The Wilds of Southern Utah
There is majesty in Southern Utah that draws you in. It trundles you out of your car and forces you on a path through its unrelenting wilderness for a never-to-be-forgotten experience.
Taking a week to make the loop south from Salt Lake City through Zion, Bryce Canyon, and Capitol Reef National Parks, each with its own uniqueness, the story unfolded of how this land came to be through countless eons. Its massive mountains, sheer cliffs and columns of stone display the full range of colors—in the soil, rocks, leaves and sky—that mother nature offers.
Why would you go to Utah? That’s what city-folk asked before the trip and, it’s a fact, I couldn’t rightly say. But, now that I have made the trek and returned to city-firma, I know the answer. A smile will never be far from my face recalling the days and nights, the dawns and dusks, and the discovery of new muscles that bore me to heights I never imagined.
We could have landed in Las Vegas, founded decades after Salt Lake, but it wouldn’t have set the tone for the excursion. Better to see the city of Brigham Young and learn the history of what brought folks to settle in such a godforsaken desert. They began with a small-enough group pursuing religious freedom and left for their 1000-mile trek—from Iowa! But you can probably feel persecuted anywhere.
Few Mormons could afford oxen, so they hefted the responsibility on their own shoulders to bring their families and lifelong possessions farther west. They chose a spot where no one else was around, a good place to lay the cornerstone for their new tabernacle so no one could tell what to do or how to think. So, it was the newly-arrived Mormons who named the heights and the depths, the rivers and ravines. Early settler Isaac Behunin chose “Zion” because he saw it as the Promised Land. For three peaks in a row they chose their Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. (A joker on the tour bus suggested Larry, Moe and Curly.) Even if their names don’t make you feel reverence, their towering massiveness does, and you don’t care what they are called or who named them. The Mona Lisa would still have her fair smile, and the rose its fragrance, by any other name.
Many of the locals, and multitudes of tourists—nearly three million a year—enjoy Zion. Mile-long hikes to Weeping Falls and Emerald Pools where, inexplicably, the desert squeezes out year-round drips and sprays, give passersby a cool breather and a moment to reflect on how they fit into nature. But there are two Zion hikes for the not-so-faint-of-heart. One takes you through a tunnel where no claustrophobe has ever gone, and the other to a height so precipitous, no acrophobe would ever venture.
The Narrows, at the farthest end of the park’s main road, were cut through the millennia by the valley’s Virgin River. The water begins at a roll-up-your-pants depth to something reserved for those looking for a challenge and will charge into chest-high water at a shocking fifty-two degrees. You can go far enough in, with the help of a walking stick from a community pile, with the splash only reaching your knees, to see why you came. Past the first few turns are curved and smooth walls, solid stone which the sun’s rays magically illuminate into ribbons of pink, orange and red, an eerie tunnel like cavernous chambers of a human heart. The pastel sandstone makes you wonder how it could be solid rock. Through these narrows the river makes its own way, carving, pulsating and beating in the depths, the lifeblood of the mountains. When you emerge, just put your walking stick back on the pile so the next lucky soul can share the wonder.
That was fine and flat for starters, but the excursion planned for the next day was the other reason you came to Zion, the one you’d heard about but could never picture, not even with the multitude of photos. Early settlers looked to the peak aloft, seemingly separated from the rest of the mountains, and puzzled how anyone could reach the top. Someone suggested it was a place where only angels could land. Today the favored few, fit and fearless, are the ones who seek the summit of Angels Landing.
From the floor of the canyon it is a 1500-foot hike, slowly inclining to steeper. You find blessed shade as you go through Refrigerator Canyon and wonder what trick of nature creates the coolness. Then you face Walter’s Wiggles, a switchback trail that loses its humor at about the tenth switch, with the same number and more to go, and still the path continues around rock and tree and nature’s cornerstones until, breathlessly, you reach Scout Lookout. Even then you are only two-thirds there with another 500 feet of upwardness before you. Here is where the vertigo sets in for nearly everyone. The lookout is littered with singletons whose partners were so compelled to forge on that their mates, men or women, were left behind.
There are scores of chains, large enough for a ship’s anchor, looped through shiny steel posts secured into crude rock. They lead you along the only safe way. Now you are no longer a hiker, but a climber, and your foot moves more upward than forward with each step. Hiking boots are necessary here to grip the surface. Your old city-sneakers will simply not do the trick.
You hoist yourself through narrow crevices, ever steepening inclines, and around obstructing boulders, always married to the life-saving chains. Chipmunks, cute and furry, bound around making fun of the bipeds trudging up the slopes. There are few butterflies up so high, but a California Sister, with its wide black wingspan and yellow and orange spots, flits lazily by at over 1200 feet. It renews our spirits and restores our breathing.
At one spot the path is but four feet wide. The drop-off on either side is sheer for hundreds of feet and you know you’ve reached “Chicken-out Point.” The prescription is not to look down but to keep moving forward. Most will succeed, turning around only after the isthmus is passed to see where they have been and then hope the heart attack does not follow. The rest of the way is more of the same, but steeper. Steps have even been carved in the stone for better footing, when the chains are too near the edge.
Finally, the summit is reached, and the biggest surprise is—there is no wind. It is calm and peaceful. You feel on top of the world and you damned near are! At 1500 feet above the valley floor there is nothing to tell you how high you are when you close your eyes. But why would you do that—the vista is grand!
There is a small troupe aloft who have performed well and now share a milestone in their lives. They eat bagged lunches, fending off what, earlier, were cute chipmunks, but the ones here are brazen. They scamper away with your apple and intrude into your backpack to steal your crackers. The tourists have become part of their environment, so we share our food with them, and they share their daily view that we may see but once in our lives.
A half-an-hour will do it, resting, reflecting, and generally taking stock of your life in a way that may only come from sitting on a mountain’s crest and gazing at the pastoral valley below. There is something to be said for sitting in a scene from a picture in a nature’s-wonders calendar.
Hoodoos are columns of stone that the Indians believed held the souls of their departed brethren. Some are human-size while others are gigantic. Build your own from nearby stones and, legend tells us, make a wish as you lay the top piece. Hundreds of small hoodoos abound on high and no one lacked the reverence to displace a single one. Likely, the wish for most, beyond general health and prosperity, is for a safe descent.
As we approach Chicken-out Point from the other side, our courage is heartened. Photos at the center, with arms brazenly outstretched, show as much foolishness as anything else, but there is joy in having succeeded, especially for those who traveled here from a state whose average elevation is twenty-five feet above sea level.
Passing down the chains and still hanging on, but careful to let those ascending through, you feel like a block has been checked in your life. You finally reach the bottom, through switchbacks and canyons, and take time to heal from the rigors of the climb, but there is one important stop. It is Zion Lodge where everything imaginable about the park is for sale. You rush for two items you saw earlier but dared not purchase. One is a tall, narrow poster with Walter’s Wiggles, zigzagging up the cliff. It is what your friends will need to see to believe what you’ve told them. The other is a beige baseball cap lettered, “I HIKED Angels Landing,” that you have earned the right to wear. You will do so with pride, gladly telling your story to anyone who asks.
There are magnificent photos in the lodge and in Springdale’s galleries by those who have lived here long enough to really get the feel for this so-photogenic place. A man we met at dusk said he waited a whole month for this full moon, and I thought he was joking. He is the one who captures scenes after midnight, with the white reflecting orb his only source of light for fifteen-minute exposures. Single stars become dashes on a deep blue sky and rock formations, as the massive beehives, become ethereal monuments that you want to see for yourself.
The next day brings departure from Zion, but not before passing through a mile-long tunnel, blasted through the stone in 1920, to let us out the eastern end of the park. There is no turn on this winding road that does not bring another extraordinary view of more of the same, but different, and your camera must continue to be at the ready. Recalling ancient days when rolls of film had twenty-four or thirty-six exposures, you were forced to snap a shot only when you thought you had a good one in your sights. The modern-day photographer holds a digital model capable of storing over two-hundred frames (and today, over 10,000!) …and still I had to download each day’s captured moments to be ready with an empty microchip, and recharged battery, for tomorrow’s adventure.
You stop by a wash to pick some leaves, bright yellow from the aspen, and vivid pink and red from Bigtooth maple and Gamble oaks. They will find a place in a book at home, mementos that have cost you nothing, but will be treasured for years.
Leaving the park, the mountains calm down a bit, but the vistas persist, and soon you are upon Bryce Canyon National Park. The difference is simple. Where Zion had a valley road at the base of the canyon walls, Bryce has an 18-mile route atop a plateau with the canyons all below. All hikes start by going down, and the exertion must be made to return to square-one. But it is also in the land formations that the parks differ. Where there were intermittent hoodoos at Zion, these are the stuff that Bryce is made of, not with dozens, or hundreds, but thousands of them, mammoth and monolithic. Beyond one overlook is a valley floor with “the grotto,” a word surely never used in this sense before, where a geological army stands at attention and always will. They are like stalagmites, but larger, and with no cavern roof above where a pairing stalactite dripped its precious liquid to form the base.
They are yellow, brown, red, white and gray, mighty and mystifying and the two-mile walk through Queen’s Garden takes you through their eternal bivouac. On the top of each is a caprock, and you stare in wonder at how they all got up there and hold their balance atop the columns. But this is backwards reasoning from what nature has done and it is the beauty of geology. In the mountains and fields, back through the millennia, wind and water wore down the weaker sandstone. Where a denser rock rested, the land beneath it held its own, protected from above. Through time, the formations of soldiers emerged. Where the rocks had been, now they bore columns beneath them, and the stone without the rocks above, unprotected from the elements, simply wore away. What is left for the admirer, so many thousand years later, is wonderment at the uniqueness of the place. Once you know its story your photo in front of mighty Thor’s Hammer will surely be a keeper. It is nature’s answer to the Statue of Liberty…or perhaps the other way around.
There are trees in these parks that cover the range of the great Rockies and farther west to the Sierra Nevadas, but some are rarer than others. The Bristlecone pine is not as tall as the stately Douglas fir or orange-barked Ponderosa that you pass to reach them, but its story is astounding. Botanists have gauged these living organisms as among the most ancient on the planet. On the Bristlecone Loop Trail one is 1600 years old and surrounded by its children and all levels of great-grandchildren. But, it is not simply their age that holds them apart. They reside in the most inhospitable terrain, not just living in the harsh and windy climate, literally, with no soil, but it is even more astonishing. They grow under conditions where their seeds, alone, can germinate, thus marking off their territory where no other plants have gone before. The Bristlecone is the starship Enterprise of the plant kingdom.
From birth through centuries-long life, meagerly growing and eking out its existence, with twisted burl and sometimes skimpy green to show for it, these trees are an extraordinary facet of nature. For the man who thinks he stands alone beside humanity, however nonconformist or eccentric he might be, there is nothing that can make him as different from his brothers as the barren-living Bristlecone is from the rest of the plant kingdom.
Brilliant sunlight and overcast skies paint different pictures at each Bryce overlook and photographers return for different perspectives every day. A thunderstorm races toward you that will surely soak you to the bone. You rush to escape Queen’s Garden, heart racing, trying to retake the canyon trail for the safety of your car. Your pulse is still pounding in your ears as you recover. This is a moment the great and eerie formations have never experienced—shelter. It is their lot to modify, incrementally, and change in personality with each sweeping storm.
This has been a cellphoneless trip. There is so much electronic dead-space in these parks, which contrasts with the abundance of life, that the difference jumps out at you. The enthralling panorama from Inspiration Point is something that no ringing phone, or one-sided conversation, should interrupt. People find themselves whispering at the overlooks—where nature has a presence—a reverence usually reserved for the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials.
Then it is north on U.S. 89, a top-twelve scenic highway in America, with a view you couldn’t pay for…and don’t have to. It has more colors and shapes, in steepness and slopes, and vistas galore that are breathtaking from both sides of the car. Volcanoes in the distance kiss toward the heavens and porous black rocks from their ancient spewing litter the earth, helter-skelter, for miles. A large one even broached the pinnacle of Angels Landing, which is all the more mystifying knowing the distance it must have flown to join us there.
The petrified forest at Escalante, a smaller version of the Arizona one, has its share of these mystery rocks. A curio shop near Bryce had an enormous table-size chunk, with the top polished to a high gloss and red and brown hues, on sale for a mere $14,000. I just wanted a half-a-football-size piece, legally bought, to take home as the souvenir of a lifetime. On an early Sunday morning, we found a house on a dirt road with a “Rock Shop” sign, actually just card tables in the back yard. A kind lady in rollers and flannel pajamas sold me the hunk I had set my heart on for only twenty bucks. I hope to find a gemologist to polish it up and be around long enough to tell grandchildren of the ancient rings from a bygone swamp where calcified water seeped into the veins of a Pliocene tree to create this precious stone.
Through mountain passes, the autumn forest shines with colors thought to be reserved for New England. Higher up they break into fall clothing a few weeks earlier than on the plain below so there is always a splash of accent nearby from late September through November. The brilliant yellow of the cottonwoods signals river valleys in the distance and belies the moisture beneath the surface in dry washes. Just then, over a crest, Capitol Reef National Park, named for the massive dome-like shape of one of its formations, comes into view.
For an early start the next morning, a good bed & breakfast is the place to call home for the night, and we found The Lodge at Red River Ranch on the internet. It has a homey western lobby and a dozen uniquely decorated rooms with fireplaces to take off the chill, but it was their outdoor piping-hot Jacuzzi, and the full moon illuminating red cliffs in the distance, that made the evening special. How this beautiful cabin-like chalet survived before the web-world, I will never know, but the new technology has brought this ancient geology to the attention of other-hemisphere visitors. The Brits and French now come in droves.
If you make it this far and have not yet seen the sights from the height of a saddle, it is high-time to ride the range. Spending a couple of hours with our wrangler, Cody, his dog with three good legs, Ditches—who can chase jackrabbits with the best of them—and his three-foot tall American miniature horse, Tuffs, who looks prehistoric, was the way to pass a mighty pleasurable morning. Granted, we weren’t Billy Crystal in City Slickers, but it was close enough to get the feel of reining in your steed, and having him follow your commands, down ravines and past dry river beds, through groves of majestic cottonwoods.
Cody told us not just of life on the range, but what has happened to the politics of cattle, from where they’re born and shipped to where they’re raised, all the lobbying and government step-ins, and how the old-time independent cattlemen, versus the new corporate ranchers, have fared so even the largest only eke out a living. With government rules sprung on cattlemen in the 1990s, open grazing lands and driving your herd the distance, like they did from the 1890s, has come near to extinction. It was educational and something I did not know, and more than just hearing about the beef of the cattlemen. Ultimately, it was the history of fast-food in America.
The weather was chilly, early on, and we had to bundle up. If you planned on riding, while you can proudly wear your Angels Landing baseball cap, it is only a true western hat that will make you feel a part of the scene. I had found one just the right size, shape and color, along the way. Even if you wear it only this once, then forever hang it on a hook at home, the memories it will bring back will have been worth the price.
The road into Capitol Reef begins with more canyons and ravines, but they are spread out and moderate with their inclines and layered formations. Taking a trail through them reveals hundreds of trees that nature has kept small over years. They are junipers, pinyon pines, and firs, stunted from poor growing conditions. So this is what I have been trying to duplicate all those years in my backyard with the little pots from the local nursery! This is the home of nature’s bonsais and the survival of each one is its own miracle.
The earth’s outer crust is pushing up the Colorado Plateau that covers an amoebas shape in the four-state area of Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. We are in the middle of it all with respect to place and time. Slowly, the earth is constantly changing and churning from within. Tectonic plates shift and sediment river beds, like the ones in museums with dinosaur tracks, fold over to reveal their history after eons. It is here to see at Capitol Reef.
We learned that the great stone arches are not “bridges,” and they, too, will collapse leaving behind separate columns, but over thousands of years. Each movement in these canyons is a speck of a geological moment that a human may never expect to observe. But, as we walked down a sheer-walled, car-width canyon the way was partially blocked by a house-size boulder split down the middle from its fall. Dust from the tremendous crash was still scattered about, meaning it had landed since the last rain. This was the canyon’s “movement” during our lifetime and we missed it by just a few days. Better, perhaps, to see the aftermath, than to be too close when gravity finally had its way.
Elijah Behunin, Isaac’s son, had ten kids, but only he, his wife, and their smallest children slept in a one-room red sandstone cabin they built near a wash in the 1880s. The older girls slept in a wagon outside while the teenage boys were left to find shelter in narrow holes nature had gouged out at the base of the cliff. Frightening times, for sure, but it was not the temperature that drove them away. It was the flashflood that coursed and crashed through the wash and wiped out their crops. Now only the cabin remains of the man whose family gave the names to the nearby mountains.
Just above the rubble at the base of the tallest sheer cliff are petroglyphs drawn a thousand years ago by what archeologists now call the Freemont Indians. We will never know what they called themselves. Only bits of tools, fragments of crumbling woven baskets, and these drawings are left to show they existed. So when mom tells her young son that he should be earning a living and not wasting his life trying to be an artist, she might never realize that almost all that would remain of their civilization in a thousand years would be her son’s musings on the canyon wall.
These parks have such an impact that you want to share them with family and friends, the reason post cards were invented. Thoughts of parents and grandparents come to mind, for you want to tell them where you’ve been and wish they were still around to share the experience. These are the memories to preserve for the next generation. You swear you will bring your children here, and their children, until you cannot make the climb yourself. You will teach them what you have learned of this most ancient past. Let them see the Bristlecone, the same one that germinated where no other plant could have, and twice as long before our ancestors’ ancestors graced these North American shores. Let them arrive at these mountains and canyons and build their own hoodoos. In building them, the wish you made, when you built yours, will finally come true.
When you take a vacation, pick a spot that you’ve heard about and think you’ll like. Go to it, see it, learn about it, and revel in it. Then never forget you were there. That is a vacation for the ages, and that is what I found in the wilds of southern Utah.
Coral Gables, FL
October 27, 2005