Promised Land

Early Mormon settlers of Springdale and other Virgin River communities built resourceful farming settlements by using natural water on the canyon floor to dig irrigation systems and plant corn, vegetables, fruit, and tobacco. They also harvested timber from the high plateaus and grazed livestock in the canyons and on the surrounding mesas. When they first arrived, the plateaus around Zion were thickly forested with old-growth ponderosa pine, but getting this timber down into the valley was a major challenge. Rolling logs off the canyon rims failed because they shattered thousands of feet below. A local man, David Flanigan, then devised a system of pulleys and cables that carried cut boards from a sawmill atop the plateau to the canyon floor, and the Zion Cableworks operated for 26 years before it was abandoned in 1927.

Springdale, Utah · United States