Last week I snuck off to the Southwest and surprised my mom by joining her and my dad on their vacation to Zion National Park. We somehow managed to keep my inclusion in the trip a secret, despite massive setbacks such as her having to approve the credit card charge for my plane ticket. I coordinated with my dad in the Las Vegas airport by texting our locations (incidentally, texting with one’s parents is a very disturbing experience. I can’t explain it, but it feels like their catching you doing something wrong) and I was eventually rewarded with a slack-jawed look of abject shock on my mother’s face.
We left sin city behind and drove two hours to god’s country. When I was a kid my parents took me on a three-week tour of all the major parks in southern Utah: Zion, Bryce Canyon, Capitol Reef, Canyonlands and Arches. The striking geology in this part of the country made a lasting impression on me and I have been dying to get back there ever since. Of all these parks, Zion is the most magical. It doesn’t have the craziest rock formations or the most bizarre natural wonders, but there’s something about the huge red rock walls towering above lush green groves of trees and the flowing Virgin River that just feels like the way the world was meant to be designed. It’s as if Zion was the last place that god made on the planet and by that time he had finally figured out how to constructed the perfect landscape. Satisfied, he cleaned up his workspace for his seventh day rest, dumping the unused detritus of the world in a desert a little ways to the southwest. By that point pretty much all he had left were neon signs and hookers.
ANYWAY I spend two glorious days exploring Zion with my family. Above you can see my parents approaching the “Weeping Wall” which is early-settler poetry for “Half-Assed Waterfall.”
A lot has changed since we were there 10 years ago. There’s now a shuttle through the canyon with a Disneyland-style voice over which is kind of a shame, but I suppose better than a perpetual traffic jam.
The highlight of the trip by far was the hike to Angel’s Landing. This is Zion’s claim-to-fame hike and with good reason, although why the Park Service allows people to do it is beyond me. It seems so dangerous that you should have to sign 3 waivers and a nondisclosure agreement just to get to the trailhead, but instead they have t-shirts daring you to try it! And an “I Survived Angel’s Landing” shirt can seem a little grim if not everybody qualifies for one.
Ok, so I checked it out when I got back, and only five people have actually died on it, and it was the most spectacular hike I’ve ever been on in my life so I have to recommend it, but it still makes me a little uneasy. I mean, is there such a thing as “acceptable losses” on a pleasure trip? I guess you just have to look at it as a Darwin thing.
Here’s the deal: you hike up two miles of switchbacks disarmingly named “Walter’s Wiggles.” This part of the hike, gaining elevation in the ever-changing light of the canyon, is spectacular enough, but it’s the last 1/2 mile that’s the real piece of work.
Basically you spend this 1/2 mile climbing along a narrow rock spine with a THOUSAND foot drop off on each side. And the walls of Zion are steep and flat like the side of a building, so one wrong step means no second chance. At times the trail is about 4 feet wide and it’s all sandstone, which has this irritating tendency to be covered in sand. Fortunately, in order to combat these obstacles, the National Park Service has adorned the trail with some heavy chains hammered into the red rock walls. The spine curves left and right and up and down (you can see it trailing behind me in the above picture) and all the while you’re pulling yourself hand over hand along a weathered length of chain, trying not to look down, back or forward or to think much at all about what the hell you are doing. You’re able to almost lose a sense of the height, it’s when you see what’s to come or what’s behind you that you begin to question your sanity and the morals of the NPS.
The payoff, of course, makes it all far beyond worthwhile. 360 degree views from high above Zion canyon, strikingly different from each direction. California Condors circling hundreds of feet below (you have to try not to think about their plans for you). A hundred shades of red changing with each sink of the sun. The attached picture was taken with my shitty iphone camera so you can imagine the effect on the unaided eyeball. It was an absolutely breathtaking experience, and one that I will store up in my mind as I spend this winter hibernating in the frozen canyons of New York City.
