These long buses featured convertible tops, which provided much better viewing of the park’s spectacular scenery. The road followed an early Mormon wagon route up the canyon and by 1925 extended to its current terminus, Temple of Sinawava.īuses were the best way to see Zion during the 1920s, when visitors rode 11-passenger Utah Parks Company buses to the park from Cedar City after a 35-mile railroad spur off the main line from Lund reached it in 1923. That same year construction of what is now the Zion Canyon Scenic Drive began in what was to become Zion National Park. Although the problem is steadily growing, overcrowding is nothing new to Zion as this photo of a more-than-full Weeping Rock parking lot on Labor Day Weekend in the 1970s illustrates, Zion National Park, Utah, 1970s | Photo courtesy of Zion National Park, St. By 1916, more tourists came to Yosemite in their cars than they did by rail like most visitors did in the earliest part of the century. Park administrators didn’t heed Bryce’s warning and just a few years later saw the results, which included trampled grass and shrubbery, scattered litter, traffic congestion, air pollution, the lack of adequate traffic control, overcrowded facilities and unhappy visitors, prompting them to come up with a management plan. “And if you were to realize what the result of the automobile will be in that incomparable valley, you will keep it out.” “If Adam had known what harm the serpent was going to work, he would have tried to prevent him from finding lodgment in Eden,” Bryce said. Great Britain’s Lord James Bryce, when he visited Yosemite in 1913, voiced his concerns about “horseless carriages” to park officials, who planned to lift the early ban on automobile travel. Early automobile enthusiasts visiting Yosemite had to chain their cars to a tree and leave their keys in the park office so their newfangled machines would not spook the most reliable form of transportation at the time – horses. George Newsīelieve it or not, several national parks banned cars when they first made their way into the national consciousness in the early 20th century. This historic photo shows Utah Parks Company employees posing in front of one of the company’s buses at the Temple of Sinawava, Zion National Park, Utah, late 1920s or early 1930s | Photo courtesy of Zion National Park archives, St. Today the system itself is fatigued trying to handle nearly double the visitors (4.5 million last year) it was designed to accommodate (2.42 million in 2000) with the exact same fleet of buses.ĭespite its current weaknesses, it was a groundbreaking concept and one current park managers are trying to tweak to keep the visitor experience it sought to improve still manageable. Case in point was a plan to reduce Yosemite National Park’s overcrowding in 2000, to which then Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt remarked, “We produced paper,” but developed “planning fatigue.” Overall, however, it is the story of a major National Park Service achievement for an agency notorious for making big plans and not carrying them out. Now, 18 years later, it sadly is inadequate, but the park would be chaos without it. The impacts of the shuttle after its implementation were immediate in many ways – a quiet canyon, no fights over parking spaces, significantly fewer cars up Zion Canyon (only those with accommodations at Zion Lodge), the resurgence of some wildlife species and less damage to roadside vegetation, which mitigated erosion potential. When the shuttle started, it was a lifesaver and nearly universally applauded – a way to protect the park’s resources as well as to improve the visitor experience. To mark the occasion, a bus similar to those of the past, borrowed from Yellowstone National Park, was prominently displayed. That catchphrase meant that the park was hearkening back to a time when buses were the best way to see Zion – the 1920s and 1930s. “Beginning today, we visit Zion Canyon by shuttle to restore the tranquility and power of the early days of Zion National Park.” “The congestion, noise, pollution, and associated resource damage suggested that we go ‘back to the future,’” the event’s program read. In this 2009 photo, buses pass each other at the Weeping Rock shuttle stop, Zion National Park, Utah, Ap| Photo by Reuben Wadsworth, St. FEATURE – At the grand opening of the Zion National Park transportation system on May 26, 2000, the program noted that the park was going “back to the future,” not because park managers wanted to emulate Marty McFly or because they were even fans of the popular 1980s movie trilogy.
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