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Home of the Gods

Zion greets you gently with swirling pink and white rocks sculpted into checkerboards and whipped cream fantasies. Canyon walls sparkle with falling water.

Side canyons disappear around mysterious corners in rocky cliffs, beckoning you to follow them to secret treasure. The narrow red road twists and turns and doubles back on itself as you wind through vista after vista.

Then, just ahead of you, is a solid mountain. Until 1930, that was the end of the road. But construction of a 1.8-mile tunnel through the mountain had begun in 1927. When the tunnel was completed, it had already become part of the new public works programs that would help take the United States out of the Great Depression. (Note: Going through this tunnel today may still be the best prescription for anyone needing to come out of their own depression!)

Don't be distracted by the gasps of your passengers as you proceed through the tunnel. Occasional windows are giving them a fleeting glimpse of what is to come. When you emerge, you're near the top of one of Zion's vast arenas stretching out over several miles around and below you. And you're ready to wind and twist your way down, down, down, to the very bottom.

This is what the ancients called the Home of the Gods. And although they built advanced settlements all over the surrounding region, you'll find barely a trace of a home, a rock carving, or any other remains of them here. How come? Was this truly, as legend has it, the home of their deities? Was that why they called it by a word that means simply "come out the same way that you go in?"

Their successors, the European settlers, stood equally in awe. They named one of the towering, sheer cliffs the Great White Throne. From there, they ventured up the North Fork of the Virgin River and stood in yet another magnificent temple-like arena, which they called the Court of The Patriarchs.

For all its splendor and grandeur, Zion is in many ways the easiest to visit of all the parks in the Golden Circle. It's especially good if you're traveling with grandma - or, indeed, if you are grandma - since you can actually "do" Zion literally without ever getting out of the car!

If you do get out of the car, however, you'll find endless reasons for not getting back in.

Walk a simple trail for half an hour, or hike the heights and depths of the park for a month.

Sit on a rock by the Virgin River and try to figure out how this chattering, babbling brook and its tributaries carved out these fabulous landscapes over millions of years. You can read up on all the geology but somehow the ancient explanation - it's the Home of the Gods - still makes more sense.

Here's the geology, anyway:

Back in the Triassic Era, the whole area was under a shallow sea. This was dinosaur time and you can still see these ancestral toeprints on some of the rocks.

Millions of years later, in the Jurassic Era, the water dried up as the region turned into a desert. Sand blew in and turned the whole region into something resembling the Sahara Desert. Winds piled the sand up into dunes.

Then new rivers flooded the dunes, and mud and sediment helped press them into sandstone.

After that, there were deep rumblings underground and great eruptions on the surface as the entire region was pushed upwards, until what we now call the Colorado Plateau was thousands of feet above sea level.

Finally, the Virgin River went to work, carving out the gorges and canyons we see today in much the same way the Colorado River helped carve out the nearby Grand Canyon.

Gods of Wind, Water, Fire, and Earth, indeed.

For the European settlers who had been persecuted for their beliefs in the cities back east and had risked life and limb in their Great Trek across America in search of religious freedom, Zion represented the promise fulfilled, the dream come true.

For them, the Golden Circle was a safe place, a protected place, and a land where they could attempt to build a society of "Latter Day Saints."

Thousands of years earlier, other immigrants had come to this same place. They, too, had set out to build a world of peace and harmony - with each other and with all nature. They were the Anasazi, or ancestral pueblo people, whose paintings and carvings give strong indications of their nonviolent philosophy.

In our own time, a new wave of people - and animals - are finding their way to this land of promise and wonderment. At the heart of the Golden Circle is Angel Canyon, home of Best Friends Animal Sanctuary.

The animals who find their way here are perhaps the equivalent of a persecuted people: the lost, the stray, the homeless, the abused. And, more and more, the people who find their way here are those for whom caring for these modern castoffs can be the key to a better world for all of us.

Truly, at the heart of this breathtaking miracle of nature, a miracle of love is being worked every day.

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