Day 18: Zion

We started off our day bright and early with a ranger-led shuttle tour of the canyon.  So, first of all, Zion was named that by the Mormon settlers.  A couple of them settled in the park and tried farming watermelons and stuff.  It turns out that Zion is a crappy place to build a farm.  While the vegetation looks lush around the Virgin River that runs through the canyon, that immediate area is one of the very few parts of the desert here with any water, and it's nearly impossible to use it as a water source for crops because of the flash floods that rip through it 15 times a year or so, drowning your crops and destroying your irrigation tunnels.  So after a while all the settlers left. (I thought this is what happened with Orderville, pop. 596, which I mentioned way back in the SLC post, but as it turned out Orderville died because the church lost interest in the whole co-op thing, plus the Orderville population refused to give up on polygamy and got arrested.)  In fact, sometimes the water gets so high that it completely washes out the main road.  Anyway, this is not the first time on the trip we've noticed a correlation between land being totally useless for farming and land becoming a national park.  The park materials really stressed the irony of "Zion", a place of refuge, being a lousy place to live.  We learned on Wikipedia that the park was originally called Mukuntuweap but renamed because the park service thought nobody would go someplace with such a funny name. 

Ironically for being in a desert and all, the park is full of Cottonwood trees, which require huge amounts of water.  They have these cottony seeds, sort of like milkweed, and the air near the main road is completely full of them--they blow through the bus, clump on the edges of lawns, they're everywhere.

The other omnipresent form of wildlife near the roads is tent caterpillars, which are gyspy-moth-like in their ability to completely encompass and destroy a tree.  Guess it's pretty clear how they got the name...

Another thing we learned on the tour was that deer in the park, while not afraid of people, are apparently terrified of turkeys.

As we heard many times, Zion is part of the Colorado plateau that was once a lake, and, at other times, a desert.  Some of the rock formations are the result of fossilized lakebed; others come from sand dunes collapsing under their own weight.  We also learned a bit more about how arches form--rock weakens not just due to frost heaving, but also due to calcium carbonate leaching out of the rock, due to pH changes (the ranger didn't say whether this would be in high or low pH conditions...but I assume low).


Below: "arch embryos"!

One thing I learned about that I was not expecting was the life of a ranger!  Apparently most ranger jobs are seasonal, since the parks are far more busy in the summer; full-year jobs are highly coveted and generally reserved for the most senior rangers.  So a lot of rangers find themselves rangering from May to October and then waiting tables or something in the winter.  The jobs themselves are season by season, so rangers who want to advance professionally can find themselves hopping from park to park each year.  Sounds like a difficult lifestyle.  I also noticed that the staff selling food and stuff in the park appear to be on J-1 visas, which is the first actual legitimate use for the visa program I've heard of (more people have probably heard of this one).

The big hike that Zion is known for is Angel's Landing: it includes a portion on a ledge that's 3 feet wide and 800 feet above the ground.  Another cool-sounding hike in the park is the Narrows, which is 16 miles long and mostly down a river, requiring hikers to swim park of the way.  We opted to skip those particular hikes and instead went on a few drier less elevated ones, Weeping Rock and Lower Emerald Pool.  Both of these are places where snowmelt from the mountains collects and drips down onto the ground, resulting in some very refreshing splatter and lots of plants and animals...including canyon frogs, which are incredibly loud considering their size--they sound like sheep.  We even saw one in person!

Lower left: frog

Weeping Rock

Below: Plants growing out of the ceiling that water is dripping from

Pretty wildflowers on the way to Emerald Pool

Emerald Pool

Pretty rocks caused by sand dunes being compressed

Also on the hike we saw one of the much-discussed rockslides in person.  Fortunately ours was just a little fist-sized rock bouncing down the hill in front of us, but a ranger told us about a time when another ranger almost got smushed like a pancake on one of the park's most popular trails.

We saw this stink bug, which was courteous enough to demonstrate its stink-bombing posture.  The ranger assured us that most of the time it's just faking it, since it saves up the bomb for real predators.

After Zion, we hit the road for Vegas, which it turns out has drivers even worse than Boston's and definitely the worst of anywhere we've been on our trip. The strip was all lit up and very pretty, and our hotel had the requisite drunken newlyweds.