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60 free Zion National Park trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Zion National Park trivia quiz covers the red-rock canyon country of southwestern Utah where the Colorado Plateau, Great Basin and Mojave Desert meet. It ranges across Zion Canyon and the Virgin River that carved it, Angels Landing and its chains, the Narrows, the Great White Throne, Kolob Arch, the Zion-Mount Carmel tunnel with its cliff-side windows, and the bighorn, condors and 19 kinds of bat that live there. There is plenty of history too: the Ancestral Puebloans and Southern Paiute, the Dominguez-Escalante padres of 1776, Mormon settler Isaac Behunin who named the canyon, Powell's 'Mukuntuweap', Taft's 1909 monument and the 1919 name change to Zion, the Union Pacific's rail-and-bus tours, Gilbert Stanley Underwood's lodge, the 1995 landslide that trapped 450 people and the shuttle buses that took over the canyon in 2000. Questions run from easy to expert with the difficulty shown on each one, so it works for a shuttle-queue game or a serious park-nerd challenge. Every answer was checked against a reference page and each question carries its citation. If you enjoy it, try our Bryce Canyon, Arches and US National Parks quizzes next.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Zion National Park is in which U.S. state?
Utah
Zion is in southwestern Utah, in Washington, Iron and Kane counties; it was the state's first national park and sits at the meeting point of three geographic provinces.
Q 02Which town sits at the park's south entrance and shares its territory with the park?
Springdale
Springdale, a town of a few hundred residents, lies just outside the park's south entrance along State Route 9, and was settled by Mormon pioneers in 1862.
Q 03The North Fork of which watercourse carved Zion Canyon?
Virgin River
The North Fork of the Virgin River carved Zion Canyon; with a gradient of 50 to 80 feet per mile, it is one of the steepest streams in North America.
Q 04The canyon's reddish and tan walls are made of which rock formation?
Navajo Sandstone
The walls are Navajo Sandstone, Jurassic desert dunes turned to rock; the lower cliffs are stained red by iron oxides while the upper cliffs are bleached nearly white.
Q 05Roughly how deep is Zion Canyon at its deepest?
Up to 2,640 feet
Zion Canyon reaches a depth of up to 2,640 feet, half a mile, along its 15-mile length, and in places its floor is barely wider than the river.
Q 06Which president first protected the canyon in 1909, as Mukuntuweap National Monument?
William Howard Taft
William Howard Taft proclaimed Mukuntuweap National Monument on 31 July 1909; Frederick Dellenbaugh's paintings, shown at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, and his Scribner's article had publicised the canyon.
Q 07Which explorer visited the canyon in 1872 and named it Mukuntuweap, believing it to be the Paiute name?
John Wesley Powell
John Wesley Powell, leader of the Colorado River surveys, reached the canyon in 1872 and recorded its name as Mukuntuweap, thinking it the Paiute name; his photographer Jack Hillers made the first pictures of it.
Q 08Why did the Park Service push to rename the monument 'Zion' in 1918?
Officials thought Spanish and Indian names deterred visitors
Acting NPS director Horace Albright drafted the proposal; the new name was one local Mormons already used.
Q 09In what year did Congress make Zion a national park?
1919
Congress established Zion National Park in 1919 and Woodrow Wilson signed the act on 19 November that year, making it the state's first national park.
Q 10Which Mormon settler farmed the canyon floor from 1863 and is credited with naming it Zion?
Isaac Behunin
Isaac Behunin built a cabin near the site of today's Zion Lodge in 1863, growing corn, tobacco and fruit trees, and is credited with calling the canyon Zion.
Q 11Which two Spanish padres passed near the Kolob Canyons in 1776, the first Europeans known in the area?
Dominguez and Escalante
Trapper Jedediah Smith explored downstream stretches in 1825, and Mormon farmers arrived in the valley in 1847.
Q 12Which 1,488-foot rock fin, reached by a chain-lined trail cut in 1926, is the park's most famous hike?
Angels Landing
Angels Landing, 1,488 feet above the canyon floor, was once called the Temple of Aeolus; a permit system for the chain-assisted final half mile above Scout Lookout began in April 2022.
Q 13What are Walter's Wiggles?
Q 21What is the most famous feature of the Zion-Mount Carmel Highway, opened in 1930?
A 1.1-mile tunnel with windows cut through the cliff
Oversized vehicles need a permit and one-way traffic control to get through.
Q 22Which famous formation stands beside the highway near the park's east entrance?
Checkerboard Mesa
Checkerboard Mesa, beside State Route 9 just inside the east entrance, gets its grid pattern from horizontal dune cross-bedding crossed by vertical fractures in the sandstone.
Q 23The road up Zion Canyon ends at a spot named for the Paiute coyote god — what is it called?
21 steep switchbacks on the trail to the famous fin
They are named for Walter Ruesch, the park's first superintendent, who built them in 1926.
Q 14Which threatened owl nests in Zion's narrow side canyons?
Mexican spotted owl
The Mexican spotted owl, federally listed as threatened in 1993, nests in the cool, narrow side canyons of Zion, where the park monitors its breeding pairs.
Q 15Which classic hike involves wading up the river between sandstone walls as little as 20 feet apart?
The Narrows
The Narrows follows the river itself, with walls up to a thousand feet high and as little as 20 feet apart; the full top-down route from Chamberlain's Ranch runs sixteen miles.
Q 16Which geologist descended and named the park's famous river gorge in 1872 as part of the Wheeler Survey?
Grove Karl Gilbert
Grove Karl Gilbert, a geologist with George Wheeler's 1872 survey, made the first recorded descent of the gorge and named it; Gilbert later became chief geologist of the US Geological Survey.
Q 17Which famous slot canyon lies on the Kolob Terrace side of the park?
The Subway
The Subway is a tunnel-like section of the Left Fork of North Creek, reached from the Kolob Terrace Road; the top-down canyoneering route involves rappels and swims through cold pools.
Q 18Which span in the park's northwestern section is one of the longest natural arches in the world?
Kolob Arch
Kolob Arch spans 287.4 feet by a 2006 measurement, a few feet less than Landscape Arch in Arches National Park; reaching it from Lee Pass is a 14-mile round trip.
Q 19Where does the name 'Kolob' come from?
Mormon scripture, the heavenly place nearest God
Settlers from Parowan and Cedar City used the Kolob country for timber and grazing from 1851.
Q 20The Kolob Canyons, a separate national monument from 1937, joined the park in what year?
1956
Zion National Monument, proclaimed for the Kolob Canyons in 1937 by Franklin D. Roosevelt, was merged into Zion National Park in 1956, adding the red-walled Finger Canyons.
Temple of Sinawava
The Temple of Sinawava, a natural amphitheatre named for the Paiute coyote god, is the last stop on the canyon road; from there the paved Riverside Walk runs about a mile to the mouth of the gorge.
Q 24Since 2000, how do most visitors travel up Zion Canyon from spring to fall?
On free propane shuttle buses
Since 2000 the park has run free propane-powered shuttle buses up the scenic drive while private cars are barred for most of the year; the system began after canyon traffic jams grew intolerable in the 1990s.
Q 25Which architect designed the rustic Zion Lodge, built in 1925 for the railroad-owned Utah Parks Company?
Gilbert Stanley Underwood
Gilbert Stanley Underwood, who later designed Bryce Canyon Lodge and the Ahwahnee in Yosemite, drew up the rustic Zion Lodge for the railroad's park company in 1925; it was rebuilt after a 1966 fire.
Q 26How many people were trapped at Zion Lodge when a 1995 landslide washed out the canyon road?
About 450
About 450 guests and employees were stranded at Zion Lodge when the April 1995 slide dammed the river and washed out the road; a one-lane emergency road was built within 24 hours.
Q 27Which 1969 Western filmed scenes in the park and at nearby Grafton ghost town?
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid used Zion and the nearby Grafton ghost town, where the bicycle scene was shot; silent Westerns such as 1924's The Deadwood Coach had filmed in the canyon decades earlier.
Q 28Which video game's 'Honest Hearts' expansion is set in Zion?
Fallout: New Vegas
Fallout: New Vegas's 'Honest Hearts' expansion sends the player into a post-apocalyptic Zion Canyon, where tribal groups fight among the red cliffs; Obsidian Entertainment released it in May 2011.
Q 29Roughly what share of the park did the 2009 Omnibus Public Land Management Act designate as wilderness?
About 85%
About 85% of the park, 124,406 of its roughly 146,600 acres, became the Zion Wilderness when Barack Obama signed the Omnibus Public Land Management Act in 2009.
Q 30Roughly how many visitors did the park attract in 2024?
Nearly 5 million
Zion drew 4.95 million visitors in 2024, nearly 5 million, placing it among the busiest national parks in the United States despite covering only about 229 square miles.