The Subway in Winter and Spring

You can hike the Subway in winter and spring only as in any month: with a Wilderness permit, your own skills and gear for cold water. NPS warns that snow and ice in the cold winter months may call for wet or dry suits on the bottom-up route, and it recommends wetsuits on the top-down route even in the hottest weather. From 16 April, top-down permits also depend on the snowpack. Nothing on this page is a forecast: the conditions on your day are NPS’s to report.

What NPS says about the cold months

• Bottom-up: “Snow and ice in the cold winter months may necessitate wet or dry suits” (NPS’s bottom-up page, updated 13 January 2026). The route still wades ankle to knee deep and scrambles over boulders, with no trail.
• Top-down: long swims through extremely cold water, with wetsuits recommended “in even the hottest weather”.

That is as far as NPS goes in print. It gives no ice report, water level or temperature on its Subway pages, and neither do we.

The snowpack rule from 16 April

The park’s Superintendent’s Compendium (2026) sets one rule for the top-down route. Permits for through-hikes of the Left Fork, meaning any hike that starts upstream of the Subway’s Keyhole waterfall, are not issued while the snow-water equivalent at the Kolob snow telemetry station is above 35 inches. The closure begins on 16 April and stays until that figure drops below 10 inches. The Chief Ranger can move the closing or the opening date on what park staff see.

The same document is plain about the rule’s limits. There is no river gauge on the Left Fork, the Kolob station is 14.5 miles north-northeast of the Left Fork’s headwaters, there is “not an exact correlation” between the snowpack there and the water in the canyon, and the rule “does not guarantee safe water flows”.

The bottom-up hike starts below the Keyhole waterfall, so this rule is not about it. It still needs its permit.

Which lottery covers a winter or spring hike

The seasonal lottery draws a whole three-month season at once, and the daily lottery takes applications two days before each hike. Which window covers January, March, April or May is in the table on the Subway permit lottery, and the band on the homepage shows which window is open on the day you look.

Closures

Recreation.gov’s lottery pages say trails, canyons and the park can close for fires, floods and rockfall, and NPS notes that a reservation does not guarantee a canyon will be open. Before a winter or spring hike, read NPS’s current conditions page for alerts.

The Narrows in winter and spring

If your plan B is the Narrows, NPS says winter and early spring commonly bring high and cold water, and the river is closed when it flows above 150 cubic feet per second; NPS lists the springs when snowmelt closed it, among them 2023 and 2024. The Subway or the Narrows has the rest.

Dry options east of the park

Some trips outside the park run through the cold months without any swimming. East Zion Adventures' UTV ride and slot-canyon walk had departures on 27 November 2026 and 20 January 2027 when we read its calendar, and none on 10 March 2027. In fall and winter, come ready for cold weather. It is a 2-hour walk, not the Subway.

Sources: NPS The Subway, the bottom-up page, the Superintendent’s Compendium and The Narrows; recreation.gov Subway seasonal lottery. All checked November 2026.