| 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 newsworthy destination. If someone traveled to the canyon from Salt Lake City, it often made the news. Getting there was difficult. 111c 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 Setvice, traveled to Mukuntuweap National Monument, because no one from the Department of the interior had visited the canyon. ln his memoirs he recalled the difficult trip from Lund to the monument: The hundred or so miles 10 Mukuntuweap 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 [.~ic] 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 the projccts. 138 Still, in attempts to encourage tourist travel to the canyon, the newspapers often carried reports that these roads were in "excellent condition." 139 In spring 1919, the Deserer 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 swnmcr excursion rates over the railroads go into effect, June I, and direct connection is opened with Lund on the Salt Lake Rmile." 140 At the end of the tourist 131 lloracc M. Albrigh1 and Marian Albright Schenck, Crea1ing the National Park Service: The Missing Yean {Nonnan, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 241. i;q Safi Lake Tribune, "Laud, Grandeur of Lillie Zion," August 21, 19 19, 8. l-401 De.sere/ En >ning Newl", "Zion Canyon Open," May 24, 1919, I |
