The other door into Zion
Most everyone who says they have "done Zion" has really only done the main canyon down at Springdale, elbow to elbow on the shuttle. Forty-odd years of watching this country, and I still send folks who want the park without the crowds up to the far northwest corner, to a section called Kolob Canyons. It has its own entrance, its own visitor center, and its own weather, and it sits a full hour's drive from the Zion Canyon everybody photographs.
Here is the part that surprises people: you get to Kolob straight off the interstate. The turnoff is Exit 40 on Interstate 15, roughly 17 miles south of Cedar City and about 40 miles north of the main canyon. You pull off the freeway, stop at the little Kolob Canyons Visitor Center to pay your fee or flash your pass, and a five-mile scenic drive climbs up into the red rock. The Taylor Creek Trailhead sits about two miles up that road, on the left, and it is the finest walk in this whole quiet corner of the park.
How the river carved the fingers
The reason Kolob looks the way it does comes down to a single word geologists love: uplift. This is the far western lip of the Colorado Plateau, and it got shoved skyward along the great Hurricane Fault that runs through this part of Utah. When you raise a thick slab of stone like that, water goes to work on the cracks, and the streams here cut straight, parallel gorges back into the cliff face rather than one big meandering canyon.
The result is the famous Finger Canyons of the Kolob — a row of narrow box canyons standing side by side like the fingers of a hand, walled in Navajo sandstone that climbs as much as 2,000 feet overhead. That sandstone is old dune country, petrified desert, and it carries iron that rusts in the weather, which is why the walls glow orange and pink and deep rust in the late afternoon. Taylor Creek has carved one of those fingers, and the whole hike runs up inside it. The trail also brushes past a wrinkle in the rock called the Kanarra Fold, where the layers bend and tilt — a nice reminder that all this stone was once being bent like taffy.
Getting your feet a little wet
The Taylor Creek Trail follows the Middle Fork of Taylor Creek and runs roughly five miles round trip, which the Park Service rates as moderate. It is not the climb that earns that rating — you gain only a few hundred feet over the whole way in — it is the footing. You start by dropping down to the creek, and from there the trail crosses the water again and again, dozens of times, weaving from one bank to the other and clambering over and around boulders as the canyon narrows.
In late summer and fall the Middle Fork usually runs thin, and with a little care picking your rock-hops you can keep your boots mostly dry. Spring snowmelt is another story — the crossings run higher and colder then, and wet feet are simply part of the deal. Give yourself three to four hours for the round trip, wear shoes you do not mind soaking, and know that dogs are not allowed on this trail, as on nearly every trail in the park. Winter turns the shaded, damp sections genuinely icy, and the Kolob Canyons Road itself can close after a storm, so check conditions before you commit to the drive.
Two cabins the wilderness is taking back
This is where Taylor Creek stops being just a pretty walk. About a mile up the Middle Fork you come on the first of two weathered log homestead cabins, tucked into the trees beside the creek. The lower one, near where the North Fork joins in, is generally called the Larsen cabin; a bit farther up the canyon stands the Fife cabin. Both went up right around 1929 and 1930, before this ground was ever part of a national park.
The story the Park Service tells is a homely one. These were built by families from Cedar City — the record ties them to men connected with what is now Southern Utah University — who came up here seasonally to graze sheep and goats along the creek and to hold a claim on the land. Kolob was not folded into Zion until 1956, so for a couple of decades this was working back-country, not a preserve. I will pass along the local color as lore rather than gospel: old-timers say one of the homesteaders left his claim in the mid-1930s when church duties called him away. What is solid fact is that the park has fought to keep these cabins standing. Back in 2012 crews ran a stabilization project to patch the roofs and swap out rotted logs, and because this is designated wilderness, they did it the hard way — no wheeled carts, not even a wheelbarrow, and no power tools. Everything came in on backs and got built with hand tools, the way the homesteaders would have recognized.
The Double Arch Alcove, and why you came
Past the Fife cabin the canyon tightens and cools, the walls lean in, and the trail delivers you to the turnaround: the Double Arch Alcove. Do not go expecting a freestanding arch you can walk under. This is a great scooped-out hollow in the cliff, where water seeping through the porous Navajo sandstone has undercut the rock and peeled it away in curving sheets, leaving a soaring alcove with a smaller arched recess set above it.
The color is the thing. Mineral-laden water bleeds down the back wall and stains it in vertical streaks of black and rust and pale desert varnish, and in spring a hanging garden of moss and wildflowers clings to the damp stone. It is one of the most photogenic spots in the whole park, and because so few people make the drive out to Kolob, you may well have it to yourself. Sit a while, eat your lunch in the cool shade, and then turn around — the trail dead-ends here, and the walk back down the creek is every bit as good in the other direction.
Nearby — make it a loop
Taylor Creek is the heart of the quiet northwest section, so build your day around it. Before or after the hike, drive the rest of the five-mile scenic road detailed in Zion National Park: Kolob Canyons for the big finger-canyon overlooks, and if your legs still have miles in them, the same area serves up the long haul out to the Kolob Arch. When you are ready for the headline sights, point south to the main canyon for Zion National Park: Angels Landing and Zion National Park: The Narrows, using Springdale: Zion Canyon Shuttle to get around once you are there. And to understand how all this rock and homesteading and railroad-era tourism became a park in the first place, read Zion National Park: Becoming Zion National Park — it is the connective tissue behind every trail in this guide.