An Afternoon In Zion (CNP)

The day of July the 28th began for me like many other days that had come before it. I woke up in the back of my truck. After gathering my things together, I headed toward the general bathroom area to take a shower, only to get there and find out that it was a coin operated shower. It was supposedly 8 quarters for 8 minutes, but the water started when I hit 7 quarters, and who am I to complain? Then I gathered up the rest of my stuff, and headed out, in the general direction of Zion. This meant I had a bit of backtracking to do.

I knew that my digital camera was out of the question for the day in question, after having thoroughly exhausted its picture-taking capacity the day before in Bryce Canyon, so I went back to the old, reliable 35mm camera I have. It isn’t anything super spectacular, but I do feel a little guilty for how under-used it’s been on this trip. Anyway, I had run the batteries down on it sometime back, and as coincidence would have it, bought new batteries for it the previous day in Cedar City. Since I was passing back through Red Canyon, I decided to stop and take some pictures on my old camera. I pulled of to the side of the road, took out the camera, took out the old batteries, loaded the new ones, and the camera came to life ever so briefly. This was followed by the camera having its switch in the ‘on’ position, but giving no signs of actually being ‘on.’ To make kind of a long story kind of short, the contact on the battery door of the camera is slightly recessed, making it below a raised plastic ring placed there for I cannot think of any good reason. So, as I was closing the battery door, I would briefly get contact between the door, the battery, the other battery, and the rest of the camera, before the plastic ring would push the battery away from the contact. It seems like a pretty big design flaw, except for the fact that somehow it had never been an issue before. And I have no idea why it would be one now. In any event, after many instances of getting the camera to light up briefly and then die, I was able to get the camera’s readout to have display things when it was off (which is normal), but as soon as I would turn it on, everything would go blank. This happened many, many times. I was quite fearful of going through a day with no pictures. There were plenty of thoughts racing through my head regarding things like taking the day off to find a motel and charge the digital camera, trying to find a camera repair shop, or any number of other things that would allow me to keep some kind of visual memory outside of my mind of the remainder of the day that was to come. Finally, after literally minutes of messing around with the machine, I got it to turn on, stay on, and even work-that is, until I hit the shutter button, then it would turn off again. It was extremely frustrating. There were several instances of me thinking that I’d gotten everything working again, but then something would go wrong in a new and unexpected sort of way. The next time I tried it, I was actually able to take a picture of Red Canyon. I was well pleased, and the remainder of the day was fairly problem free, picture-taking wise. Although, there were several more instances of turning the camera on, lining up the near-perfect picture, pressing the shutter button, and having the camera turn off. Indeed, it was quite frustrating, but some pictures were by far better than none, in my opinion.

After stopping at several scenic turnouts along the road through Red Canyon for picture-taking purposes, stopping to take another picture of the abandoned car, and turning south on the highway that would get me to the road that went through Zion Canyon, I stopped at a gas station for to buy some ice. After I went in the store and came back out and drained my cooler and then filled it up again, a strange thing happened. Two cop cars rolled up into the gas station parking lot, two more passed by on the road, a minivan with lights on it rolled up on the other side of the road, and a semi truck with a positively monstrous machine on its trailer pulled off to the side of the road (as much as it could). It’s been a while now, so I don’t remember quite what the monstrous thing was, but I did take some pictures of it with the then-functioning filmic camera. That thing was huge, though, it was probable more than twice as wide as the trailer it was on (that might be a slight, slight exaggeration). I was heading the other direction, so I finished up with what I was doing, hopped in my pickup truck and drove onward toward Zion.

After a time, I arrived in Zion. I paid to get in, or would have, had I not had my handy dandy park pass. Then I went and saw the checkerboard mesa, which had criss-crossing lines on its surface which were both vertical, and horizontal. I drove around some more, decided to go on a little hike up to a canyon view lookout, which was pretty great, and then back down. Shortly after reentering my truck, again, I went through the longest most hypnotic tunnel I may ever have passed through. The tunnel had windows, five of them. I didn’t really have time to look out them though, for many reasons. I reached the end of the tunnel, and exited accordingly. Rounding some turns, and switching back some switchbacks, I found a view of the viewing area at the end of the trail. I took some pictures and then continued down the mountainside. I was looking for a wherever it was that the shuttles stopped, and wasn’t having any luck. Finally I saw some signs that said to turn for shuttle parking. Unfortunately, they also said that the parking lot was full. I continued on, and found myself quite quickly on the outside of the park. I then found a parking spot, and walked back into the park. What I didn’t realize, however, was that I had to pay to get back in, or rather, would have had to pay to get back in if I had paid to get in in the first place. They just swiped my card (again) and I went on my less than merry way. After boarding a shuttle bus, I rode it around. I didn’t get off until the last stop, which was called ‘Riverside walk,’ or something equally ‘nice’ sounding. It was exactly that, a riverside walk. And it was fun. Then I got back on another shuttle bus, and headed back down the canyon.

Wow, I can’t believe how much I was just about to leave out. Let me try this again. The riverside walk was pretty neat, it was paved all the way, and had a couple of interesting hills, but was not difficult at all (except for the fact that, again, I’m not a very ‘prepare for a hike’ kind of person. Besides the level of interesting hills and non-difficulty, the setting was pretty amazing. There were basically sheer cliffs that would rise mere feet away from the river to heights of (supposedly) “2000-3000 feet above the canyon floor.”* It was pretty amazing. There were little trees growing out of the cliffs up toward the top, that I would have to guess to be around 30 feet tall. So maybe that height is actually kind of reasonable. I can’t think of any other worthwhile descriptions right now, but Zion Canyon was pretty awesome (I do maintain, however, that Bryce Canyon was way awesomer). There were a lot of people that had climbed down and were wandering around in the river, some shod, some swam in clothes, it appeared as though all had fun.

Back down the mountain, I decided to disembark at a trail for the location entitled ‘Weeping Rock.’ That was a pretty great experience, and a very neat sight. There was a fairly short trail up to the attraction, and the attraction was a cliff with a little bit of a recess at the bottom. There were all sorts of reasons written on various little plaques and signs about why the water collected and fell, but I don’t really remember those reasons right now, but I do remember that it was great. You pass under the cliff face to the recess and walk through a curtain of water falling from earth to earth.

I walked back through the curtain after observing it for several minutes, and went back to the bus stop. I got back on the first bus I’d ridden that day, and rode it back to the visitor center. Then I left the park, went back to my truck, and had to reenter the park again. I needed to get back to the road I had been on before I turned to get on the road that went through the park because my goal was to see the Grand Canyon the next day. So, I got to go up the switchbacking road that I had traveled down, then back through the windowed tunnel, and past the checkered mesa before heading south once more.

The result, was me stopping in Kanab, UT. It was a town with not much there. I stopped at a motel that was the cheapest deal to date and had the best wireless internet to date. It was boring but maybe a little fun. I stopped there pretty early, but I knew that I wasn’t necessarily going to have another sure chance to charge up my digital camera before the Grand Canyon. I did so, watched some television, and eventually went to sleep.

* http://www.nps.gov/zion/ParkProfile.htm