Guided Angels Landing Hike in Zion National Park — Permits Included

The morning air in Zion has a grit to it that sharpens the senses: cold breath hanging under a sky the color of old copper, the canyon walls already bleeding into light. You start at the Grotto Trailhead, where the park shuttle drops you beneath the serrated face of Navajo Sandstone. The trail pulls you upward through scrub and pinyon, then tightens into Walter’s Wiggles — 21 steep switchbacks that begin to test lungs and focus. Above them, Scout Lookout opens like a balcony; beyond that, the final half-mile becomes a spine of stone chained on both sides, a hand-over-hand passage to one of the most vertiginous summits in the Southwest.