The barren hills around me are dominated by heat-desiccated grass, interspersed by the occasional hardy sagebrush. It’s the kind of landscape that will become very familiar as I drive the length of Interstate 15 from Salt Lake City to Zion National Park in one day—without burning a single ounce of gasoline.

I’m nearly 30 miles from the nearest town, but I wanted to make the Golden Spike National Historic Site the first stop on my trip for symbolic reasons. It’s currently the northernmost part of the national parks system within range of a new network of DC Fast Chargers on I-15 in Utah. It’s also the site of the earliest origins of the Great American Road Trip.

The Golden Spike National Historic Site marks the spot where in 1869 the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads joined ties to form the first transcontinental railroad. Prior to the advent of the Golden Spike, park ranger Lucas Hugie tells me, crossing the nation took four to six months and cost as much as $1,000. But with the completion of the railroad, the trip could be made in just 10 days for about one- tenth the price.

“This is what really opens up the population boom in the west,” Hugie says. By the 1890s, it had also launched a whole new industry when the railroads began advertising trips to 'Wonderland,' which we know today as Yellowstone.

“To have the ability to go somewhere distant for recreation, you need relatively fast transportation,” Hugie says. “The railroad provided that.”

Modern road trippers like myself are faced with a different challenge. I love the sense of freedom that comes with packing my bags, piling into my car, and adventuring wherever the wide-open road leads. I don’t love the pollution that this generates. But to have the ability to drive somewhere distant in a zero-emission electric car, you need access to relatively fast car chargers.

Enter Utah’s new Electric Vehicle Corridor, a network of eight strategically placed DC Fast Chargers that connect Salt Lake City and northern Utah to Zion National Park in Utah’s southwest corner via I-15. Unlike traditional charging stations, which take hours to replenish an EV’s battery, and unlike Tesla’s Superchargers, which are brand-specific, the corridor’s stations can put miles of range on nearly any EV in a matter of minutes, making long-distance travel a real possibility for the first time for many EV drivers.

Eventually, the partners who developed the corridor—Utah’s Office of Energy Development, local electric utility Rocky Mountain Power, and Maverik convenience stores—hope to extend the network as far north as Yellowstone and as far southwest as Disneyland to facilitate the ultimate western road trip sans pollution, which has plagued Utah for years. Within Utah, the corridor is expected to connect all Big Five redrock national parks within the next few years.

Map courtesy of Rocky Mountain Power 

As of this summer, there are just enough fast-charging stations to make the trip from Salt Lake to Zion National Park—barely. Rocky Mountain Power is still working to fill in a nearly 110-mile gap between Fillmore and Cedar City, according to James Campbell, a strategic projects adviser for the utility. Until that point, the trip puts smaller and older EVs to the test and requires an adventurous spirit undaunted by range anxiety.

With some trepidation, I leave Salt Lake City and its relatively numerous charging stations behind to traverse central Utah’s sagebrush sea. According to Aaron Simpson, chief marketing operator for Maverik, only about 40 vehicles had used the chargers before my departure, so the route itself is relatively unproven. I’m not entirely sure whether my borrowed Nissan Leaf, with its functional range of 120 to 140 miles is actually capable of making the journey. 

After a brief stop to charge at a station among the farm fields of Santaquin, I’m on my way to the next charging station in Fillmore, where a different sort of farm is located. The Pavant solar farm, which is operated by German juwi Inc., spans about 1,000 acres and contains a half million individual solar panels—enough to charge almost 4,000 Nissan Leafs in an hour, theoretically. Rocky Mountain Power currently buys all that electricity, and I was curious to see where my EV’s fuel was coming from.

But after Fillmore, there’s nothing to distract me from the menace of the hills I have to climb on my way into Cedar City, St. George, and ultimately Zion National Park. Nothing burns battery power in an EV like climbing up a mountainside. I quickly learn to let even the semis pass me by and breathe a sigh of relief with every passing “summit” sign—signs I’ll admit I hadn’t even noticed before, despite the number of times I’ve made this trip in a conventional vehicle.  

By the time I make it to Cedar City, my battery is nearly drained, so I’m already anticipating a charge time of at least an hour, I figure. But the slow climb up the mountains has also overheated the battery, so my car can’t draw in large quantities of power when I arrive. I spend the next two hours hanging out around Cedar City’s picnic tables.

I finally roll into my hotel in St. George at 1 A.M. tired but mostly triumphant. I’ve almost made it.

I drive the final 35 miles to the west entrance of Zion National Park early the next morning, hoping to beat the park’s now-infamous crowds. I manage to snag a spot in the parking lot largely thanks to the fact that two spaces equipped with Level 2 chargers are reserved for EVs.

It’s only 8 A.M., but guests are already lined up around the visitor center, waiting to catch a ride on the park shuttle bus. 

Zion National Park has experienced massive growth in the last decade and now brings in as many as 20,000 visitors a day, To reduce congestion, private vehicles are no longer allowed within Zion during the peak summer season. All visitors, EV or no, are asked to leave their cars in the parking lots near the visitor center—which filled by 10 A.M. the Thursday morning I arrived—and proceed up the canyon via shuttle bus.

Not a fan of crowds myself, I avoid the shuttle system to hike up the side of a mountain on foot for a better view of the canyon. But I can’t quite escape the noise of the propane-fired buses as they roar by, a constant reminder that Zion today is vastly different from the wilderness I remember glimpsing from the passenger seat when I was a kid. 

The intrusive noise of the shuttle buses is why Zion, too, has been investigating the possibility of switching to EVs, according to Jack Burns, chief of commercial services and partnerships for the park. But where my little Leaf could climb Utah’s mountains—barely—the range on electric buses isn’t adequate to run the length of Zion Canyon multiple times a day.

Battery technology is improving rapidly, though, Burns said. So in the meantime, the park has already begun the process of ordering its first two electric buses to tow in visitors from the overflow parking in nearby Springdale. Over the next 10 years, Burns said, Zion National Park expects to replace its entire 39-bus fleet with electric models to cut back on noise and help preserve the environment.

For now, it still takes a bit of effort to find a piece of desert solitude to claim, temporarily, as my own. Eventually, I find a sliver of quiet atop a rocky, barren knoll overlooking the mouth of the canyon. I set down my pack and, in the tradition of history’s early adopters, pull out a notebook to begin my own dispatch from a modern Wonderland, newly accessible without all the lung-damaging pollution.