Exploring Zion National Park
Mukuntuweap National Park would have sounded as fascinatingly Native American as Yosemite National Park. To the Southern Paiute ( pronounced as pa-ee- yot) tribe of Native Americans living in what became Southern Utah, Mukuntuweap meant either “straight canyon” or “straight river arrows”. The traditional Paiute name for the canyons surrounding the Mukuntuweap National Monument is Oawingwa (likely pronounced as wa-wing-wa) which refers to a place where the stream flows. It was Isaac Behunin, a Mormon renegade whose family was one of the early settlers of Utah and who built a home in the upper area of the Virgin River in the late 1800s who is credited for giving the former Mukuntuweap National Monument and its surrounding canyons its name: Zion. Zion is a Hebrew word meaning refuge or sanctuary. Behunin believed that “a man can worship God among these great cathedrals as well as in any man-made church”. In 1909, President William Howard Taft used the A...