Birch Creek

So for everyone just dying to see what happened to my lip, oh boy, here it is! And for everyone who does not know what happened, here is the story. New Years' Day evening, I was getting up out of the chair in the basement, when I put my weight in the foot part of the weight bench. It was up so down swung this metal thing. The next thing I knew, Jacqueline was screaming and I had no idea what was happening until there was blood running down my face. I don't even remember pulling the leg thing from the weight bench off my face. I just went to the bathroom sink, started spitting blood into the sink, and I told Jacqueline to go get me a towel. 

It bled quite a bit, but the towel stopped the bleeding. Jacqueline was going nuts, but I was pretty chill about the whole deal. I guess that is shock kicking in. We drove down to St. George and they fixed me right up. The doc called it a through and through. That was because my lip was split completely all the way through. He did a good job fixing me up, though. It only took about two hours and they put the Georgia-Hawaii game on the tv for me to watch. It went well and to look at it from a mirror, it seemed not so bad. Then came the sitting around and healing process. My lip swelled up like a balloon, like a big pus filled balloon. Then it started to go down and I was able to get my stitches out only six days afterward. I also was able to get a job on that day too working for H&R Block during the tax season. Oh boy! I finally was able to get a hike in on Thursday, a mere nine days after the injury. I decided to take it easy and just go somewhere up in the main canyon that I had not taken the time to explore yet. Birch Creek is right across from the shuttle bus stop for Court of the Patriarchs. Since it has no official trail on any maps, it does not see the volume of people that other areas in Zion see.

 It is much like the drainage for the Emerald Pools, except quite a bit bigger. I set off and there was a trail for me to use. It took me past the area where the horses turn around from the Sand Bench Trail. Soon I was heading up the canyon and the trail stayed quite good. I had excellent views of the Court of the Patriarchs, peering up to see if anyone was on Tricks of the Trade on Isaac. The trail continued, but it climbed the north side of the drainage. Soon I was quite a ways above the creek.

 I did not think that snow would be an issue since there was not much on the ground. Unfortunately three other people had hiked this trail before, thus turning the snow into ice on the trail. It became a bit difficult when the trail started to get steeper and head over some large dropoffs. On any other day in Zion, I might be complaining about how muddy or how sandy this trail was, but on this day it was just ice. I continued up until I was only about fifty feet below Abraham. I figured that was about as far as I needed to go and I guessed that this trail was most likely a climbing access route. I had a great view of the two tiered half frozen waterfall coming out of Birch Creek. I was not exactly where I wanted to be, as it would have been nicer to check out the creek. So I went down a different way, which was much easier to walk on the snow rather than the ice. When I hit the creek, I decided to go up it. First it was dry and then it became very wet. It was difficult at times to get around the water when the rocks were slick with a thin coat of snow. I made it to where the water came in from a spring similar to Weeping Rock. 

After that, it dried out once again. It became mainly a snowy rock drainage and after a while, I decided that there had to be a better day to explore this kind of stuff, maybe when every rock does not have a layer of snow on it. I decided to try out one more drainage before I called it a day. So I went up the drainage between Abraham and Isaac. I expected it to be much like the drainage between Isaac and Moroni. It was very similar in a couple of ways. First there was lots of structure and a pipe that drained water from the area. 

Birch Creek was one of the main settled areas in Zion, so it has lots of arch sites from settlement. This seemed to be an active site, though, probably a reason that there isn't a trail up here. Next, there was quite a bit of water. I figured there would be a waterfall to check out and there was. I went up to the waterfall and figured that was good enough of a day. My healing lip did not like the cold too much, but I enjoyed the short 2.5 hours of hiking in an unexplored area for me in the park.