Silver Cliche' on the road: A trip up Zion Canyon

Evenin', Campers! It's Silver Cliche' here with you again. Still in Utah, but tonight from Zion National Park.

The change we made yesterday to escape the frozen hell of the Grand Canyon North Rim paid off big time! The weather there is what teachers in Florida use to motivate their students to study, as in “Now class, if you work hard and get good grades then when you grow up you will be able to find a well paying job and stay right here in Florida. Otherwise you'll have to go to find work as a server in a National Park like the North Rim where it can snow even in May.” It works. Overnight lows in Hurricane, Utah were in the low 60s with humidity under 50%. That meant we had the windows open and a blanket on and it was perfect. We even slept in until the sun came up and hit the trailer. Just what the doctor ordered.

We only had a 45 minute drive from Hurricane to our campground at Zion. That allowed us time to be lazy and make a stop at WalMart en route to pick up a few supplies. Interesting place, WalMart, When you are there you get a good glimpse of the local community. Wherever we go WalMart is a sure fire place to rub elbows with the locals. Here in Utah there seems to be a population boom. About every other shopper was a woman in her 20s or 30s with one in a front pack and one in the cart or a bun in the oven. Some of this is probably the strong Mormon influence. That was also visible in the manner of dress for about half of the women who wore ankle length dresses made of a range of dark colored cotton prints. I felt like I was on the set of “Sister Wives”. I hope I don't appear as an unwitting extra in a scene in an upcoming episode.

So, after WalMart, on to Zion. I can almost hear you say… “Zion… Zion… I know I've heard of it, but it's not the one with the geysers and its not the one with the big ditch… after those two I'm not sure what the others have in the way of scenery”. No worries… I felt the same way until today.

Zion National Park was the first National Park to be created in the state of Utah. That was 1919. It was Piaute Indian territory and its wonders were known only to the tribe until the late 1800's when paintings of its spectacular rock formations began to be shown “back East”. As history is told today, the folks back East believed the paintings were not accurate depictions of any place on planet earth. Having taken our first tour of the place, I'd say “That sounds about right”.

The park is large, but the most visited part, which is where we are, is in the southeast corner and is called Zion Canyon. To get oriented to this place you must understand that its about water (specifically, the North Fork of the Virgin River) and its about sandstone (mostly that red Navajo Sandstone). Before the water did its thing, the tops of the sandstone peaks here were already about 7,000 feet above sea level on the Colorado Plateau. One day, tens of millions of years ago a single drop of rain made a path that moved a grain of sand just enough to create a deeper path that the drop of rain behind it followed and moved just a bit more sand. That process has continued since then with more and more water moving more and more sand to this day. The result is that the tops of those sandstone peaks are still at 7,000 feet, but the area where that first drop flowed is now 4,000 lower than it was when the process started. As the river dug a path now almost a mile deep in spots it exposed the sandstone. In places the sandstone is soft and it crumbles. In other places it is extremely hard and acts more like granite or some other volcanic rock. That variability shaped the canyon and the resulting cliffs into an array of shapes and textures. It also exposed rock of varying color and patterns. The canyon today is anywhere from a few hundred feet up to almost a mile wide.

As knowledge of Zion grew, the automobile and interstate system kicked in and Americans became more prosperous, traffic to the park exploded. You can picture what happened as more and more cars tried to cram into a long, narrow canyon. I wasn't here for that, but I'm thinking the term “road rage” could have been coined in a place like that. Some years ago, the National Park Service closed the road up the Canyon to vehicles except a fleet of shuttle buses which it operates. These run continuously and drive up the canyon then back down with 9 stops along the 5 or 6 mile route. It's an 80 minute round trip to ride from the visitors center to the top and back. We headed out as soon as the trailer was settled to take the ride and took a couple of stops along the way to take pics and a hike to a place where a waterfall drops over the edge of a cliff and the trail goes behind the waterfall.

Zion is a photographer's paradise… or hell… I'm not sure which yet. The image of rock faces of infinitely varying color and texture reaching thousands of feet above you is spectacular… until you realize that only a fish eye lens can capture something that large and that close in a single frame. I don't know about you, but pictures from a fish eye lens make me feel disoriented and nauseous… not the effect one wants to produce when starting from a scene with the grandeur of Zion. So, the trick may be (you be the judge) a combination of long shots of features visible in the distance and panoramas constructed from several frame (frequently stacked vertically, rather than arrayed horizontally like most panoramas). Here's what I got in a trip up the canyon and back. You be the judge: