My first full day in Zion I decided to go to an area I didn’t know anything about, about an hour's drive south of the park. Down there is a tiny town right on the Arizona border called Hilldale. The town is situated beneath Navajo Sandstone cliffs, and capped off with the same sands as are in the upper east canyon of Zion. Behind the town is a canyon called Water Canyon, and it is used as a training area for some of the Zion Canyon guide companies. Hilldale is a pretty serious Mormon town. In fact, it's beyond serious, it's the headquarters of an extremist sect of fundamentalists. Jon Krakauer devoted an entire chapter to the town in his book Under the Banner of Heaven. It's important to note though, that i had absolutely no knowledge of the town or it's history when i went there to go hiking, nor at the time that i originally wrote the following blog.
On the west edge of town, a new neighborhood has several empty blocks of red dirt roads scattered with completely out of place looking modern prefabbed houses with no lawns, just the red desert and sage. Farther in town were trees, grass and better houses. I saw several wives who were in old prairie style pioneer dresses and bonnets. They looked at me, while climbing into their new Chevy Trailblazers full of children, with fear and suspicion. I also felt fear and suspicion.
Several of the neighborhood streets, like this one, continued their grid out into open desert well after the houses ended.
I got to the trail close to 11am, right when things are getting blistering hot. The heat was killing me almost immediately. Soon after, some teenage male residents drove up on ATV’s, up the trail (which was perfect for ATV’s at this point) and began their own mysteriously short hike. After 30 minutes they came back passing me on foot. They wore long sleeve shirts and jeans, and looked like men dressed in the 1940’s, or maybe the hardy boys, but with cell phones and big watches. They also looked at me with suspicion like the women earlier, and I felt like I perceived a masked hatred behind their wary gaze. Maybe I was only imagining that they went to extra effort to stay as far from me as possible while walking by.
There's an arch visible high up on the cliff. The same arch is visible in the upper center portion of the first picture on this post. It wasn't until i took this picture though, that i could tell for sure it was an arch.
Water canyon is known for a short segment where the canyon walls curve overhead in a way that is similar to the famous subway in Zion. It turned out to be not as impressive as I’d hoped, and I kept climbing higher to see how the slot sections were. The slot sections were too cliffy to walk down, but in every instance the trail cleverly took advantage of natural faults in the rock, bypassing each obstacle without too much of a problem. After a long time I eventually made it on top of Mt. Canaan. The top was impressive and revealed a huge slickrock landscape, miles long, that I never knew existed. The thing to do would be to would be to come up in the fall or spring and camp, because it’s a strenuous hike up to the top, and once there you have a huge area to explore. I could see all the way to Bryce to the northeast and south to the swell of land that marks the rim of the Grand Canyon.
Photography 101: Taking pictures in the desert at noon is bad bad bad...
Waiting until late in the afternoon is magnitudes better.
On the way down I was thankfully in the shade most of the way and things were cooling down. About 20 minutes before the end of the trail I saw a group of people standing in a pool in the stream below. It was a bunch of kids and their parents, and was bizarre seeing the wife in an old looking 1800’s style country dress in knee deep water wearing a bright yellow life jacket on top of it. I suppose there are not many ways to learn to swim in Hilldale.
These oasis areas were very hot early in the day but felt great later on.
Back at the car another Mormon drove up on his ATV and started asking me if I’d seen the people I’d seen. He was easy going, at least 10 years older than me, and exuded that kind of confidence one has from knowing with certainty everything about their surroundings. He had an accent, local I assume, that I’d never heard. He pronounced Zion like Zsayun, but with a little more complexity than that. We began to talk about the land. He’d lived in Hilldale his whole life and climbed all over the area as a youth. He said when he was a kid tour buses used to come and pick up hikers at the mouth of water Canyon who had begun hiking all the way back in Zion. That must have been way back before the Park scandalously closed Paranaweap Canyon to the public. His story made sense. I had seen blast marks and even a couple of broken metal poles sticking out of the rock. He said the arch I saw had no name, and went on to tell me about some others, the extensiveness of that slickrock landscape up above, and the location of another cool canyon with a huge amphitheater that can be reached by ATV. He was a refreshing change of attitude from the previous residents I encountered.
With the right clouds this new vista i found would make a great panorama.
