Utah’s Zion National Park did something clever back in 2000: it stopped letting cars crowd its main canyon and started running a shuttle bus instead. By 2024, those buses went fully electric, and the air got visibly cleaner. But the park has saved its most exciting move for now — it wants everyone to reach those red-rock trails, no matter how they move.
Zion now rents the "Extreme Motus," an all-terrain wheelchair sturdy enough to roll over most of the park's hiking paths. Park leaders argue the trail access can open up whole worlds for visitors with disabilities, who have long been shut out of rugged backcountry routes. Chris Horton, chief operating officer of the Zion Forever Project, was almost poetic describing the machine to ABC4 Utah: "It looks kind of like a moon lander. The design is very sturdy." You can picture it — a tough, tank-like chair built to chew up gravel and dirt where an ordinary wheelchair would spin its wheels.
Zion's shuttle system started in 2000 to fight traffic jams)Skip the sentence — let me continue. Today visitors can pay to use the Extreme Motus and finally reach viewpoints and overlooks that were once off-limits. It is one more example of how travel is learning to meet travelers where they are, whatever their bodies can do.
A thousand miles north, Canada is making perhaps its boldest move yet in clean energy. Officials are calling it "the largest clean energy investment in North American history": 70 billion Canadian dollars — about 50.9 billion U.S. dollars — earmarked for wind and hydropower. Prime Minister Mark Carney says the 14,000 megawatts this will generate would be "enough to light, heat [and] cool the homes in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver combined." Picture three of Canada's biggest cities — millions of homes — all running on the breeze and the rivers.
The timing matters. Even as some governments pour money into blocking renewable projects, Canada is doubling down. For people who worry the world is moving backward on climate, this is evidence that the opposite is also true: ambitious nations are still building the future, one wind turbine and one dam at a time.
Neither story is finished. Zion's rented wheelchairs open a few more miles of trail, a few more families able to share a sunset from a cliff edge. Canada's turbines and hydropower plants will hum for decades, quietly lighting kitchens and warming homes in three great cities. Small steps and giant investments — together they add up to a world where more people get to see the views, and more of the energy that powers our days comes from the sun, the wind, and the water. That is a future worth hiking toward.