Planning the Mighty Five: What Everyone Asks Me First

Every Utah conversation starts the same way. Which park first, how many days, can we really do all five.

Arches, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, Bryce Canyon and Zion sit across southern Utah in a rough line, and the honest answer is you can string all five together in a week if you are willing to drive. The less honest answer, the one a lot of itineraries give you, is that you can do it comfortably and still enjoy any of them. You cannot. Pick four if you have seven days. Pick three if you have five.

We drove into Utah from Colorado once, a cooler, a tent, a paper map, no plan beyond Arches first. We hiked, set up camp, and the temperature dropped to 24 degrees overnight. I still am not sure how we survived that night and it is still the one I bring up first when people ask about that trip. The next morning we drove south and the landscape changed every twenty minutes. Red sandstone arches gave way to hoodoos, then slot canyons, then something that looked almost lunar by the time we hit Capitol Reef.

That drive is the actual experience people are searching for when they type Utah national parks itinerary into Google late at night. Not one park. The drive between them, and if it is worth the hours in the car.

It is, with conditions. Southern Utah is where the parks are. Salt Lake City, Park City and the ski mountains sit four hours north, and that is not a quick side trip, so decide early which half of the state your week belongs to.

Inside the parks themselves, a few things hold up no matter how tired or hot everyone gets. Watching The Watchman from the bridge at the Zion visitor center an hour before sunset costs nothing and takes ten minutes, and it is the photo your kids will remember years later, not the ones you posed for. Wading The Narrows from the Temple of Sinawava needs no permit at all as long as the river flow stays under 150 cubic feet per second, which the park checks and closes the route for when it does not. Nobody drinks the water and nobody filters it either, there is cyanobacteria in the Virgin River most seasons.

Summer in southern Utah runs hot enough that the parks shift their own schedules around it. Plan hikes for early morning, keep the middle of the day for the shuttle, a shaded slot canyon, or the pool back at the hotel. This is not the kind of heat you push a kid through just to say you did it.

Angels Landing at Zion and the permit lottery that comes with it is the other thing people search for before they book anything, and it deserves its own conversation, which I get into on the Zion page.

If you are building the order of a Mighty Five trip right now, start with how many days you have, not which park sounds the most famous. Arches and Canyonlands sit close together near Moab and pair naturally. Capitol Reef and Bryce sit along the slower, quieter Scenic Byway 12. Zion sits apart at the far end, closest to Las Vegas if that is where you are flying in and out of.

I lay all of this out, park by park, with drive times and current fees, in our Utah guide, and the shuttle and permit rules specific to Zion live on the Zion page.