Zion Canyon

Here's what people really come to Zion for.

The way the giant walls and towers of rock loom over you on all sides is really hard to convey with photographs.  Everywhere you go, in town or in the park, these giant red and brown and orange and white striated craggy cliffs are in your peripheral vision.  They're staggering.  I feel like they are watching me.

The whole thing used to be dunes, part of an enormous ocean of sand the largest the planet has ever known, larger than the present Sahara.  The sand was pressed into sandstone under its own weight.  This region's sandstone is special in that it is infused with iron, which gives the rust-red colors, and calcium, which makes white streaks.  Today the Virgin River continually reshapes the landscape, carving and re-carving its way through the path of least resistance, mostly during the violent flood season.  

The rock is porous.  In a surprising number of places, water soaks into the rock up high and drips out far below, creating "weeping rocks" that feed hanging gardens of ferns and flowers.  Not what you expect to see in the desert.  There are also plenty of waterfalls.  This one fell over a large sheltering overhang.

Here are several tourists gazing upon a Weeping Rock.  Aaron did not wish to be wept upon.

After learning that there were supposedly no buffalo in Zion, Aaron said, "But I see a buffalo head right there," and pointed out this astonishing rock formation.  How about that?

Our usual routine is to get up earlyish, load up at the breakfast buffet, hop on the shuttle, and take easy hikes all morning.  We range from age 3 to 70 so we don't try anything too ambitious... our pace is about one mile per hour, and it's easy for some among us to get too hot or too tired.  We find our way back to town for a late lunch, rest in the afternoon, and do another walk or activity in the evening.

People do crazy stuff here... one of the most popular hikes, the Narrows, involves being actually in the river multiple times - wading back and forth and even swimming across, unpredictably, because the river changes the route all the time.  That "hike" is closed right now because the high volume of water in the river threatens to sweep away unsuspecting tourists.  I didn't want to go anyway.  Plenty of people do the Angels Landing hike, so called because the original explorers were sure that only angels would have a good way to get there:  the last stretch has you traversing a sheer fin of sandstone with a 1400-foot drop on each side, though hey, there are now anchored support chains on some sections of the trail.  No thank you.  The really certifiable ones, according to the rangers, are the rock climbers who scale those vertical sandstone walls.  They are referred to as wall-nuts.