The Truth Behind America's Deadliest Hike

This is the most deadly hike in America's national parks. Nineteen people have fallen to their deaths on the half-mile spine of Angels Landing. A knife-edged sandstone ridge with 1,500-foot drops on both sides. The only thing keeping anyone alive up there is a chain bolted into the rock in 1926.

But before the chain, before the trail, before anyone called this place Zion; a 50-year-old Methodist minister from Ohio stood at the base of this mountain in 1916 and looked up for about ten minutes. What he said in those ten minutes is the reason any of us climb it today.

This is the story of the man who named Angels Landing, the man who built the trail to reach it, and the bet they made; that turned a 1,500-foot pinnacle into one of the most famous, and most dangerous, hikes in America.

⛓️ CHAPTERS
0:00 America's Most Deadly Hike
1:16 A Methodist Minister and a Question Nobody Asks
2:13 8,000 Years of Names Before "Zion"
4:25 How Mukum Teweep Became Zion
5:12 Frederick Vining Fisher's Long Road to Utah
6:10 Walter's Wiggles - 21 Switchbacks Built by Hand
7:08 Fisher Leaves the Pulpit for the World's Fair
7:55 The Naming Trip
9:17 Why Angels Were Never Supposed to Land Here
9:55 Where the Chains Begin
11:37 Walter Ruch and the Bet on Access
13:30 Building a Trail Up a Knife-Edged Ridge
14:56 Nineteen Deaths and the Denominator Nobody Talks About
17:19 Why the Permit System Exists (It's Not the Deaths)
19:02 What You See From the Top
20:19 A Name, a Trail, and a Hundred Years Later