Zion's Main Canyon

After our fun little cabin adventure at the Grand Canyon we made our way over to Zion. I kind of wanted to go see Bryce but it was 18 degrees there at night, so we opted to stay warm. Last year i mentioned that i never did anything in the main canyon of Zion during my week long stay at the park, so this time, since Maree had never been to the park at all, i decided to spend the majority of my time there, where most of the official trails are.

We wanted to go to the Narrows, but the cold front that came through made that undesirable. Our first excursion into the water, to a hidden oasis i knew about, was frigid. So i took Maree up to the famous Angel's Landing, a 2,000 foot monument in the middle of the canyon.

Once again, i was shocked at how many people visit the park now. The trail was totally packed, and up near the top, where you need to hang on to chains for safety on the extemely exposed trail, we found ourselves waiting for minutes at a time as endless caravans of visitors came down from the top.

There are a lot of switchbacks up the Angels Landing trail.

Although the total height didn't seem as impressive to me after the years of other experiences i've had, the trail does still offer a frightening amount of exposure that is amplifed by loose sand on the rounded, sloped rocks. I have to admit i was a bit scared. In fact, i was shocked to be more afraid now than i used to be, which was bizarre (since i just mentioned the total height being less impressive than i remember). Maybe it was the high winds.


Maree is getting scared right when things start to get fun.

Maree, on the other hand, was frightened to death. It was too bad because she became paralyzed just a short distance from the top, and could go no further. Once someone experiences a paralyzing fear like that there isn't much you can do to talk them out of it, so i let her sit on a narrow bench of rock while i made a quick trip up to the top. At least in this instance she thought i came back much sooner than she had expected.


The view on the top looking down at the road and the Virgin River 2,000 ft below.

The next day the winds became so strong that rangers advised people not to go on the Angels Landing trail at all, and with all the sand in the air we decided to go for a drive instead of walking in the high cliffs. But we did do one other hike before leaving directly across the river from Angels Landing. Maree enjoyed Hidden Canyon, even wandering far up canyon, off trail while i went to find the way to nearby Echo Canyon.


This is where Maree could go no farther. You can see how scared she is, poor girl...

We saw California Condor Number 57. I never thought i would see a Condor!


And we saw one of these!

 












This is the piece of land i want.


I also used that day to test out a new lense. I had rented a Canon 17mm TSE lense. It's a tilt shift lense, which means it can correct for parallax like a field camera. I'd been excited about the possibilities of the lense, but the huge price tag made renting one for a week seem like a good idea. I picked it up from Las Vegas on the way out of town, and played with it a bit in our cabin, but hadn't used it since then because it was so heavy and cumbersome. Eventually i decided that the only way i could force myself to really use it was to make sure that it was the only lense i had available, so i left my others in the room that day.

This image shows how you can use the lense to make those popular "miniaturized" pictures of just about anything. It's fun. 


This image shows what you can do when the lense is used correctly. Notice that the long narrow slot canyon on the far right of the photo is nice and verticle all the way up and down the photo. This would be very distorted on a normal wide angle lense. For a 17mm lense that is impressive.

The lense has a HUGE crystal ball attached to the front of it. It looks very cool, to be honest, but there is so much glass that it seems it would be impossible for the thing to take a crisp image without any distortion. The results are exactly the opposite. It has virtually no chromatic aberration, and it is extremely sharp, if you focus it right. It's manual focus only, and i had a lot of difficulty getting the plane of focus to line up with the scenes i wanted. By the very end of the day i was finally starting to get some better results, and those are posted here.

The two images above may look the same at first glance. The top one is taken using the lense with no tilt corrections, and the bottom using the maximum tilt that the lense will allow. It may be easier to notice the cliffs and trees on the left look slightly "straighter", while the mountaintop on the top picture has been very stretched out on the right side due to the wide angle. The difference is so subtle that i don't think it is worth the price tag. The camera wasn't moved during the two shots.




We found this bridge that had been destroyed by a HUGE flash flood at some point.

Delicate Arch

I’ve mentioned this before, but I have this mental condition where I avoid anything that sounds too popular in my mind. Delicate Arch, in Arches National Park has always been one of those overly popular places. I’ve seen so many pictures of it over the years that I simply never had any interest in seeing it in person. I had some experienced friends tell me recently that it was indeed worth seeing, and that the hike was pretty cool, so since I had a week in Moab, and since it was still very snowy in many nearby places I figured I’d give it a shot. Below is my “review.”


Delicate Arch

The first half of the hike is rather boring, but after a long ascent up a large body of slickrock things start to get more interesting. After not too long you round a cliff and walk unexpectedly out onto the large rock bench with the arch on it. The arch is much larger than I had imagined. It looks to be four or five stories tall, and it’s unarguably a beautiful carving. I was sure by the time I left that I had almost found the control panel that turned it into an inter-dimensional portal.


Delicate Arch

So the thing to do is sit around and wait for the sun to set, and that’s exactly what every one does. As expected, there were a ton of people milling about. Some arrived early and had staked out their respective positions. They had their tripods set up and were snapping a picture every three minutes, capturing the slowly changing light. The majority of people though, were constantly getting in the way of that first set of people by taking turns posing underneath the arch in whatever silly charade they could think of. I mean seriously, some people were actually pretending to be in bed underneath the arch. How do they think of those things? At least they were having fun.


Delicate Arch.

I didn’t see any way to get a shot of the arch without people standing under it or in the way of it, unless I took enough pictures that I caught every part of the background in at least one picture, due to people constantly moving around, stacked the resulting images into layers, and then photoshop the people out. Furthermore, it seemed silly to just stand around and take the same picture I’ve seen a million times over. The arch is pretty, but it’s really just one jewel of an exceptionally interesting landscape of slickrock.

The rock plummets off a massive escarpment into a canyon right behind the arch, and also off the side of the trail that you walk on during your approach. A deep round bowl on the front side of the arch prevents people from getting any different angle than what you normally see in typical photos. I found the bowl itself very interesting. It was probably 50 yards long and 25 wide with no outlet. Eventually my curiosity (and lack of being able to sit still) got the better of me and I wandered away to see if I could get down into that bowl.


Delicate Arch. Here you can see everything in the other pictures. The depth of the bowl, the other arch and little people on the rim that do a good job at demonstrating how large the cliff is in front of the Arch.

I began climbing around all over the place. There were a lot of neat little areas nearby, and I kept running into a few other people who had similar interests. Then the sun set and everyone started heading back to the parking lot en masse. That meant I had to run back. There was no way I could bear being stuck in post concert style traffic in the middle of nowhere.


Delicate Arch.

Speaking of Arches, across the street is a road that winds along the Colorado River. There is a little state park in the area that goes to a place called Corona Arch. It's a kind of a fun hike to a pretty arch that's like a scale model of Rainbow Bridge in Lake Powell.


Corona Arch

The Oldest Individuals

During my Utah vacation i planned things out so that with each new location i visited i would be higher. The idea was to make adjusting to the altitude as smooth as possible. I live at sea level so going to Zion and suddenly climbing around at 6,000 feet made things difficult. But after a few days of that, going to Bryce and walking up hills near 8,000 feet wasn't so bad. My last stop was Great Basin National Park and my main attraction for going was too see the Bristlecone Pine, the oldest living individual organisms on earth. These trees thrive at 10,000 feet in conditions so harsh nothing else can compete. My days of adjusting to higher altitudes really paid off by the time i arrived. I could feel the altitude but it wasn't any worse than i felt at Bryce, and i had adequate energy to enjoy the day even near treeline at 11,000 feet.


This thing could have been a seedling when primitive Egyptians were stacking rocks into simple geometric shapes and thinking it was important. If it could think it would never have guessed while it sat on it's silent slope, watching a glacier melt away, that millennia later those same creature's descendants might develop the technology to cross oceans, fill the night with light, and even gaze up at it's branches to give it a name using a dead language half it's age. The bulk of recorded history and development of human technology has occurred during this tree's lifetime. It is still growing, even after surviving clouds of radioactive fallout from the nearby atomic bombing up through the 1950's.

The Great Basin area includes all the land between the Sierra Nevadas and the Wasatch Range in Utah. In that area there are no rivers that drain into the ocean. Instead all water drains internally or ends up in what area usually salt lakes where it is trapped and evaporated. The Great Salt Lake, 150 miles away, stretched to within 10 miles of the park 12,000 years ago when it was known as Lake Bonneville. Today the high mountain ranges act as islands in the sky, isolated by impassable oceans of dry desert for the non airborne animals that live on them. That creates unique species differentiation between ranges. Gazing down on the Baker Basin from high up in the forests of the park it looks like the perfect place to land a space shuttle.


Even in the thick forest of Engelmann Spruce there is no vegetation on the ground more than a few feet from water sources. You can see where it suddenly ends on the opposite bank.

The park has the only glacier in the entire basin and range area but the real object of interest is the Bristlecones. The more i found out about the Bristlecone, the more amazed i became. The trees have several peculiar characteristics. They grow painfully slowly, 1/100th of an inch per year, making the wood extremely dense and hard for parasites to penetrate. The trees grow far enough apart that if a fire starts it cannot spread to other trees. Additionally, the bark is saturated with a preserving resin. The resin is so effective that dead trees will stand up for centuries without rotting. They are eventually destroyed in the same manner as rocks, eroding away due to the permanent forces of wind and ice. Researchers once found a piece of dead wood lying around that was 9,000 years old.

The wood feels like waxy plastic and limbs appear to sprout randomly out of smooth sections.

In an ironic twist, the harsher the spot in which the tree grows the longer the tree lives. The fastest growing, biggest of the Bristlecones at lower elevations only live a few hundred years. At the limit of their territory though, right at treeline at 11,000 feet, the trees, which look like they are in terrible health, can live longer than any other individual life from on the planet. Even the needles on the branches can live 40 years at a time. A tree was once found in the park that was 4,950 years old! That was after one of the most notable idiots in history cut it down just to count the tree rings. He killed the oldest thing on earth. Recently it has been reported that an even older tree has been found in the Inyo-White Mountains of California, but the location has been kept secret, for good reason.

The trees grow straight out of piles of rock. It can be difficult to even walk by one. Interestingly, they prefer Dolomite.

The previous evening there had been large thunderstorms over the park, so i wanted to get to the trees early in case that happened again. The air was crisp and cold but it was high enough that the all the gamma radiation from space kept me warm without a jacket. Along the way i met a gentleman from South Africa asking me if i'd seen a rare bird in the area. I've mentioned before i don't know anything about birds, so i wasn't any help to the guy. He gave me a lot of interesting information about travelling through the war torn, corrupt countries of Africa over the years that he'd been living there. Doing business and finding rental cars with gas in them sounds very crazy when there is 1,000% inflation going on.


The quaking aspen can grow in cloned colonies that are tens of thousands of years old, although no individual part of it as any older than normal.


Wheeler Peak in the background and the glacial basin.

The drought that had been plaguing the rest of the west for the last couple of years was evident here too. I went on another trail on the way back from the sad little glacier that took me by two lakes and a spring. The spring was dry and the lakes were incredibly low. The aspens were in full color though, and in general the park is exceptionally peaceful and quiet with very few visitors. I hear the marble caves are very nice too, and at night the place offers the clearest views of the stars in the country. I'd highly recommend it if you're looking for a quiet place to get away from it all. You'll notice the lack of any contrails in these images.

Bryce Canyon

Bryce Canyon National Park is one of those uber-popular parks that i've been a bit snobby about. I think some of the most famous parks in the country are not necessarily the best parks, but ride on an reinforcing wave of popularity because the visitors who choose to go to those areas are duly impressed, and since they likely haven't been many other places, they pass the word on to others. Bryce is Utah's park of that type. The Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, the Tetons are others. I have met certain people who have actually been to many parks and declare with great certainty that Bryce is still their favorite. I think it appeals to a certain personality more than to others.



I've been to Bryce before, and on that first occasion driving through the park only confirmed my suspicions that it was overrated. The views from the long slow drive are all similar and the top of the park is just open pine meadows and forest. I'd never actually done any of the trails in the park, so this time i decided to give it a closer look.



The best thing you can do at Bryce is to get up early and see it at sunrise. It will be cold and likely below freezing anytime other than deep summer. In fact, with subfreezing temperatures at night for 200 days a year, frost wedging is actually the major erosional force in the park. If the rocks were present Bryce might be able to exist in Alaska, and indeed, i have seen similar formations in certain areas of the state.



I HATE getting up before dawn. I'm usually very bitter and depressed about life if i am awake before the sun is in the sky. I'm a sunset kinda guy. I'm not a fisherman or farmer. I love sunset. Sunset is the best thing that ever happened to the desert (ask any animal that lives there). Sunrise though, at Bryce, is impressive enough that i'd do it again.



Due to it's orientation the morning light illuminates far more of the scenic areas than sunset. Unlike the vast areas of sandstone in Utah, the soft iron and manganese limestones of Bryce reveal their colors better in the early morning light than they do in the evening sun. Somehow they pull off the illusion of actually glowing for a short time.



There were a large number of people out there in the predawn darkness. Luckily i still had room to get a spot that was close to what i was looking for at one of the viewpoints i had scouted out the previous evening. I even had time to take a 10 minute walk to another viewpoint for comparison. I also had time to answer some questions to an old New Jersey couple as to why i wasn't pointing the camera directly at the sun to get a sunrise picture. They were delighted to understand the answer.



Afterwards i did a short two mile loop hike down in the canyon. Although you think you've seen everything from the top i have to say i'd definitely recommend going down into the canyon. The formations were larger than i thought. The walking is very relaxing and continuously surprising. It's almost like walking through a theme park, but with a billion interesting photos available to take.



By the time i left the temperature had risen from about 25 to what seemed like 70 degrees. I have to admit, you can get a lot done if you rise before the sun. I felt like i had done a lot and it was only 8:30 am. I had plenty of time to make it to my next destination.



Oh yeah, i had to leave. This is embarrassing, but i had no place to stay. A few days prior, in Zion, i had called a hotel at Bryce to make reservations. I tried to use the directions on the phone in the hotel room but apparently i'm an idiot (or the instructions are vague and badly written) and i ended up calling the front desk instead. I didn't know that was what happened, and i made a reservation for two nights, at the hotel i was already staying at instead of the one i wanted in Bryce. So when i got to Bryce well after dark and went to the hotel they had no room for me, and were booked for several days. I was dismayed. I found a more expensive room at one of the other two hotels but they only had a room for a single night. I was pretty angry about the first hotel losing my reservation until a couple of messages popped up on my now in-range cell phone. The messages were from my Zion hotel and the owners were pretty upset that i'd made reservations but didn't show up. Very embarrassing, especially since i liked the owners of the hotel in Zion, and plan on staying there again in the future.

Loose Ends

I lived in Zion for only 3 months one fall (the best time to be there), but i took advantage of the opportunity. I was lucky enough to be there when the federal government was shut down for a week under Bill Clinton due to being unable to resolve a gap in the budget. That meant the the National Park system was also shut down. As a result, the public was not allowed inside the park, meaning the people who worked and lived inside the boundaries had the whole place to themselves for a week and were basically off work too since there was no business going on. No traffic, no speeding tickets, nothing off limits, no permits; that was a fantastic period of protected anarchy. I spent many of those days systematically exploring the canyons of the upper east side of the park. By the time my season was over i had only about 5 left that were unexplored.

Just for the sake of starting rumors, i'm making the claim that the ancestors of the Mayans got their ideas for pyramid building after passing through Zion on their way down to Mexico.

Another reason i like the upper east canyon is my preference for white sandstone. Besides the clean purity and rarity of the stuff there is also some element of it that makes me feel like i'm in a futuristic science fiction movie... far into the future when mankind lives underground and has forgotten about the surface... i have no idea why. It also lends itself well to moonlight hiking. Under the glare of a full moon you can hike for miles through white canyonscapes with no flashlight. It is a surreal and recommended experience.

The sheep look much farther away because i only had my wide angle lens with me.

For this day's hike i decided to try a loop and knock out two canyons at once. On the north side of the road shortly past the entrance station are two canyons that look on the map like there is a possible traverse between the backs of them. Additionally, the larger canyon has several small connector canyons that make "H" shapes on the map. Those looked interesting too.

This was canyon where i fell. I had hoped to make it back to the "T" intersection in the back.

In order not to get boring i'll just go over the highlights. I ran into a group of bighorn sheep while going to investigate what looked like a possible water source. I surprised them, and they surprised me, running from their bedding behind some brush to the safety of steep rock slopes above. Continuing on i found a skeletized sheep in a narrow part of the canyon. There were tracks everywhere so i think i was on a major crossing route for the animals to get to the south side of the park lands. That told me it was also likely that i could hike all the way out of the canyon up to the forested highlands if i wanted. I didn't want to.

The white pass and pyramid after making it up the slope.

I checked out one of those H canyons. It was fairly narrow but had a series of points where you have to climb up piles of choke stones. Eventually i got to one that i couldn't get up without some help. Returning from that point was when i fell. I had to jump off one of those ledges, and when i did one of my shoelaces got snagged on a broken branch sticking out of the rocks. It was about an 8 foot drop, and snagging one foot momentarily gave me forward rotational speed. I was rotating forward and to the left, away from my snagged foot. Luckily it broke free, but not before my landing was completely ruined. I hit the side of the canyon with my forearm, which then bounced me back off in the opposite direction with some new rotational speed to the right. I landed hard on my right elbow and knee on a big pile of soft sand. Then my backpack slammed down on top of me a split second later. I was very fortunate to have landed in the sand instead of a pile of rocks. Eight months later and i still have the remnants of a huge 8 inch abrasion scar on my arm.

The view from the pass looking down the other side. About a 90 degree panorama.

Zion was beginning to be far more dangerous for me than Alaska. I didn't hurt anything but my skin, so i decided to go ahead and try to get over a "pass" between two mesas. Getting up to the pass was challenging and a little scary, but fun scary. The pass was a really cool all-rock landscape with very steep sides on either end like a hyperbolic saddle. I hope the pictures get the point across.

In Zion you can follow tiny "sidewalks" where there are discontinuities in the layers of sand. These little paths can take you places you would think were unreachable, but sometimes they pinch off in undesirable places.

Dropping my lens cap and watching it roll and skip until it disappeared helped me make up my mind to go ahead and try to find a way down. I needed that cap back.

The far side of the pass was questionably steep with mystery zones not visible from the top. I remembered suddenly those non-visible variables that can completely ruin a descent. However, in Zion there is often another way. It turned out that the hardest part the whole way down was the last 10 feet! All in all i thought it was a very cool little hike.

During the hike i'd been watching and hearing thunderstorms build up, and since it was still early when i got back to the car i decided it might be worth it to try and make it to the west side of the park for some sunset pictures. It took about an hour of driving but i did make it in time to the Kolob Terrace.

Looking off the Kolob Terrace.


I was hoping the sun would illuminate these clouds and rocks just as it set.

I have a favorite area over there where i've never seen anybody else. Zion has some old areas of private land inside the park boundaries and i've always wondered if the area is off limits because you have to cross a fence to get there. This time at the end of the road i met some rangers doing some kind of studies. I told them where i was going and they didn't seem to know themselves if there was anything wrong with the area, so i guess there isn't.



A fast 25 minutes later and i was there. The place was still as pristine as it had been last time i visited. A few dead trees but also a few small new ones. Sunset was not what i was hoping it would be but i did get to see some cool lightning. Once again, i didn't make it back to the car until after dark. By this time i at least was becoming familiar with which restaurants were still open after 10pm.