Finding our way to Zion

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Sunday morning, we made the short drive up to Zion National Park from Hurricane, UT (why is there a town named “Hurricane” in Utah??). When we neared the park, the signs warned that the parking lots at the park were full, and suggested using the free shuttle to reach the park. So we pulled into the first park-and-ride lot we saw and caught the shuttle. It turns out that we had selected to lot furthest from the Visitor Center, and it took about 15 minutes to travel through town to the park entrance.

Once we made it into the park, we caught the park bus for the ride up into Zion Canyon. This canyon was explored by the Mormon pioneers, and they left their legacy in the names the chose for this remarkable place. There are places like the Court of the Patriarchs, which offers views of rock formations named Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, or the formation named Angel’s Landing.

We attended a ranger talk about the geology of Zion, where we learned that the Navajo Sandstone that makes up the spectacular sheer cliffs of the canyon represents an ancient desert of sand dunes that may have been as much as 3,000 feet (1,000 meters) deep! This desert was later submerged under a sea, which provided the minerals that bonded the sand together into the sandstone layer we see today. The most remarkable thing about this sandstone is the source of all that sand. It had started out at the rocks of the Appalachian Mountains, back east. These mountains were once taller than the Himalayas, but were eroded down by rivers running to the west. The sediment collected north of what is now Utah, and prevailing winds drifted it into dunes over what is now the Colorado Plateau. It was amazing to look at all that rock and realize that it had once towered over what is now the East Coast.

The sheer walls of the canyon were gorgeous in their colors and staggering in their heights (nearly 3,000 feet in some places). We saw a couple of climbers working their way up one sheer cliff, which had to be hot work with the hot summer sun reflecting of the rock face. Another feature here are the seep springs at the bottom of the sandstone layer. The sandstone is porous, and the water that falls on the mesa tops soaks in and filters through this layer. At the bottom of the sandstone is a layer of much less permeable stone, and when the water reaches it, it moves laterally, seeping out of the canyon walls at this boundary between layers. At one point, called Weeping Rock, the water falls from the cliff face like a rainfall, fostering a vibrant green hanging garden that was quite remarkable to see.

Eventually, we took the bus back to the visitor’s center at the mouth of the canyon, and headed to the car. We then drove past the canyon and through the park from west to east, passing through a mile long tunnel that was bored through the mountain in the 1920’s. Along the way, there were many spectacular views of the sandstone cliffs and the slipstone formations as we climbed higher on the plateau. Soon we left the park, and continued toward our next destination, Bryce Canyon.