A new visitor center is coming to East Zion. Here’s what it will include.

On the east side of one of the nation’s busiest national parks, a new visitor center is finally taking shape.

“I just heard that the windows were installed in maybe the last 24 to 48 hours, so we have an enclosed space and dry space to be able to hold events — a huge milestone,” said Jason Curry, director of Utah’s Division of Outdoor Recreation, gesturing to the fresh glass panes on the site’s future visitor center.

Curry met at the future Zion National Park Discovery Center last Friday with members of the Kaibab Band of Paiutes, private landowners and state, local and nonprofit leaders, to share updates on a project that has been in the making for more than a decade.

The partners hope the center will draw visitors to the park’s less frequently visited east side, easing the bottleneck in the main Zion Canyon and creating new opportunities for people to connect with the region’s land and culture.

For Kevin McLaws, owner of the Zion Mountain Ranch lodge and the donor of the land for the project, the development represents something deeper.

“There’s a lot of negative narratives out there around national parks,” McLaws said. But in East Zion, government, nonprofit and private partners have come together to avoid that “fighting narrative,” address visitation issues facing the park and create a new story of Zion “on the mend,” he said.

Other partners echoed his sentiments. “My hope is we can get away from that message of loving our parks to death and talk about how we can love our parks to life,” said Natalie Britt, CEO of the Zion Forever Project, the park’s nonprofit partner helping to fund and convene efforts in East Zion.

What’s coming to East Zion

The new discovery center, located about two miles outside the park’s east entrance, will include interpretive educational materials, including a store run by Zion Forever, with some proceeds going to fund education programming in the park.

Those interpretive programs will also be informed by the Kaibab Band of Paiutes. The entire Zion area is part of the Paiute people’s traditional homelands, Roland Maldonado, the band’s chairman, told The Tribune.

“To see everybody working together with a common goal and to be able to be a part of that as well is a great honor for us,” Maldonado said at the event, “and it helps people to understand that we’re not invisible, that we are still here, that our traditional knowledge is relevant and that sometimes science is just barely catching up.”

The site will also include abundant outdoor education and play areas where kids can safely “get their hands and feet dirty,” said Shain Manuele, Zion Forever’s board chair.

Manuele has seven kids who are ages one to 13, and he’s excited to bring them to the space. “I say I raise free range children,” he said. “I want my kids to be able to roam and to go about and to experience things, jump off rocks … and I think this is an area where they can do that.”

There will also be nearby playgrounds for adults, including 35 miles of new mountain biking trails funded by the Division of Outdoor Recreation, Kane County and Zion Forever Project, said Stephani Lyon, Zion Forever’s chief of staff. The McLawses and Steve Neelman, owner of Zion Ponderosa Ranch Resort, donated the land and put it into trail easements “for public access in perpetuity,” said Lyon.

The last ten miles of trails are still under construction, but once it is complete this spring, it will include an adaptive trail that’s accessible to people who use adaptive equipment.

“Providing access and opportunity to folks has been a huge priority,” Lyon said. “We want everybody to be able to see themselves in this space.”

Kane County is also working with the Bureau of Land Management to develop additional hiking trails next to the discovery center, Lyon added.

The new projects in East Zion will do “a lot” for Kane County, said County Commissioner Celeste Meyeres. “One of the things it does is allow us to be considered a gateway community more visibly and physically than previously.”

The group’s goal is to open the new center by late 2026, but early 2027 may be more realistic, Britt said.

Other visions include a new shuttle system that will take visitors from the discovery center to Zion’s visitor center near Springdale, a lodge and employee housing, according to Zion Forever Project.

Overall, the efforts in East Zion could create over 450 annual jobs and nearly $30 million in new gross domestic product for the state by 2030, according to a study by the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute.

A long time coming

Over two decades ago, Zion National Park’s leadership identified that it needed to connect more with visitors on its east side, said Jeff Bradybaugh, the park’s superintendent. At that time, the park was seeing roughly two million visitors per year but was anticipating more. Now around five million people visit annually.

The park had little room to expand or build on its east side, though. “We knew that given the terrain and the soil and geology in the area and availability of water and such that we would not be able to actually build a … visitor center within the park boundary,” Bradybaugh said.

The only path forward would be through a partnership, he added.

Eleven years ago, McLaws brought a solution to Bradybaugh and offered 18 acres of his land for a new visitor center and outdoor education space. The land is now publicly owned through the Zion Mountain Local Services District, which McLaws worked with Kane County to create, McLaws said.

During one of the first meetings at the site, McLaws passed around an image of a tree and its roots that his daughter drew and asked people why they do what they do: “Why are you a commissioner? Why are you a state legislator? Why are you a park superintendent? What drives you?”

The group summarized their “why” in six words: authenticity, reverence, heritage, resources, cooperation and integrity.

Those became the foundation upon which they’d build the discovery center, he told the group that gathered on Friday, holding a poster of the tree with the group’s brainstorming written around the roots and branches.

Ultimately, McLaws said he hopes the discovery center isn’t just a quick stop on the way to the national park, but an immersive experience in itself.