We left bright and early during the morning and it was strange to drive through Zion. The place was eerily quiet. Despite the reports of kicking people out of places, there just were not any people really to kick out by this point. Meadow Creek was located a few miles outside the park. It met up with Mineral Gulch that led into Parunaweap Canyon. We started hiking from a piece of old road that used to be Highway 9. The beginning of this was just route finding through the trees on a ridge that dropped us into the canyon. From there it was following a weak stream down.
We did our best to keep our feet dry as we knew this stream was going to dry up. We saw what we believe was a fresh mountain lion kill sitting in the stream as there was still fresh blood floating around the kill. Almost immediately after this we came to the first obstacle. It was a 20 foot rappel down a slopy section of rock. There was already a rope installed, so we just used that. It was an awkward rappel, so I told Patrick to just handline it. He had a simpler time with it than me. Combined with another waterfall that we could walk around, these were the only obstacles and the rest of the canyon was mostly easy going.
There was an unimpressive arch a few miles in. Patrick expressed his displeasure with arches and I would definitely have to agree with this one. Downstream we ran into the confluence of Mineral Gulch and continued down that. We heard a voice and far up above us was a man on a four wheeler, so far we could barely make him out. We kept going farther downstream and eventually the views were fantastic. The canyon became super narrow but still incredibly flat. This was an amazing canyon that would be a photographer's dream. It opened up a little bit and we found a cave with some pictographs in it. These were made with yellow paint. There were also cow pies and fire scars from many campfires in there. Still an awesome sight to see, but it could have been made better if it was protected a little bit better.
We went down some more amazing narrows until it opened out to Parunaweap canyon. Patrick was hoping to get into the barracks, but unfortunately that was quite a ways downstream from us. We would visit that during a separate trip through Fat Man's Misery later that month. On this day, we just turned around to head back upstream. It was back through all the pretty narrows until we got to the junction with Meadow Creek again. Instead of heading back up Meadow Creek, we went over to Seven Canyon instead, so named because there was an arch that looked like the number 7 in it.
There were all so some petroglyphs and that was our main goal. These were pretty incredible, though faded. There were a lot of them, mostly bighorn sheep. We saw some bighorn sheep on the hike high on the cliffs above and you could really tell that people hunted them and it was a blessing to be able to bring one down for meat. We decided that seeing the glyphs was good enough and the arch would have to wait for another day or never to be seen at all. We went back to Meadow Creek and started to head up that one. The one drawback of this hike was the large amount of time one had to spend in mostly wide open canyon.
Still, the cliffs were scenic and the hike back seemed to take less time than it took coming down. We hiked up to the base of the waterfall this time and while there was not much water it was still quite a drop. We made it out a little after 4 p.m. making it about a nine hour day to do about 20 miles. It was definitely worth it to see the beauty of that place and definitely not as challenging as I thought it might be. It would have been very hot midsummer so this was the perfect time of year to do it. Patrick was nervous about the length of the trip but never once did we have an issue as we moved well the entire trip.
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