Home From the Back of Beyond: Some Images of Strange and Wonderful Places

Thunderstorm near Bandelier National Monument

No, it's not a volcanic eruption, but with the light show that followed that evening, it might as well have been. We were in the high desert of New Mexico at Bandelier National Monument, and the monsoons had arrived early. The lightning flashed every second or two for hours that night. It was magical.

Joshua Trees outside of Rainbow Basin, Mojave Desert of California

I'm back from a long, but epic journey with my students through one of the most intriguing landscapes in North America, the Colorado Plateau. We crossed the California deserts to Arizona and New Mexico, swinging north through southwestern Colorado and southern Utah. Our last few days brought us through the Basin and Range Province of western Utah and Nevada.

Banshee Canyon in Hole in the Wall, Mojave National Preserve

As with all trips, I try to do new things whenever I can, but the real purpose was to open a different world to our students. This class was a hybrid course that explored the geology and archaeology of the region. It's a marvelous region for doing such a class, as humans have impacted the landscape, and the landscape has left its mark on humans.

The Citadel ruin and San Francisco Peaks from Wupatki National Monument, Arizona

The land has seen a parade of cultures over the centuries. Understanding why they abandoned the region in the past has a lot to do with understanding the limits of life there today. Sometimes the problems are the same. The Ancestral Puebloans may have left because of 25 year drought. We are in the midst of a 15 year drought today, although we experienced a very short reprieve from the dryness. A lot of ran fell in the weeks before our arrival. The desert was unusually green for this time of year.

Meteor Crater was impressive as always, a reminder that sometimes situations on our planet change in a hurry.

The Crystal Forest at Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona

Some of our stops were familiar to most people, such as Petrified Forest National Park. People may have heard of it, but many haven't visited. It's a bizarre landscape of badlands topography and horizontal forests of trees that wouldn't be out of place in the Redwood forests of California, yet are more than 200 million years old.

The slot canyon at Kasha Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument

Other places are exceedingly obscure, although they don't deserve to be. Kasha Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument is one of those places. Unless you are from Cappadocia, Turkey, it is one of the most unusual landscapes you'll ever see. The slot canyon is one of my favorite hikes anywhere.

The greenery was really pretty stunning after fifteen years of crippling drought. The drought is not broken by any means, but the rainy conditions over the last few weeks allowed us to imagine this landscape under a different climate regime. At Chaco Culture National Historical Park, the rangers described the plant growth as the most intense they had ever seen. The elks wandering near the campground were looking downright fat (of course the doe was probably about to drop a calf).

Chaco Canyon represented the height of the political power of the Ancestral Puebloans, in the period around 1150 AD. By the 1200s they were building the fortresses of the cliff-dwellings in Mesa Verde. It wasn't the culmination of their society, but the prelude to abandonment. Whatever the reason, the canyons fell silent around 1285. The people had migrated south and east into the Hopi mesas area and the riverlands of the Rio Grande in New Mexico.

Cliff Palace in Mesa Verde National Park, one of the largest of the cliff cities.

One of our stops was especially eerie. Castle Rock was one of the last of the Ancestral Pueblo dwellings to be constructed. It came to an end after only a decade or two with a massacre. Archaeologists discovered more than three dozen slaughtered people in the excavations.

Castle Rock, in Canyons of the Ancients National Monument

The last part of our trip went back to the geological aspects of the plateau country. Despite having visited the Natural Bridges National Monument nearly two dozen times over the years, this was the first time I was able to hike under Sipapu Bridge, probably the second largest natural bridge in the world. The opening is more than 200 feet high, and from the bottom, it is immense. Those are mature cottonwood trees in the picture below!

Sipapu Bridge in Natural Bridges National Monument

We made the very hot hike to Horseshoe Bend near Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River. An entrenched meander, the loop formed when the land rose, trapping a river in its floodplain pattern. The stunning cliffs are composed of the Navajo Sandstone, the remnants of a Jurassic-aged sand dune "sea" that once covered many western states.

Horseshoe Bend, near Glen Canyon Dam. The Colorado River runs clear because the dam has captured the silt that once gave the river its name. Algae is able to thrive in the clear water.

The culmination of the Navajo Sandstone is found at Zion National Park in southern Utah. The Virgin River has carved an incredibly deep slot canyon at the Narrows. In many places the river fills the entire valley floor, meaning a hike is a wet affair. I didn't hesitate!

So, I am home for a couple of days, and will try to pick up the pace with a few long-delayed blog entries. You can certainly expect more information from our last couple of trips in the plateau country as well! It's good to be home for a spell.

Want a Wilderness Experience in Zion Canyon? Go Where the Trams Go.

Not where they stop, mind you, but where the trams go. Zion National Park underwent a huge change in 1997 when the park service closed the upper canyon of Zion to private vehicles and instituted a system of free tramways. The change brought an end to my favorite activity of night hiking in the upper canyon, and it at first seemed inconvenient when dealing with large student groups. But it didn't take me long to deeply appreciate the changes that came about in the upper canyon as a result.

For one, the animals became far more easy to see. On summer days, every available parking spot and pullout along the road would be filled with people, and the animal life would simply hide out. Without the constant commotion, animals felt more comfortable being out, and the tram rides now offer chances to see rabbits, deer, coyotes, foxes, and turkeys, while the tram drivers report seeing other more rare animals like mountain lions and badgers.

My recent trip to Zion afforded me some extra time to explore some new places, and I took the opportunity. The day started with a normal tourist target, the Gateway to the Narrows and the Riverside Walk. It is pretty much the most popular walk in the park, and is well worth seeing, even if it is crowded.

Zion Canyon is relatively wide in the lower reaches because the layers beneath the Navajo Sandstone are easily eroded, undercutting the high cliffs and causing rockfalls. It's where the Virgin River flows entirely in Navajo that the canyon gets incredibly narrow and very deep, with vertical walls reaching 2,000 feet above the river. The Riverside Trail is a paved ADA accessible trail that follows the narrowing canyon, ending after a mile at the entrance to the Narrows, where no trails are possible, but people can explore miles upstream as long as they don't mind getting wet numerous times.

Lots of water enters Zion Canyon from cliffside springs, and the hanging gardens can be very colorful. The Columbines are some of my favorite flowers. Don't worry about the feeling that you are being watched. It's either a Mountain Lion, or one of the Rock Squirrels. I don't which one is more menacing...

The trail is just gorgeous. But if the crowds bother you, there is a neat little secret for finding seclusion in the midst of the very busy national park. Like I said, walk where the trams go. Not where they stop, but where they travel between stops. You can walk along the road, or in many places a foot path follows close to the river. A tram will pass every 10 or 15 minutes, but that will be it for the motorized noise. I had two more hours to play with so I decided to walk as far down the canyon as I could.

I first passed the empty parking lot at the Temple of Sinawava, the end of the paved highway. I remember so many harried efforts to find parking for four vans on trips in years past, with hundreds of people hanging about, unwilling to give up their precious parking spots. Today it was quiet, because the moment the tram pulls up, people get out and immediately disappear up the trail.

Walking down the road, I was immediately struck by how unfamiliar the canyon looked. Walking is slow, giving one a chance to look at cliffs from new angles and new perspectives. I never saw this sort of thing from a car window.

The cliffs seem to change character every few hundred yards, with some cliffs sheer and unbroken, and others broken up by jointing. The air was fresh and the canyon bottom was still cool as the morning sun had not yet reached the floor of the gorge.

The emerald green cottonwood trees provided a strong contrast to the reds and browns of the canyon walls, and all of it was reflected on the waters of the Virgin River. Even the sound of flowing cascades felt unfamiliar and strange, but it was delightful as well.

Zion has been compared to Yosemite, only it's red and without the glacial origin. Maybe. I like to see each park on its own terms. Zion is a beautiful and stunning canyon.

I noticed a park tram stopped in an unlabeled pullout. It turned out to be a ranger tour, and I found out about an attraction in the canyon that is not on any of the park maps. It's called Menu Falls, and it is a delightful small waterfall just a few yards from the road. There is even a trail and platform for viewing, but to get there you either have to walk like I did or take the ranger tour. The name derives from the fact that early menus at the park lodge had a picture of the falls on the cover.

I happened upon a park ranger with a spotting scope looking for California Condors. The birds were once very much on the verge of extinction, down to just 22 individuals in the 1980s, but with a captive breeding program, they are making a comeback. Today there are more than 400, with more than 200 returned to the wild. The numbers may be close to their pre-European contact population. They are truly a relict Pleistocene creature, though, and would have been far more numerous during the Ice Ages, when the larger megafauna like giant bison and wooly mammoths would have provided much more food.

I'm sorry to tease you with the picture though. It's actually a Turkey Vulture. The ranger hadn't seen any this season yet. The upper canyon is also a good place to watch for Peregrine Falcons.

Around the next bend, the Great White Throne came into view. One of the tallest cliffs in Zion, it rises 2,300 feet above the valley floor. No trails reach the summit.

Zion is not known for Ancestral Pueblan ruins, but they are there, in a few spots. I had always seen one briefly through the car and tram windows over the years, but this walk was the first chance I ever had to photograph it. It appears to be a single granary, but was on a pretty steep cliff, so I didn't investigate further.

I reached the Weeping Rock tram stop, and time had run out. I'm pretty sure that next time I get the chance, I'll be walking down canyon from there. Who knows what else there is to discover?

Vagabonding Across the 39th Parallel: A Heavenly Canyon of Sand - Mukuntuweap

We'd been on the road for more than two weeks last July, on our vagabonding journey across the 39th parallel in Nevada, Colorado and Utah, and we could feel home calling. We had been going along, rarely making plans more than a day or two in advance, and we had explored many new and fascinating places that we had never seen before. And yet...we were sort of planning to cross the Wasatch Front in Utah and start across the Basin and Range province, but I took one last look at the computer, and noted that a cancellation had opened up a single campsite that day at Zion National Park. What the heck, I thought, let's take in one more national park. We headed south and west from Bryce Canyon and Red Canyon.

It was hot. Around 107 degrees. Sitting around in camp in the sun was an untenable proposition, so we erected the tent, and set about finding a cool place to hang out for awhile. In the main part of Zion National Park, that pretty much means upstream, in the Narrows.

The original name of the park appears to have been Mukuntuweap, which translates into something along the lines of "straight canyon" in the Paiute language. In the main part of the canyon where the roads and developments are found, the description is true. At the north end, things change. The walls of Zion Canyon are steep cliffs of Navajo Sandstone, the Jurassic record of a vast sand sea that once existed across several southwestern states. Where the Virgin River has cut into the underlying softer layers the canyon walls are undercut and the canyon widens rapidly (in the sense of geologic time, but also human time; rockfalls happen constantly). At the upstream end of the valley the Virgin River cuts exclusively through the sandstone, forming a very narrow winding slickrock canyon called, quite logically, the Narrows of the Virgin River.
On the hottest days, the sun barely shines into the narrows, and it is the coolest place to hide from the heat. We retreated into the shadows and waited for the sun to set. Others were hanging out in the coolness including a cute doe and fawn.

Canyons like the Narrows of the Virgin River are spectacular to see, but can sometimes be exceedingly dangerous. There are miles of river watershed upstream, and when deep in the canyon, you can't see if thunderstorms are dumping water into the gorges upstream. In the case of a flash flood there is no place to go. Things were calm the day we were there, but we could see huge masses of driftwood from some intense flooding from just over a year ago.

As we approached the actual narrows, the canyon walls closed in, rising as much as 2,000 feet above us.

The shale layer underlying the sandstone is a barrier to the movement of groundwater, so water percolating downward through the Navajo Sandstone is forced out of the canyon walls, forming clear fresh springs. There is enough water in this section of the canyon to form a small swamp, an island of greenery beneath the red cliffs.

The sun was dropping below the horizon and the shadows in the canyon deepened. It used to be that the road end at Temple of Sinawava was one of the busiest parking lots in Zion, but with only a few dozen slots, cars would circle for a long time waiting for something to open up. It was crowded and noisy. The park service eventually instituted a shuttle bus system and no longer allows cars in the upper canyon, at least during the summer. Having experienced the canyon both ways, I can say that the shuttle system has done wonderful things for the canyon. The shuttle stops at road's end, people pile out and immediately disappear. By the time the bus leaves, the canyon is quiet again. More and more animals can be seen, and the canyon feels wilder, even though the number of visitors each year has been fairly constant.

The only problem is the that the shuttles stop operating at nightfall. Lingering in the upper canyon as we were doing introduced the potential problem of missing the last bus of the day. We started walking a little faster in the rapidly disappearing light.

I fully support the shuttle system, but one drawback from my point of view is that the lack of access in the upper canyon at night makes it very difficult to do one of my favorite summertime activities: night hiking. The spot in Zion for night-hikes was the Emerald Pools Trail. It was a truly mystical experience to walk up to the pools in the dark and stroll behind the small waterfalls. It was especially striking if the moon was shining through the falling water, or if lightning was causing explosions of light and echoing thunder (followed that particular time by a complete drenching of rain).

There were a few hazards, though. One year we were sitting behind the waterfalls, and a two or three foot wide slab of rock broke loose and fell just a few feet from some of my students. Another time I was walking in near total darkness, enjoying my other senses (it was a concrete pathway so it was hard to get off the trail). I was walking through the high brush and I heard rustling, not at my feet, but right in front of my face. OK, that was a bit much. I turned on my flashlight and found that I had almost walked face-first into a porcupine munching away at the shrubs...

The canyon walls had taken on the pastel hues of the twilight. We caught one of the last buses of the day, and returned to camp, which aside from the ants was a much more tolerable place to hang out for the night.

It got past me, but January 7 was my fourth anniversary of blogging here at Geotripper. 943 posts and counting. Here is the first one...