National Park, it's a heck of a stage to exemplify something.

It's millions of people and it's every year, and you stretch that forward into generations, it quickly becomes hundreds of millions of people are impacted one way or another by what they see here, feel here, experience.

And so it has a far reach to impact a lot of people.

- If someone didn't care about Zion National Park, I'd wonder if they actually had a soul.

Anyone comes to this place and experiences it, they understand how important it is that we sustain and preserve Zion National Park.

The fact that that place is there is because it was set aside as a national park 100 years ago, this is part of my inheritance as an American.

- I often feel that Zion is now my spiritual place.

I can come, relax, enjoy nature, enjoy just the scenery.

I call them divine wonders.

It spurs that inquisitive part of your being.

- For us, it's beyond special, and that's why we want to see other people enjoy it and have a good time and come here and not do damage to it, but preserve it for future generations.

- Stewardship comes in a variety of forms, but constant education and reminders throughout a visitor experience in how to best see the park and what we can do to make this place as special as it is today for your grandchildren and their grandchildren, developing that appreciation for what the parks stand for.

- Developing new stewards of our public lands.

Allowing kids to understand they do have access.

They can enjoy it just like everyone else, and there are opportunities for them to learn.

There are people in the parks to help them learn about it.

They can ask questions of the rangers.

- Our promise to the generations is that you'll be able to come here, have an experience as a newlywed, and then come back with your grandkids and have that same experience and to have that replicable generational experience.

- I think our basic mission doesn't change.

Again, conservation of the resources themselves and making those resources accessible to the public.

That's our bottom line.

But we have a number of challenges ahead of us.

Obviously, things like climate change are going to impact resources.

How we manage that is difficult to contemplate right now, but we're learning a lot in terms of climate science and those kinds of things.

Managing visitors.

It's always going to be a world-class resource.

There's no question about it.

People from all over the world know about the park and dream of having an opportunity to come.

We definitely want to make that available to folks, but we also need to think about that visitor experience.

We don't want to diminish the sights and the sounds of nature.

We want those night skies to be high quality.

So, again, reaching that balance is a challenge, and those are things that we're looking at right now.

- [Robert] The future of Zion National Park rests with those who will continue to broaden accessibility, honor the First Peoples of the land, and protect this unparalleled gem for generations to come.

- So you truly have to look at these spaces as not just parks, but very special.

Some people consider them their churches or they consider them that sanctuary that they go to.

- Places like Zion, I think we can all come together and know that this is our inheritance, this is our legacy.

This is our duty to make sure that our children and their children's children and generations to come will be able to have the same kind of sacred experiences that we do.

- [Presenter] Funding for "Call of the Canyon, Zion National Park" comes from the Utah Department of Cultural & Community Engagement and the Utah State Legislature.