For generations, Lorin Lowe’s family had something that few can claim — they owned a piece of land within Zion National Park.
The 48-acre property is situated along Kolob Terrace Road on the park’s west side. It’s an area with wide-open vistas that seem a world away from the crowds at Zion Canyon. For the Lowe’s, the land served as a place for their cattle to rest while they moved between their desert and mountain grazing grounds.
They’d go through there so often for work, Lowe said they sometimes started taking its natural grandeur for granted.
“We have to remind ourselves how beautiful it is. We just have to take a moment to take a breath and take it all in.”
In recent years, however, the Lowes have driven their herd with trucks and trailers rather than on horseback, so they decided it was time to sell. They heard from several interested buyers, but they didn’t want to see it drastically change.
So they sold it to the Trust for Public Land, a national conservation organization, who recently transferred ownership of the property to the National Park Service for permanent protection as part of Zion. The purchase was funded by a Land Water Conservation Fund grant, private donations and the support of the National Park Foundation and the Eccles Foundation.
“It made sense to us to keep it undeveloped,” Lowe said “We felt like it was a win-win for Zion National Park and for us.”
The property is one of 10 such projects the Trust for Public Land has completed in and around Zion in recent years, including one on the park’s east side that allows visitors to access the upstream end of the popular Narrows hiking trail. The group has worked on similar endeavors at national parks across the West, including Yosemite, Saguaro and Rocky Mountain, and estimates that roughly 3,000 acres remain privately owned within Zion alone.
Jim Petterson, Trust for Public Land’s Mountain West region vice president, said a lot of people don’t realize so many pieces of national parks are in private hands — properties known as inholdings that generally predate the park’s establishment.
Like the Lowe’s parcel, many of these inholdings remain in more-or-less natural condition, he said, which makes it especially important to try to preserve them before a developer does something to change that.
“It could be second homes. It could be a large glamping operation. It could be any number of things, all of which probably would be incompatible with what people expect when they come.”
Zion has become one of the nation’s most popular national parks in recent years, bringing bigger crowds and more development to Zion Canyon and its gateway town, Springdale. Not every visitor comes to see that, he said, so it’s good to remember there are still parts of the park that offer space to feel immersed in the undisturbed environment.
“These are the places where we can reconnect with nature [and] experience the wonder and joy of the outdoors,” Petterson said. “That's why we invest so much effort in making sure that these crown jewels of this nation are preserved in perpetuity.”
Protecting these properties also benefits southwest Utah economically. Zion’s 4.7 million visitors contributed $961 million to the regional economy in 2022. To Petterson, having vacation homes pop up in the backcountry takes away from the natural beauty many come to experience.
As glamping resorts and other developments continue to transform the edges of Zion, he said, the Trust for Public Land feels a sense of urgency to protect more of it. But each project presents its challenges, from working through the federal processes to negotiating with landowners. And each landowner needs to feel ready to sell — which is why the group continues to reach out to the people who own Zion’s remaining inholdings once or twice a year to remind them of this option.
With so many acres of inholdings left, Petterson said, the group's work is far from done.
“In a perfect world, we would be able to work with every landowner that owns land inside the park. We hope that happens over time. It won't happen any time soon, but we are tenacious. We'll keep at it.”
