Cougar Mountain Before & After

One interesting feature of getting to be in the same place for quite some time is realizing just how actively erosion is still occurring in Zion. I can see how the landscape changes in just a few years. These first three pictures show the same area of the Right Fork of North Creek. In 2007, my beautiful wife (who at the time was my beautiful fiance) and I used to go down to this spot and spend the day enjoying the nice swimming hole. In 2008, a massive flash flood ripped through Trail Canyon and then down the Right Fork destroying everything in its path.

There is no better illustration for what a flash flood can do then to come back to this swimming hole a year later and see it completely changed. These are the same spots, basically, though it is really challenging to tell. Well, returning four years later in 2012, I could see the river really making its mark. Cutting through the sand, rock, and debris, here our favorite swimming hole was beginning to come back to life. I love these time elapsed pictures as they show much.
This is all leading up to the fact that the last time that I got to do this hike was in 2008 when it looked like picture number 2. Now it was looking like picture number 3. So when I told Nick, Kelsey, and Woody who were hiking with me that Trail Canyon was great without much vegetation to fight, I was imagining the 2008 form rather than the 2012 version. So to get to Trail Canyon, we obviously start in the Right Fork. There was one thing that the river had not eroded yet and that was the gigantic rock slide that happened in 2011.

In fact, you can even see that with just one year's time, just how much material has continued to fall in this one area. When we crossed this rock slide almost one year prior, our volunteer Andy nearly became part of the large dam that had formed due to continued rockfall creating a massive lake.
Now, the slide seemed rather stable and the lake was still something that we needed to wade across, so wade we did. It is nice to do this hike in July when getting soaked head to toe is actually enjoyable rather than a deterrent to doing the hike.
As we all four crossed the lake, we came upon Trail Canyon and immediately started our way up. I could tell that things were going to be different this time because of the amount of vegetation. There were lots of tamarisk, too, which was too bad considering that in much of the park it had been eradicated. It is an opportunistic kind of plant, though, so I could see how it could make its way back to this area that truly had been ravaged by the flash flooding.

 Notice the difference in the colors that dominated the hike in 2008 compared to 2012. In just four years, the vegetation had recovered quite significantly. It is funny how even something so devastating as a fire followed by a flash flood can only help an area grow stronger. I was not expecting so much plant growth, though, so the people who hiked with me that wore shorts, everyone except for Nick, were quite grumpy about getting their legs chewed up by the massive amount of weeds we were fighting our way through. In fact, by the end of the day, Kelsey and Woody were not looking entirely too good with bright red legs. For some reason, I was doing just fine. Maybe years of fighting through dense vegetation had got me to the point of where my legs were just used to taking a beating. Who knows, but we continued up Trail Canyon which proved to be, though much more vegetated, still an easy enough hike to access one of the more inaccessible areas of the park.

I was interested in seeing the tree to see how it had recovered. It looked pretty good actually with a lot of new bark growth in the lower stretches. You could still see the scarring, but it was coming back to life even after being in the midst of some of the heaviest flooding. After the tree, we continued to charge up the mountain. This is where it got steep. We picked our way up and did not have too tough of a time. We just tried to avoid some of the heaviest vegetation. This was a great place to show how little impact an area could have when humans avoided it. It looked pristine with only faint animal trails to follow. There were two stretches of steep hills to climb and eventually we were able to pop out at the saddle between the Dalton Wash area and the Right Fork and also between Cougar Mountain and the upper stretches of Terry Wash.

 The view from the saddle had not changed much. In fact, the only real difference was the cloud cover that was coming in because of it being July and the middle of thunderstorm season. The clouds were looking threatening, but not exactly menacing, so we continued on. Our goal was the top of Cougar Mountain. We saw how far away that was and wondered if we had enough time. Eric and I had only made it to the natural arch that was out there in the past. This time I was determined to get on top of the summit. Well, it did not end up that way. It was easy going enough, just long. When it came time to turn around, we realized that the summit that we were standing upon was only a false summit and that the true summit was an extra one hour round-trip hike. We discussed among the group and the overwhelmingly consensus was that this was going to have to be our summit for the day. We still all absorbed the incredible views from up top. Zion is such an amazing place to get on top of peaks because the rewards are so high.

First of all, the peak itself had a bunch of interesting rock formations with hoodoos, arches, and small canyons. Add to that the views out toward the West Temple, Bishopric, and the Guardian Angels and you had views you just could not get anywhere else. The canyon above Terry Wash is one of the more inaccessible spots and we had a bird's eye view right into it. I was also glad we could make this trip because this was a first for the other three people on this trip. Nick, Kelsey, and Woody were getting to experience this awesome wilderness rich spot in Zion for the first time. We can get bogged down in visiting wilderness areas as wilderness rangers that are filled uncomfortably with people. But, when we visit a place like this, we can know that there are some places in the park that truly are left up to nature to decide how they grow and erode. We had nothing left to do but go back down and return to the trailhead. That meant more sweating and red legs, with a nice cool swim to cool us off at the end. This turned out to be a fantastic hike with some wilderness rangers actually out in true Zion wilderness.