There is a specific photograph a lot of families own. Everyone is at the overlook, squinting into the light, and one person is back at the car. Zion National Park, one of the most photographed landscapes in America, has quietly done something about that picture.
Parked at the Zion Canyon Visitor Center is an Extreme Motus, an all-terrain wheelchair built for sand, gravel, and the rutted, rocky trail surfaces that stop a standard chair cold.
Any visitor who needs it can borrow it for the day. It is free, there is no reservation system, and according to the reporting around its arrival this summer, Zion is the first national park in the country to own one outright rather than borrow it for a season. That last detail matters more than it sounds.
An object designed around a single question
We spend a lot of time on this site looking at objects that are beautiful. This one is beautiful in the way a good tool is: everything about it answers one question, which is how do you get a seated person across ground that was never graded for wheels.
The answer is mostly tires. The Motus rides on oversized, low-pressure balloon tires that spread a rider’s weight across sand and loose rock instead of sinking into it, the same physics that lets a fat bike roll over a beach. The frame is welded aluminum, painted a frank fire-engine red, and the whole chair weighs about 55 pounds. It folds down to fit in the back of an SUV. It also floats, which sounds like a novelty until you picture the Virgin River in August. At roughly six feet long it is too big for the park shuttles, so the park hands borrowers a pass to drive the Zion Canyon Scenic Drive themselves, a road that is otherwise closed to private cars for most of the year. In a park that guards that road carefully, the pass is not a small gesture.
Extreme Motus is a small company in Payson, Utah, and its origin story is the kind we like. Co-founder Ryan Grassley is the best friend and caregiver of Sam Durst, and since 2019 the two have taken the chair through nearly every one of Utah’s national parks, including the Narrows, as a running demonstration that a wheelchair does not have to end where the sidewalk does. The company’s line is “freedom shouldn’t stop where the pavement ends,” and for once the tagline is a design brief.
One thing worth knowing before you plan around it: the Motus is not self-powered. Someone has to push. This is equipment for a pair or a family, not a solo trip, and there is exactly one chair, checked out first-come and returned before the visitor center closes.
Where it can actually take you
The park lists four routes as fair game: the Pa’rus Trail, the Riverside Walk, Lower Emerald Pools, and Weeping Rock. Two of those are already paved. The other two are the reason the chair exists.
Weeping Rock is the headliner. It is a short, steep climb into a sandstone alcove where water that fell as rain roughly a thousand years ago seeps out of the cliff face and rains gently back down on you, feeding a hanging garden of columbine and maidenhair fern that grows sideways out of the rock. A rockfall closed the trail in late 2023 and it stayed shut nearly two years, reopening in September 2025 with rebuilt stairways and new sandstone curbing colored to disappear into the cliff. The Emerald Pools route is longer and looser, red dirt and slickrock beneath a waterfall you can walk behind. Both are the kind of places that get described as “worth the hike,” which is a phrase that has always carried a quiet asterisk. Now it carries a slightly smaller one.
How to borrow it
Go to the information desk at the Zion Canyon Visitor Center, ideally early. The rider and the person pushing both sign a waiver, one of you shows an ID and proof of insurance, and a ranger walks you through the chair before you leave with it. Personal wheelchairs cannot be stored at the desk, so plan for that. The park keeps its current rules on the official Extreme Motus page, which is the thing to check before you drive down.
How it got there, and why that is the hopeful part
Adaptive equipment turns up in parks now and then, usually on loan from a manufacturer or a nonprofit and usually gone by the next season. This chair is different because Zion owns it and its staff maintain it. It arrived through an anonymous donor who gave the money to 2LIV4, a small nonprofit devoted to getting adaptive gear into outdoor spaces, which bought the chair and handed it to the park. One person, one nonprofit, one park willing to take on the upkeep. That is a recipe simple enough for the other 62 national parks to copy, and the most interesting thing about this story is whether they will.
Where to sleep if you go
The chair is checked out and returned in a single day, so the closer you sleep to the visitor center, the more of the day you get. The campground guide Campgrounder, which has been verifying accessibility claims campsite by campsite rather than trusting the icon, has the Zion options laid out well.
- Watchman Campground is the obvious answer. It sits a short walk from the visitor center where the chair lives, which makes an early checkout painless, and it is one of the few national park campgrounds with accessibility that has actually been confirmed: Loop A has designated accessible sites, including A016hc, with paved roads and accessible walkways through the campground. It fills months ahead for spring and fall.
- South Campground is Watchman’s neighbor, a little more old-fashioned and a little closer to the Pa’rus Trail, which runs right along the campground’s edge.
- Lava Point is the escape hatch when the canyon floor is full or over a hundred degrees: six primitive sites at 7,890 feet on the Kolob Terrace, no water, about an hour away and usually twenty degrees cooler.
- If you would rather sleep in a real bed within sight of the cliffs, Under Canvas Zion and AutoCamp Zion are the two glamping options just outside the park. We wrote about AutoCamp’s Joshua Tree outpost a while back, and the Zion one follows the same Airstream-and-clubhouse formula.
One more, a little farther out. Snow Canyon State Park, about an hour southwest near St. George, has a paved ADA trail and, fittingly, its own reservable all-terrain sand wheelchair. Coral Pink Sand Dunes, east toward Kanab, has two confirmed ADA campsites with hookups. Utah’s state parks, it turns out, have been quietly ahead on this.
Zion has been on our short list of the most beautiful places on Earth since we started this site, and it anchors our guide to the world’s natural wonders. It is good to see the park working on who gets to see it.
Via My Modern Met. Additional reporting from KSL and the National Park Service. Chair photo: NPS.
