WHEELING THROUGH AMERICA: 10 BARRIER-FREE TREASURES FROM BIG CITIES TO NATIONAL PARKS TO EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN part 9

ZION NATIONAL PARK

As National Parks go, Zion is perhaps the most accessible park of Utah's natural treasures.

It has the best wheelchair access and most barrier-free trails.

The Lower Emerald Pools Trail provides both the best views and most challenging inclines of the bunch.

Visitors taking the paved one-mile trail may be treated to glimpses of mule deer and wild turkeys.

The trail’s occasional steep inclines eventually bring hikers several hundred feet from the canyon bottom.

The Pa’rus Trail is the easiest to negotiate.

The two-mile paved trail stays on flat terrain along the canyon floor and offers views of blooming cacti.

The stupendous one-mile paved Riverside Walk has gentle inclines that hug the eastern wall of a great, towering sheet of rock on one side and the roiling Virgin River on the other.

Zion National Park, Springdale Utah, 435-772-3256, www.nps.gov/zion

Tomorrow: BIG ISLAND of Hawaii