Frying Pan Trail

A hiker on the Navajo Knobs Trail in Capitol Reef National Park, in southern Utah.

The 15 Best Hikes in Utah’s National Parks

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By Michael Lanza

From natural arches, hoodoos, and hanging gardens to balanced rocks and towering mesas, slot canyons and vast chasms, the desert Southwest holds in its dry, searing, lonely open spaces some of America’s most fascinating and inspiring geology. The writer “Cactus Ed” Abbey no doubt had this region in mind when he said there “are some places so beautiful they can make a grown man break down and weep.” Much of it sits protected within southern Utah’s five national parks: Zion, Bryce Canyon, Arches, Canyonlands, and Capitol Reef.

The good news? Many of the best sights can be reached on dayhikes of anywhere from a couple hours to a full day.

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David Ports backpacking the Tonto Trail west of Horn Creek in Grand Canyon National Park.

16 Photos From 2025 That Will Inspire Your Next Adventure

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By Michael Lanza

How was your 2025? I hope you got outdoors as much as possible with the people you care about—and you enjoyed adventures that inspired you. I’m sharing in this story photos from several backpacking and hiking trips I took this year, from the Grand Canyon in March and southern Utah’s Capitol Reef National Park, Buckskin Gulch, and Paria Canyon in April to Idaho’s Sawtooths in August and again in early October and Wyoming’s Wind River Range in September.

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A hiker on the Navajo Knobs Trail in Capitol Reef National Park, in southern Utah.

The Best Hikes in Capitol Reef National Park

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By Michael Lanza

Chances are, when you think about hiking in southern Utah, Capitol Reef National Park does not come to mind first. Or maybe even second or third. Ask many hikers and national parks fans to list Utah’s Big 5 parks—the others being Zion, Bryce Canyon, Arches, and Canyonlands—and Capitol Reef will probably bring up the rear on most people’s list. If they even remember it.

If you’re one of those people, this article will give you an entirely new impression of Capitol Reef and make you want to hike there. If you’ve already gotten a taste of the park and long to explore more of it, you’ll find below a tick list of hikes to take there.

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A backpacker above Crack-in-the-Wall, Coyote Gulch, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, Utah.

Playing the Memory Game in Escalante, Capitol Reef, and Bryce Canyon

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By Michael Lanza

Below a deep gash in a 50-foot-tall cliff of golden sandstone, shaded from the low, late-afternoon sun of early spring, I scramble up a steep slab using in-cut holds carved into the soft rock. Ten or 12 feet off the ground, I pull myself over the lip of a ledge to peer into a narrow cut in the earth, a hidden geologic oddity that lures in a certain type of hiker for one reason: because it’s barely wide enough for humans to squeeze through. And I have to smile.

I’m grinning first of all because I’ve found just what we had hoped to see. Water sometimes pools in a couple of potholes near the mouth of this slot canyon, and the air temperature today feels a little too cool to soak ourselves in cold water. Today, though, the sandy-bottomed, giant stone teacups are dry. But secondly, touching me on a more personal level, this canyon’s entrance looks much as I remember it from the first time I hiked through here, 16 years ago this month.

In less than two hours, my impression of this place will be almost completely remade.

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