On Thursday, Aug. 4 at 7:30 p.m., Reuben Wadsworth will give a lecture on transportation and its impact on tourism in southern Utah at the Canyon Community Center, located at 126 Lion Blvd. in Springdale. The lecture is hosted by the Zion Canyon Field Institute and is free and open to the public.
Transportation in Zion National Park has presented challenges since its inception. After the road along Zion Canyon’s floor was completed in 1917, park managers dealt with problems that would be considered minuscule by today’s standards such as preventing narrow-tired wagons from entering the road and eliminating grazing in the canyon. Little did they know, however, that the new road would create a conundrum for future park managers and pit the National Park Service’s mandates of visitor access and scenic preservation against each other.
Today, those transportation challenges have expanded past the park’s boundaries as local leaders look for solutions on how to best accommodate the transportation needs of the park’s nearly four million visitors.
A national parks aficionado, Wadsworth has been a journalist since 1998 and has also written grant applications and web copy during that time span. He received a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Utah State University and a master’s degree in history from University of Nevada, Las Vegas. In addition to teaching history courses at Dixie State University, he teaches English at Hurricane Middle School.
The Zion Canyon Field Institute’s Fern and J. L. Crawford Lecture Series is a collaborative presentation of ZCFI and the Division of Resource Management in Zion National Park. For more information please call (435) 772-3264. Lectures are free and open to the public. Zion Canyon Field Institute is the educational arm of Zion Natural History Association, the park’s nonprofit partner.
RELATED ARTICLES
Bus will shuttle spectators from St. George and Hurricane to Tour of Utah in…
A condor dies in Zion National Park and we’re supposed to stop using lead…
