#005 - Zion, Part 1: The History | The Virgin River, Navajo Sandstone & the Fight Over the Name
Wildlands News Podcast — National Parks, Public Lands & Survival
How a thin silver thread of a river carved a canyon 2,600 feet deep through solid sandstone — and how that canyon went from an unknown monument with an unpronounceable name to one of the most-visited parks in America. This kicks off the Wildlands Zion trilogy, built the way the land was built: stone first, then the people.
Host Shawn Spainhour, a former Army officer, traces the full arc — the 180-million-year-old Jurassic dune field that hardened into Navajo Sandstone, the uplift and flash floods that let the Virgin River cut the canyon, and 8,000 years of human history layered on top: Archaic hunters, the Ancestral Puebloans and Fremont who farmed and left rock art before vanishing around 1300, and the Southern Paiute who named it Mukuntuweap — "straight up land." Then the Mormon settlers who renamed it Zion, John Wesley Powell's survey, the paintings that made the East want to come, the Park Service's frank decision to swap a Paiute name for a more marketable one in 1918, and the audacious tunnel blasted straight through the mountain.
This is Part 1 of the Wildlands Zion series. Part 2 covers the visit; Part 3 covers where to stay.
Wildlands — know the land before you reach it.
More description
How a thin silver thread of a river carved a canyon 2,600 feet deep through solid sandstone — and how that canyon went from an unknown monument with an unpronounceable name to one of the most-visited parks in America. This kicks off the Wildlands Zion trilogy, built the way the land was built: stone first, then the people.
Host Shawn Spainhour, a former Army officer, traces the full arc — the 180-million-year-old Jurassic dune field that hardened into Navajo Sandstone, the uplift and flash floods that let the Virgin River cut the canyon, and 8,000 years of human history layered on top: Archaic hunters, the Ancestral Puebloans and Fremont who farmed and left rock art before vanishing around 1300, and the Southern Paiute who named it Mukuntuweap — "straight up land." Then the Mormon settlers who renamed it Zion, John Wesley Powell's survey, the paintings that made the East want to come, the Park Service's frank decision to swap a Paiute name for a more marketable one in 1918, and the audacious tunnel blasted straight through the mountain.
This is Part 1 of the Wildlands Zion series. Part 2 covers the visit; Part 3 covers where to stay.
Wildlands — know the land before you reach it.
Listen elsewhere
Available Results
Generated results are saved to your library for reuse and search.