Zion Park Quotes

If nature has a soul, it feels like it must be bound up in the bark and sap of our forests. There, older, wiser sentinels stand in silent judgment. Not just the ancient sequoias and redwoods—even regular pine and birch trees outlast us. Every tree is a witness tree—they see how we spend our time on earth, what we take and what we give.

It occurred to me that part of the reason I’d seen so much debate about the year’s first sunrise, and not its last sunset, was that our beginnings always seem more important than our endings. In life, we can often control how things start. Endings are elusive and amorphous and uncertain.

Former Park Service director Jon Jarvis has said that climate change is “fundamentally the greatest threat to the integrity of our national parks that we have ever experienced.

In the national parks, all are just Americans.” Visit a park, he says, and “Perhaps for the first time, one realizes the common America—and loves it.

I don’t know what, if anything, comes after this life. But I can tell you this: If there is a Heaven, I bet it looks a lot like Yosemite.

Our ability to see a value in preserving life that extends beyond our immediate self-interest may be what makes us most human.

To sit home, read one’s favorite paper, and scoff at the misdeeds of the men who do things is easy, but it is markedly ineffective,” he wrote. “It is what evil men count upon the good men’s doing.

...tell me again about how you used to watch movies in a car. It sounded so cool to me. And so, on one of the last nights of that summer, my parents decided to re-create a drive-in movie in our driveway.

We drove through Utah, the Crossroads of the West, bordered by all the mountain states, except for Montana. Laying rooted in the backcountry we saw some of the most awe-inspiring groove gulleys we’d ever seen, but it was the intensity of Zion National Park that held our attention; The red rock backdrop dazzled us as brutal rapids nose-dived off the cliffs into pools surrounded by abundant green piñon-juniper forests and fiery peach and coral sandstone canyons carved by flowing rivers and streams. It would honestly not have surprised me to see Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid plunging from an unforgiving precipice into the river below.

Recently, we've started to think more about how the bright lights from our screens are affecting our bodies. But I wonder how the lights from our cities might be affecting our souls. As people, we arrived on the planet with a "dark mode" pre-installed, but for the past century, we've been turning it off. In an effort to see our own world more clearly, we have obscured our view of the other worlds and—quite possibly—of the divine.

I wanted a national park kind of love. Something that felt different and special compared to everything else surrounding it. Some thing that was fun and inspiring. Some thing that felt like it was worth guarding and protecting forever.

When advocating for the sequoias, Muir once wrote, “God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand storms; but he cannot save them from sawmills and fools; this is left to the American people.

So abundant and novel are the objects of interest in a pure wilderness that unless you are pursuing special studies it matters little where you go, or how often to the same place,” he wrote. “Wherever you chance to be always seems at the moment of all places the best.

Humans are by far the most destructive species, but we're also the only species that has ever worked together to ensure other forms of life don't go extinct. [...] Our ability to see a value in preserving life that extends beyond our immediate self-interest may be what makes us most human.

no longer think there’s one specific path that leads to enlightenment or salvation. I don’t think Muir did, either. Except, perhaps, for the path of the trail itself. “The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness,” he once wrote. I don’t know what, if anything, comes after this life. But I can tell you this: If there is a Heaven, I bet it looks a lot like Yosemite.

Are you trying to solve customer experience problems without understanding your customer experience ecosystem? You might as well be air-dropping butterflies into Zion National Park. You’re going to spend a whole lot of money and end up right where you started.

President Woodruff told of an experience of being prompted by the Spirit. He was sent by the First Presidency to “gather all the Saints of God in New England and Canada and bring them to Zion” (in Conference Report, April 1898, 30). He stopped at the home of one of the brethren in Indiana and put his carriage in the yard, where he and his wife and one child went to bed while the rest of the family slept in the house. Shortly after he had retired for the night, the Spirit whispered, warning him, “Get up, and move your carriage.” He got up and moved the carriage a distance from where it had stood. As he was returning to bed, the Spirit spoke to him again: “Go and move your mules away from that oak tree.” He did this and then retired once again to bed. Not more than thirty minutes later, a whirlwind caught the tree to which his mules had been tied and broke it off at the ground. It was carried a hundred yards through two fences. The enormous tree, which had a trunk five feet in circumference, fell exactly upon the spot where his carriage had been parked. By listening to the promptings of the Spirit, Elder Woodruff had saved his life and the lives of his wife and child (see Wilford Woodruff, Leaves from My Journal [1881], 88). That same

In letter after letter, misfortunes great and small are blamed on the wood. "I don't know how much I buy that," Matt [Smith] said.."If you're the kinda person who would take something from a national park, maybe you just have poor judgement skills.

Shelton Johnson may just be the best park ranger who ever lived.

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer give strength to body and soul alike,” Muir wrote in The Yosemite.

A volcanic eruption in Colorado set all of this in motion thirty-five million years ago. Then some rare combination of wind and weather and streams and sediment created the dunes.

Indicator species are the canaries in the coal mine—they remind us of the bigger picture.

Since 1835, the Exit Glacier has retreated, on average, about forty-six feet per year,” she said. “And more recently, say 2014, it retreated 151 feet. So a huge increase in the rate of retreat.

By the end of the summer, Exit Glacier was measured to have retreated an estimated 262 feet—the most significant year ever recorded.

The parks are our indicator species. Living laboratories where we can see—sometimes in something as simple as a photograph—that trouble is coming. If glaciers continue to melt at their current rate, then one day soon entire Alaskan villages will be underwater. People are already dying from wildfires caused, in part, by the longer, hotter summers brought on by climate change.

Never as well planned or resource-conscious as the trails planned by the park, social trails are created when hikers, frustrated with crowds on the main path, find their own way. Unfortunately, in the process, they trample vegetation and damage the fragile soil. Bryce Canyon, a park created by erosion over millions of years, is very vulnerable to the type of erosion caused by a summer of people walking where they shouldn’t.

Black Canyon is often far deeper than it is wide—it’s a sheer drop down to the bottom.

Like that stolen wood at Petrified Forest, once a piece of you has been taken, it can’t be put back.

This was the first national park that was set aside by the National Park Service, by the people of the United States, for what is alive,” Alan explained

The Everglades is the only place in the world where alligators and crocodiles coexist in the wild.

At the park’s dedication ceremony, President Harry Truman promised the crowd that “in this park we shall preserve tarpon and trout, pompano, bear, deer, crocodiles and alligators—and rare birds of great beauty. We shall protect hundreds of all kinds of wildlife which might otherwise soon be extinct.

In the history of the Endangered Species Act, less than 2 percent of all species that have ever been listed have been delisted.

Puzzled at first, the researchers eventually discovered the foxes were being killed by golden eagles.

Death Valley is the largest national park in the contiguous United States. Its massive boundary encompasses more than 3.3 million acres, stretching across the California/Nevada border.

Behind the fence is the only known habitat of the Devils Hole pupfish, one of the rarest fish in the world. Against all odds, this one-inch-long, bright-blue fish has managed to eke out an existence in a puddle in the middle of the desert.

There’s a well-known John Muir quote—“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.

We need places such as Everglades National Park where we may be more keenly aware of our Creator’s infinitely varied, infinitely beautiful, and infinitely bountiful handiwork,” Truman said

The conservation of all that lives within the park, Truman argued, was necessary “for the conservation of the human spirit.

Yet this glorious valley might well be called a church, for every lover of the great Creator who comes within the broad overwhelming influences of the place fails not to worship as he never did before.

But there will be no anniversary, because today, instead of walking down an aisle, I will be hiking down a trail.

On any given night, the same constellations, planets, and galaxies pass over all three places. The sky is what links us together. It’s a concept I first learned from the renowned animated astronomer Fievel Mousekewitz.

Even though the tall redwoods are constantly at risk of toppling over, they rarely do, thanks to a little help from their friends. The trees lock their roots together under the soil and hold each other tight. That may be their most human quality of all. Like us, the trees are stronger together than they are on their own.

Nature, God, Creator, Beauty—they’re all used to describe an entity greater than ourselves.

Lynn Harris, the Provo attorney representing Jones, had served as a Scoutmaster himself. 'My first allegation in the suit was, who was the idiot who decided to take 40 Scouts to the top of Angels Landing? They are kids. They do stupid things.

Quiet can be difficult to quantify—it's easier to think of loud in relative terms. A rock concert is louder than a string quartet; a jet engine is louder than a car engine; a couple have sex on the other side of the hotel wall last night was louder than my TV, so I made my TV louder.

The newly formed United States offered both opportunity and instability. Citizens were afforded the chance to move, experiment, succeed, and, just as often, fail within a nation that prioritized the individual over the community.

Humans are by far the planet’s most destructive species, but we’re also the only species that has ever worked together to ensure other forms of life don’t go extinct. The

John Muir quote—“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.

The etchings must have had some spiritual significance. Whatever afterlife the Fremont may have believed in, in that moment they came back to life for me.

To know that there was beauty all around me, even if I couldn’t see it.

I guess it’s kind of like the subtle difference between a state park and a national park. State parks are great, right? But once you know places like Yosemite are out there, then it’s hard not to want something that feels like that. I want a relationship that feels like a national park.

All I knew was that, whenever it came time to stop wandering, I wanted a national park kind of love. Something that felt different and special compared with everything else surrounding it. Something that was fun and inspiring. Something that felt like it was worth guarding and protecting forever.

She smiled at his flirtations. “Have I ever told you how incorrigible you are?” He chuckled. “Several times. But I do have some redeemable qualities. Don’t you think?” She kissed him lightly on the lips. “You sure do.” “Name one.” “Well!” Amelia tapped her forehead as if to think. Do you mean besides being so irresponsible that it drives me crazy? Well, I have to say that you’re not bad to look at. That why I keep you around.” A smile was playing at the corners of Rick’s lips and a mischievous glint appeared in his eyes. Without warning, he pulled her into his arms and gave a kiss to remember.

If you’ve never been, I encourage you to visit and tour the sandstone slot canyons in Zion National Park, where the history of Earth is laid out before you, fine layer upon fine layer, like the pages of a book.

Zion National Park is a place where history deepens one's appreciation for beauty of the canyon. Visitors marvel at the pioneering spirit of those who created an oasis in the arid desert. In many languages, tourists note their fascination with the engineering of the tunnel and wonder how trails to remote reaches of the park were constructed. Even when water was scarce and prospects were dim. early Mormon pioneers remained vigilant in their quest to settle at the mouth of Zion Canyon because their leader Brigham Young, told them that the time would come when 'Hundreds of thousands will pass through your canyon and they will need you.' The majestic wonders of Zion existed long before humans ever set foot in the canyon, yet it was only through ingenuity and foresight of the area's early settlers that the canyon was opened to the world.

Mormon pioneer Isaac Behunin is generally credited with giving the name "Zion" to the canyon. Zion was a term used by Latter-day Saints to describe a place of peace where they could gather to worship God.... When Isaac Behunin arrived in Springdale in 1862 he is said to have exclaimed, ' These are the Temples of God, built without the use of human hands, A man can worship God among these great cathedrals as well as in any man-made church--this is Zion.

Mormon history was far more complicated and divisive than I had come to—been led to—believe.

It's easy to feel small when looking up at the constellations. That night in Arizona, while standing alone in a massive field of cacti under a field of stars, I certainly thought of my own insignificance in the universe. But I also thought about how my view of the Milky Way that night came courtesy of an entire city working together. And that knowledge made me feel big. Tucson hadn't just found a way to show off the stars - it had sown that seemingly inconsequential actions, done by enough people, can make an enormous difference.

Dilution is the solution to pollution.