SPS goes Floral

I don't know what type of yellow wildflowers these are, but they are entwined with a yucca plant in Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park in Utah. A nearby sign said this type of yucca only grows in a small area in southwestern Utah.

In Zion, shooting stars could be found wherever the waterfalls were. These flowers, and others, cling to walls to take advantage of the moisture seeping out, and form "hanging gardens" on the rock faces.

And here is another yellow wildflower I do not know the name of - must be something about that color :) This one was on the floor of Zion Canyon. Since we were there during spring, we were able to spy quite a collection of blooms.

SPS: Zion from the Outside

Zion canyon is beautiful from the inside, but its not too shabby from the outside either :)

One evening we had an hour or two of sunlight left and hated to waste it. So, we decided to go find Grafton, a ghost town about ten miles from our campsite. Grafton turned out to be beautifully situated, and the late evening light was the perfect complement to the red rock surroundings. The tall whitish spires at the top left are the walls of Zion. The land really had the "Old West" feel to it. It's no wonder that western movies are regularly filmed in this area.

This picture is one of my favorites from our stay in Utah.

The Trail

Here are a few shots showing the trail that took us up to Angel's Landing:

I took this picture before we were up very far, but I liked how the trail blended into the natural rock. The view is up across several switchbacks. The people coming down were laughing at those of us just starting out, jokingly saying "You're almost there!"

This next picture is of a section of trail called "Walter's Wiggles." The wiggles are one of the CCC-constructed feats of shear effort, a collection of 22 very short switchbacks that scale a near vertical rock face. Here, you are looking from the top down to the bottom of the wiggles. If you enlarge it, you can make out people at the bottom.

And here is a view of the lower part of the trail, seen from higher up. As an interesting aside, park workers were in the midst of trail maintenance on the day we hiked. They had several ATV-type vehicles outfitted with small truck beds, and a couple of other machines that could haul rock or dirt. On one section of the trail that had been concreted to prevent erosion, I could see the imprints of horseshoes. I imagine mules or donkeys were used for heavy hauling before the advent of the smaller utility vehicles. If mules can work daily in the Grand Canyon, I guess this would be small potatoes for them :)

Here's one of the trail machines, I almost forgot I had taken a picture of it, and picture of the horseshoe imprints:

How About a Super Park Sunday?

Between one thing and another, I never did my SPS post yesterday. So I am humbly submitting a Super Park Sunday post with lots of pictures to make up for yesterday's blip :) I've got some more Zion pictures for you. These photos follow my trip up to Angel's Landing, one of the more popular but also more strenuous hikes in the park.

I took this shot close to the beginning of the trail, where the going was flat and easy. The large rock promontory in the photo is Angel's Landing, and we're headed to it's top!

Here, we were only part way up the first climb on the trail. The view was already breathtaking, with the sheer wall in front of us framing up the cliffs in the distance. In many places I was amazed that a trail could exist at all. Signs indicated that the Civilian Conservation Corps built the trail through some tremendous feats in engineering during the 1930s.

After the initial climb, a nice stroll through a side canyon, and then another steep climb, you reach an area called Scout's Lookout. From the Lookout, you have an eerie, discouraging, view out and up the spine of Angel's Landing. I say discouraging because I was winded just getting up to the Lookout, and it seemed impossible to make it all way up to the Landing itself, across that narrow rock spine.

You'll notice I don't have any pictures taken on the climb up to Angel's Landing. Frankly, I was too scared to take my camera out - I wanted both hands and feet on the rocks in front of me :) But the views from the Landing itself were well worth the effort.

At the top, we could see the smoke from a prescribed burn on the rim of the canyon. From the floor of the canyon, the angle was too sharp and you couldn't see the smoke plume at all!

I will share a few more Angel's Landing pictures in my next post, including some more of the trail itself.

SPS: Zion's Court of the Patriarchs

Thought I'd start out the post-vacation SPS posts with a taste of Zion. I did some internet research for information on the various trails in the park before we left. I read that the trail normally used for horse riding was supposed to have good views whether you were on a horse or not, and since most people without horses never thought to hike it, it was relatively peaceful, too.

Well, my internet directions were a little fuzzy, and we missed the horse trail. We actually ended up on an unmarked trail, with no name, that entered the area known as the Court of the Patriarchs. The area is named for the three large rock spires that tower over the narrow valley. Each spire is named for a Biblical patriarch: Jacob, Abraham, and Isaac. We did not see one other person while we were on this trail, but we did run into some animal friends:

This frog (or toad?) was hanging out by a small stream.

This lizard was extremely patient with us. I took a number of pictures from about 3 feet away, and when he showed no sign of caring about me, I circled in until I had the S2 on supermacro, positioned about an inch from his eye. Still didn't care one bit!

The sky on this day had some interesting clouds, which made for visual interest, and also helped to cut the bright sunlight, allowing for some decent exposures. Justin and I both felt that, even though we'd missed our intended target, we'd still run across something very worthy: solitude in a busy park!