After eating a generous dinner of steak and potatoes last night to prepare for our more strenuous hike, we were up before dawn to catch the first shuttle up the canyon to Weeping Rock and the trail to Observation Point. It's an 8-mile roundtrip, with about 3,000 feet of elevation rise in the first three miles. We are so glad we started in the nice cool early morning! Carrying more than three liters of water and enough snacks to last all day if necessary, we started up the well-maintained path that would lead through Echo Canyon (an impressive slot canyon) and up onto the mesa to look over most of west Zion. The direction of the path was not initially obvious, as we appeared to be enclosed in a bay of nearly sheer cliff face, but we soon discovered it zigging and zagging up the face at a somewhat reasonable pitch. We quickly realized that we were going to do most of that 3,000ft at a nearly stair-steep climb, with no rails as we looked over an increasingly deep canyon. Again, the semi-dark of early morning was probably a good thing for our psyches, but as the first rays of sun hit the far side of the canyon it was an amazing view.
At the top of that first impressive face, we were thrilled to recover on a nearly flat wooded section leading back into the slot canyon. This path is recommended against if rain is expected, and now we saw why. The path is in the dry stream bed for a space, until the slot becomes so narrow and inconsistent that it's impassable and the cut train reappears above it. There seemed to be a little rock dam near the top of the slot, which I think is the park ranger's way of giving hikers a couple extra minutes to escape a flash flood here. Anyone who has seen pictures of Antelope Canyon or Slot Canyon has some idea of the beauty of water-cut sandstone. It bends and swirls in the most unlikely fashion, at once weightlessly graceful and solidly eternal. There were places that looked liked caves, or likely bird-nesting spots, but all seemed wiped clean by the regular flooding. It was gorgeous, and blessedly cool on our way back down in the heat of the day, but rather intimidating.
After another steep climb to the top of the upper canyon, we and Gunter enjoyed a crackers-and-cheese brunch overlooking almost the entirety of Zion Canyon. We were awed by the spectacle, in between fighting off a whole tribe of eager chipmunks. I think Paul actually bopped one (by accident of course) that was trying to get into my bag! Paul found some lovely photo ops of desert flowers, lizards and bugs on the mesa, which you should check out on his flowers-and-lizards page, coming soon.
I had imagined that the hike back down would be easy, since we'd done all the hard stair-stepping work on the way up. I hadn't counted on the heat really coming up (101!), or what 3k feet down would do to my poor calves. We stopped a couple times just to rest our calves, but we're going to have extremely sexy legs after this! If that downward path had lasted any longer, we might have sat down by the side and cried, but it finally dropped us out near a shuttle stop, and I dumped the last of my water bottle on my bandana to wipe my hot face. Having gotten to sit for a few minutes, we thought it would be fun to visit the Human History Museum in the park, so we hopped off the shuttle at that stop. It was a fun little museum, though somewhat surface-level in it's treatment of the native Piute culture. In fact, we feel the history of Zion generally (bus tour, museum, etc) focuses a bit too heavily on the Mormon settlers who pushed out the native culture, rather than the original culture who made life successfully here for hundreds of years. I guess the Park Service focuses on the folks who pay their bills, which is the U.S. government, but it seems oddly short-sighted.
Perhaps these altruistic thoughts were distracting us as we left the museum, but we got on the wrong shuttle bus. We were hot and very footsore, and just wanted an ice-cream more than anything else in the world, and we got on the bus headed back up the canyon. Luckily we had recovered enough to laugh at ourselves, and eventually got turned around. We have now located ice-cream, and bumbleberry pie (seriously!), and are starting to feel human again. I don't know if I mentioned it, but Zion has fantastic water at all their bottle-filling spots in the canyon, even the little spigot by our RV spot tasted great! Ah water, the source of all life and happiness . . . and it makes showers possible for sweaty hikers.
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