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Updated 02/11/23 7:04 PM
Angel’s Landing Hike
If you have any fear of heights you do not want to take this hike. Hiking three foot wide ledges, with sheer thousand foot drop-
Zion National Park, Utah
2013
Hiking For Thrill Seekers
In 2013 I had Zion as one stop on one of my 3000 mile National Park’s itineraries and was contemplating hiking Angel’s Landing. I say contemplating because, after looking at pictures, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do it. I don’t have a fear of heights as much as I am fascinated by them. However, they do have the ability to turn my hamstrings to jelly.
My friend Jeff, who was going to be in Sedona the week before, immediately jumped on the idea and said he would meet me in Zion and do the hike with me. Having someone who I had hiked and skied with many times to accompany me made the decision to do it easy.
So we met in Zion the night before, had dinner and planned on meeting at 6 AM to do the 5-
We met the next morning and started up the trail. The hike is steadily up with an elevation gain of 1488 feet. The first 2 miles of the trail are basically paved and fairly easy hiking for the fit. The hike is rated as strenuous due to the elevation gain and the final half-
If you plan on doing the full hike, which we were, you leave Scout Lookout to walk to the point where you start on the last half mile up to Angel’s Landing. This is the part of the hike that earns it the label of one of the most, if not the most, dangerous hike in America. A sign at the trailhead points out that since 2004 six people have died there. The National Park Service website officially recognizes eight fatalities where suspicious activity was not involved along Angels Landing. I read elsewhere of a park official who said after a death in 2017 that there have been 15 deaths since the trail opened. I suspect that one suspicious fatality was a woman whose family is certain her husband pushed her off… but that’s another story.
Nevertheless, this is the part of the hike where you start with the chains. From here to the end much of the trail has chains to pull yourself up to a higher point, chains strung down the middle of the trail to give you something to hold onto in places where the trail narrows and the drop offs are steep and other places where the chains are bolted to the side of the canyon and you’re walking on a narrow ledge with a 1000 foot drop.
Complicating matters these days is the heavy traffic that you find on this trail in the summer months. (I think you’d have to be crazy to hike this in the winter months where it could be icy -
Sometimes you find people moving towards you from the opposite direction and you have to maneuver around them with both of you hanging onto that chain for dear life. Someone has to be on the outside! At one point you cross what’s called a knife-
The hike really is beautiful and exciting. The chains give you the security that you need to walk along ledges and up narrow ridges with steep drop-
I wore an old pair of driving gloves to use on the chains and when I got to the top the gloves were pretty much shredded.
When you reach the final stretch, for the last several hundred feet the trail flattens out and widens up to the end which is Angel’s Landing. The views are spectacular looking down the canyon and looking down at the roadway with tiny shuttle buses traveling along it.
You go back the same way that you came up and given that it was that much later in the day we encountered heavier traffic. But, everyone is cheerful, reveling in the excitement of being in such a place.
All in all, it was a great hike, tremendously scenic, interesting to think that the park service built this trail in 1926, challenging, and I’d love to, and plan to, do it again.
Angel’s Landing Hike Photo Gallery
Other Resources
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National Parks Zone