| OCR Text |
Show 55 would mean to the state. The Salt Lake Tribune and Deseret Evening News had taken interest in Zion Canyon well before it became a national park. The canyon was a newswonhy destination. If someone traveled to the canyon from Salt Lake City, it often made the news. Getting there was difficult. The closest train station to the canyon was in Lund, Utah, a nearly one-hundred-mile drive from Zion. ln 1917, Horace Albright, assistant director of the National Park Service, traveled to Mukuntuweap National Monument, because no one from the Department of the interior had visited the canyon. In his memoirs he recalled the difficult trip from Lund to the monument: The hundred or so miles to Mukuntuwcap were a real test of physical fortitude. We spent the next uncounted hours bouncing and crashing over some of the worse [sic] roads I had ever experienced. The state of Utah obviously didn't give a tinker's dam [sic] about 'Dixie,' the southern part of the state, for convict labor had been used to make these so-called roads. Those men probably took out their hate and frustration on tbe projects. 138 Still, in attempts to encourage tourist travel to the canyon, the newspapers often carried reports that these roads were in "excellent condition." 139 ln spring 1919, the Deseret Evening News reported that "Zion's canyon camp has opened auspiciously, with visitors pouring in there by private automobile already, and a large increase in numbers in prospect when summer excursion rates over the railroads go into effect, June I, and direct connection is opened with Lund on the Salt Lake Routc." 140 At the end of the tourist 138 l\orace M. Albright and Marian Albright Schenck, Creating the National Park Service: The Missing Years (Nonnan, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 241. 09 Salt Luke Tribune, "Lauds Grandeur of Little Zion," August 21, 1919, 8. 140 Oeserer Evening News, "Zion Canyon Open," May 24, 1919, I. |
