Traveling through the national parks of Utah is taking a trip through time. Along the parks’ hiking trails, road and overlooks, a visitor can see remnants of pioneer times, the Paleolithic era of the Indigenous peoples and the immeasurably vast periods of geologic history that existed before humans.

The trip starts with a visit to Zion National Park, a six-hour drive from Phoenix. The Native American tribes, including the Paiute and the Shoshone, considered the area a sacred space. They would visit, but wouldn’t live in the valley created by the Virgin River. The park scenery has been mostly unchanged, and it is truly a sanctuary for nature enthusiasts.

A visitor has many options, including hiking the various trails that wind through the park. These include the easy two-mile Riverside Walk, which follows the Virgin River through the narrowing canyon past hanging gardens of plants, and the strenuous Angels Landing Trail, a vertigo-inducing four-hour round trip through a series of switchbacks built into a cleft in the canyon wall.

The Zion Canyon was formed over the millennium as the Virgin River cut through steep walls of Navajo sandstone. At its northern part, the sandstone walls are only 20 feet apart. Visitors can gaze up at huge sandstone cliffs. The soaring stone in cream, pink and red contrast against a vivid blue sky.

Because of the extremes in the rock elevations, ranging from 8,700 feet to 3,600 feet, and the weather, microclimates are formed.

For example, because sandstone is porous, water can percolate through it until the water is stopped by a layer of harder rock. The water then moves horizontally through the rock face where it forms a spring providing nutrients to whatever seeds are delivered by the wind which sprout into the flowers and plants.

The river canyon was visited by Indigenous peoples for thousands of years and, in the 1800s, were followed by Mormon pioneers, who named the area Zion and gave various rock formations names, such as Court of the Patriarchs.

Our park visit was in early May before either the temperatures or the number of park visitors got too high.

Less than 100 miles to the northeast of Zion, more spectacular rock formations can be found in Bryce Canyon National Park, home to the eerie looking hoodoos.

Hoodoo comes from a Southern Paiute word, “oo’ddo,” which refers to a thing that is scary or inspires fear.

In modern English, hoodoo also can mean to bewitch — and the Bryce Canyon rock formations are, indeed, bewitching. Ranging in height from 6 feet to 10 stories, the hoodoos are tall, skinny shafts of rock that protrude from the bottom of arid basins. Nowhere in the world are they as numerous as in the northern section of the park.

Hoodoos are formed through a combination of erosion and weather. The process includes frost wedging into the rock where the water freezes and expands in cracks causing the rock to break and the gradual weathering away of softer rock layers while harder rock remains. The process, which takes millions of years, creates the distinctive spires and colors of the hoodoos.

The Paiute have a different explanation for the hoodoos. They tell that before there were any Native Americans, the Legend People lived there. They were of many kinds — birds, lizards and animals — but they had the power to make themselves look like people. But the Legend People were bad, so Coyote, the trickster god, turned them all into rocks. So, one can still see them now — some standing in rows, some sitting down, some holding onto others.

In addition to the hoodoos, the park features the Rim, which is a great place to watch the sun rise or set over the area’s spectacular stone formations.

Bryce Canyon takes its name from Ebenezer Bryce, a Mormon pioneer who settled in the canyon area in 1875. Legend has it Bryce made an unsuccessful attempt to raise cattle. After losing too many cows — which got lost in the maze of rock formations — Bryce is said to have grumbled that a hoodoo amphitheater was “a hell of a place to lose a cow.” Bryce and his family eventually moved to Arizona, but his name remained as nickname for the rock maze.

To the northeast is Capitol Reef National Park, which has been called a wrinkle on the earth.

That’s because the park’s cliffs, domes and twisting canyons were formed by the Waterpocket Fold, which extends 100 miles and was created by three powerful processes over millions of years: deposition, uplift and erosion.

The area’s climate and geography changed dramatically over that span. What were once oceans, deserts and swamps created 10,000 feet of limestone, sandstone and shale. Then 50 to 70 million years ago an ancient fault reactivated by tectonic activity pushed the rock layers to the west of the fault up over 7,000 feet higher than the layers to the east.

Erosion shaped the uplifted rock layers. Powerful rains, flash flooding and freeze/thaw cycles created canyons, cliffs domes and rock bridges.

Indigenous people — the ancestors of the Hopi, Zuni and Paiute tribes — lived in the area and left petroglyphs behind.

The enterprising Mormons established the small settlement of Fruita in the 1800s. Their orchards, schoolhouse and Gifford House today are maintained by the park.

The Capitol Reef Natural History Association, in cooperation with the National Park Service, has renovated and refurnished the Gifford farmhouse as a cultural demonstration site to interpret the early Mormon settlement of the Fruita Valley. The house depicts the typical spartan nature of rural Utah farm homes of the early 1900s. In addition to the farmhouse, the Gifford homestead includes a barn, smokehouse, garden and pasture.

It’s well worth stopping by the Gifford House to buy a locally baked personal-sized fruit pie. They are delicious.

After a stop in Green River, Utah, we took a detour to see the petroglyphs visible in the rock faces along Potash Road. Historians theorize the Native Americans carved the enigmatic figures at a point where they found an easy river crossing. The meaning of the figures are still open to interpretation.

The next national park on the itinerary was Arches National Park.

Reaching Arches National Park, signs point out the park’s spectacular arches, spires, balanced rocks and sandstone fins were created by an underground salt bed thousands of feet thick in places deposited 300 million years ago, when a sea covered the region before eventually evaporating.

The salt bed was covered by the residue from floods, winds and returning oceans. The debris was compressed into rock. But the underlying salt bed was unstable. The salt shifted and buckled thrusting the rock layers sometimes thrusting the rock upward into domes or collapsing it into cavities and creating rock fins.

The faults caused vertical cracks in the fins, which later contributed to creating the arches as water seeped into the cracks, joints and folds. Ice formed in the fissures expanding and breaking off pieces of rock. Over time, many of the damaged fins collapsed, but others survived, despite missing sections becoming arches. The park’s famous Delicate Arch is featured on Utah license plates.

The next national park was Canyonlands — but along the way we stopped at Dead Horse Point State Park for a spectacular view of the Colorado River and a retelling of a particularly grim Old West story.

From the state park’s numerous overlooks the park’s many layers of sedimentary rock exposed by erosion and the action of the Colorado River are visible. Dark gray limestone is topped with layers of sandstone created by ancient rivers and tropical tidal flats, clay laid down from vanished lakes and swamps, more sandstone created by massive windblown sand dunes and topped with another layer of sandstone.

Dead Horse Point was named for a legend that says the point was used as a corral when cowboys rounded up a group of wild mustangs and herded them across the narrow neck of land leading to the point, which was fenced off with branches and brush creating a natural corral. The cowboys took the horses they wanted and left the remaining mustangs trapped on the waterless point.

Twenty-six miles to the east is Canyonlands National Park.

Canyonlands is not for the casual visitor. Its views are more accessible to hikers willing to put in the time and effort to walk to its scenic vistas. We drove to the Islands in the Sky district of the park. There is a paved road that leads to sites such as Grand View Point which overlooks miles of rugged wilderness.

Leaving Canyonlands, we detoured to view Newspaper Rock, a petroglyph panel that shows records of 2,000 years of human activity in the area. The rock contains figures carved by prehistoric peoples, as well as figures left by the Ute and Navajo tribes in historic times and more recent American pioneers. A fence has been set up to prevent more modern visitors from leaving their own marks behind.

Although it’s not in Utah, it would have been a shame not to drive the 140 miles south to Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park just over the border in Arizona.

Monument Valley is part of the Navajo Reservation and its landscape is amazing, not just for the beauty of its mesas and buttes but by their size.

Monument Valley has been featured in many movies and television shows, including “Stagecoach,” “The Searchers,” “National Lampoon’s Vacation” and “The Lone Ranger.” The more recent Netflix series “Dark Winds” also filmed in Monument Valley.

In fact, a section of the road leading to Monument Valley, at Mile Marker 13 on Route 163, is featured in the running scene in “Forrest Gump,” and it attracts tourists attempting to recreate the moment in the movie when Forrest decides to quit running across the nation and go home.

Monument Valley overwhelms because visitors are looking up at the sandstone formations instead of down on them from an overlook.

That’s especially the case if you elect to take the 17-mile loop drive across the valley floor. Be warned: the drive is rocky, bumpy and flanked by deep sand. Or you can elect to travel the lloo as part of a tour by the dozens of guides who will drive guests in high-wheeled vehicles.

Either way, the loop is the best way to see some truly spectacular formations — and you may have a chance to buy Navajo art and jewelry from artists who have set up tables along the route.

You could spend days or weeks in any one national park in Utah. Visiting five can only let the visitor dip into the many beauties they contain. It’s well worth the trip.