Observation Point is 700 feet higher than Angels Landing and looks down on it. It needs no permit, has no chains, and most of the walking is flat.
It is also the trail that the internet is most confidently wrong about.
The closure that is not the closure
Search for this hike and you will find major sites labeling it CLOSED.
What is closed is the East Rim Trail from Weeping Rock, wrecked by a rockfall in 2019 and shut ever since, along with Hidden Canyon. That was the classic route — eight miles and 2,100 feet up from the canyon floor — and it is gone for the foreseeable future.
The viewpoint is open. It is reached from the other side, by the East Mesa Trail, which starts outside the park on the high ground above the canyon. You walk in nearly level through ponderosa forest and arrive at the top of the cliff.
The practical effect: what used to be a brutal climb is now a moderate walk, and a lot of people never find out because a page from 2019 told them it was closed.
The trade-off
The hike got easier. The logistics got harder.
There is no shuttle stop. You drive — out of Springdale, east through the tunnel on Highway 9, then onto North Fork Road, which turns to dirt. Allow about an hour each way.
The tunnel road is open again. The Zion-Mount Carmel Highway was closed to through traffic from Canyon Junction to the East Entrance from 30 September 2026 after a rockfall, and reopened on 9 October. North Fork Road leaves Highway 9 east of the park, so the trailhead is reached from Mount Carmel Junction. If the highway closes again, the drive from Springdale to the turn alone is 114 miles and about 2 hours 40 minutes by Hurricane, Hildale, Kanab and the junction, by OpenStreetMap’s car router, before the dirt, and the answer is to stay on the east side for this one.
That road is the catch, and we understated it until 18 September 2026. The Park Service says the East Rim trailheads are “only accessible by high-clearance / 4-wheel-drive dirt roads”, which are often impassable in winter and spring and after rain.
Do not take an ordinary rental sedan up here. The park’s wording is that the roads can be “extremely muddy and inaccessible in the winter, spring, and after rainstorms”, and there is no shuttle to rescue you. Go late spring to fall, in something with clearance, and only when it is dry — if it has rained, take the loss and hike something else.
Park only in the marked spaces. The land around the East Mesa trailhead is private, the Park Service asks visitors to respect it, and it says plainly that illegally parked vehicles may be cited or towed at the owner’s expense.
This is also why it stays quiet. Everything that makes it inconvenient — the drive, the dirt, the fact that it is not on the shuttle map — is what keeps the crowds in the canyon.
Who this is actually for
Anyone who lost the Angels Landing lottery. You get a higher view, from a trail with no permit, no lottery, and no exposure. The thing you miss is the chains, and for a good number of people the chains were never the appeal.
Anyone who does not like drop-offs. The path is wide and the edge at the top is a place you choose to walk to rather than one you must traverse.
Anyone tired of the shuttle. Being outside the system means your day is not shaped by a line at stop 1. The same east side is where the UTV, jeep and slot-canyon trips run; they are compared on the East Zion UTV and jeep page, and the horse ride to the slot canyon at Red Hollow is on the horseback page.
