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Published: January 25th 2008
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Obfuscator writes: We woke up to find that it was still snowing a bit on us in Bryce Canyon. There was a nice layer of fluffy snow on our bivies, and it had been a fairly awkward night of alternately keeping the bivy closed to keep the snow off yourself, and opening it up so you could breathe well. It wasn't too sad to be getting moving.
We had a drive of about 80 miles ahead of us to get to Zion National Park, so we didn't waste too much time. We did stop in some little town along the way, as we saw what appeared to be a neat old school building along the road. It turned out that it was indeed an old school house, which had also served the town as their Mormon Church in the early years of their settlement. It was all closed up, but we walked around the exterior a bit, and took a look at a monument to an early Mormon pioneer who came through that way.
After a bit more driving, we got to Zion National Park. It was much warmer here than in Bryce Canyon. A bit cold earlier in
the day, but warming up to the point that later in the day we were pretty much down to t-shirts. We took a couple of quick scenic stops on our way in, mainly to see the Checkerboard Mesa, which is a bizarre looking rock face that actually seems to have squares carved into it. A bit further along the main drive, from the east entrance, we came to the canyon overlook trail. This hike took us up quite a ways and along some neat cliff faces, until we could look out over most of Zion Canyon. It was breathtaking.
We climbed back down, and drove through a tunnel that was a bit more than a mile long, until we were descending into that very same valley. We stopped for a while near the bottom to take a short hike. From where we parked, we could see a lot of ice hanging from a rock face, so we walked out toward it. There was a large stream winding its way through the rocks on the canyon floor, and it was mostly frozen. The parts of it that were moving were clear and lovely though, and the damp cliff face with
all the hanging ice and frozen vegetation was pretty nifty. It was only marred by the annoying people who had gotten to it before us, and were hurling rocks at the formations, knocking quite a few icicles down in the process.
From there, we drove on to the Visitors Center, where a friendly and cute ranger recommended some hiking routes to us. We headed back out of the center, and up a scenic drive that during the main tourist season, is only accessible by shuttle buses. Our first stop on this leg was the Court of the Patriarchs. There's a short hike to a good overlook, where you can find out why it's got the name. Basically what you're looking at are three huge mountains in a row. A methodist minister passing through there named them after the Patriarchs, so you have Mount Abraham, Mount Isaac, and Mount Jacob. In front of them, but more or less in the same skyline, is a smaller mountain, which I guess the Mormons later named Mount Moroni, after the angel that gave Joseph Smith his gospel.
Further down the road, we stopped by the Emerald Pools trail. This had come highly
recommended by the ranger, as well as by signage and such in the park. It was a nice, if a bit tough hike up to the middle and upper pool, as the trails were wet, muddy, and icy. We were a bit disappointed in the pools themselves. Normally they are supposed to be very green (which they think is great, but since it's from algae, we had sort of mixed feelings about it). When we got there, not only were they not terribly green, but they were mostly not even pools. Instead what we found was a lot of snow and mud. The upper pool was impressive for other reasons though. Mainly, it was surrounded on three sides by very high, sheer cliffs, with ice hanging off them. As we stood there, large chunks of ice were sloughing off and crashing down. Because we were surrounded by cliffs, the effect this had was like a shotgun each time. It was really neat.
The middle pool, further down, had more water, and a more algae, but still didn't inspire us. The lower pool looked neat from what little we could see, but we couldn't get very close since the trail
to it had been closed due to the ice conditions, I suppose. We continued on the trail toward the Grotto, but truth be told, we never found anything that we thought looked like much of a grotto. On our way back to the car, we did see a bunch more deer though.
We continued on our scenic drive until we got to the end of the road. There's something called the Temple of Sinawava there, as well as a riverfront trail that goes through what they call the Narrows of the canyon. This was supposed to be a two mile round trip hike, but we probably only made it halfway, if that, because again, we found trail closures due to the falling ice, and ice in the paths. We did get to see a really tall, narrow, frozen waterfall though, as well as the river looking very pretty.
Finally, we stopped at something called Weeping Rock. This too turned out to be closed, and we hardly made it up that trail at all. It was at this point that we decided that we should press on, rather than simply going to the campground and stopping for the day.
That's because at this point it was still only mid afternoon, and we had seen pretty much all the park that was open to the public in January. We left the park through the other entrance, and drove west, then north, until we got to another part of the park, called Kolob Canyon. There's not a lot of trails or major stops in Kolob Canyon, but there are a lot of beautiful vistas, and plenty of stops to take pictures of them. It's basically just a five mile scenic drive, but since we had to go that way anyway, it wasn't a problem.
We drove north again until we got to a town called Beaver, where we turned off the major highway, and attempted to find a State Park that had camping listed. Unfortunately none of the exits that listed the highway we were looking for actually seemed to have the power to take us to said highway. Luckily, one rancher, and several miles of dirt roads later, and we were back on track. We eventually found the park in the dark, and found that they were charging an exorbitant $18 per night for off-season camping in which the
only place we had to lay our gear down was concrete or gravel. This didn't sit well with us in principle, so we headed back into Beaver and found a cheap motel with wireless to crash at. The DeLano Motel on Main Street was cheap, spacious, and clean. It was looking pretty retro, and needed a decent paint job, but everything was clean, and the price was good. At any rate, we stayed up late fighting technical issues and uploading, and hit the sack.
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