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. 

The Narrows & The Narrows

When I went to Patagonia, there was a lot of down time to read books. My dad had a book that we both read entitled The City & the City, which was a Hugo Award Winner in Science Fiction. In this book, there are two parallel universes existing simultaneously within the same city. In plain sight when you are in one city, this other city with a different culture and completely different universe exists in a different reality. People are not allowed to look over and see what is going on in this other city or bad things will happen to them. So the characters talk frequently of "seeing without seeing", meaning that as they walk by they know out of the corner of their eye what is going on in this other city but they block it out to keep bad things from happening.

I have been working in Zion for 6 years by this point and going up in the Narrows is never on anyone's list of high priority activities to do for work. There are too many people, there is too much chaos, but most of all to me, there is too much resource damage that is uncontrolled and abundant. So, as I walked by all this resource destruction for years and years, it was like the City & the City as I was "seeing without seeing". It is so easy to just look at this majestic place with the extremely high walls of Navajo Sandstone and this awesome river pouring right through it and ignore the fact that vegetation is being destroyed at a rapid pace. There are trails built specifically for people to take a poop. Anyplace where there can be a trail out of the river, people take advantage of it without the thought of what they are destroying. Why? Because no one is stopping them. I know that my thought process would be if I was hiking in this area and not working in this area. "If the Park Service didn't want me to walk here, then they would have stopped me from walking here in some way." As a park employee, I would take the time to throw a few sticks and logs on these trails and to try to encourage folks to find a different way. But it never worked and I never really thought that it was my responsibility to make it work. None of my bosses were telling me to get this job done, so why should I take it too seriously.

But coming down from Deep Creek two weeks past, it finally clicked with me that why couldn't it be me to lead this charge. I have realized throughout my life that no matter how big a project if I was willing to lead the charge and it was a good idea, others would see that and get behind it. When I brought it to my bosses, they were nothing but supportive, but with the attitude of it's going to be a BIG project taking lots of time and muscle. Still, I was ready and willing to get the job done. Now I just had to see what amount of effort it was going to take.

So I decided to give it a try. I started amazingly early and at 7 am, I was driving up the scenic drive to park at the Temple to get a head start on the Narrows hikers. My goal with this was to avoid the big crowds of people because all day long I was going to have answers questions about what I was doing. I hit the Riverside Walk and it was refreshing to only have a few souls on the trail in the morning.
I already had a social trail picked out. It was in the perfect spot. This trail started on the left side of the river climbing up to a flatter spot and then branching off in three directions below. It also had a second trail lower down that connected with these other branches. It was completely useless because if you went around the corner instead you stayed at the same elevation with the river instead of going up and coming back down. No one would disagree with me that this trail was absolutely useless, so I was determined to get rid of it. To top it all off, there was a log jam right downstream, where piles of logs were laying there waiting to be used to block people's progress.

From what I have learned from years of blocking social trails is only when you make the trail more difficult for people to continue using then to not use, will people stop using it. So the plan was to use as much material as possible to dump on the trail in order to keep others from using it. So I set about collecting material. I crossed and re-crossed the river multiple times carrying the heaviest logs I could possibly lift. Why not carry a whole bunch of sticks instead? Because if there is anything that I have learned with the Narrows is that if something is the size of a walking stick, it will vanish instantly. So I carried logs that honestly should have been lifted by two or more people at once. Sometimes there were entire trees that I dragged across the river. I worked on this for two hours straight and physically, there is no better workout then to carry heavy logs across a river time and time again.

The fun part was that after those two hours I got to then carry those logs up and down the hill dumping them strategically in places that would keep people from using these routes and instead use the river. When I ran out of logs, I started moving rocks. I spent about an hour moving the logs and then another hour moving the rocks. After that I put up the five signs that I had brought with me.

I was exhausted, but when I looked at it my first thought was: It is not enough. There were many signs of that like while I was working people walking right through the trails I am blocking, most of these people being foreigners. Most people when talking to me kept asking me what I was doing, as they were honestly seeing without seeing. I did even get a little help moving the largest of logs from some women, but really I was out here alone and I needed someone else in my corner. This was not a project that I was going to accomplish alone. But what I could do is see if how the work I had done would hold up in the next couple of weeks to see just what kind of effort and time commitment would be required to accomplish a project of such large proportions. 

Golden Wall

We had such a good experience with Red Canyon, that we decided to go back. Jacqueline was able to get going early in the morning as we wanted to make sure to get a campsite. It was a good thing, because when we pulled in, there were only a few remaining. This time we didn't choose our campsite from before and instead went with one a little bit further up the hill. It was good this time, though, because we already had a plan together about where we were going to hike. There was a trail that left right from the campground and went up, but continued back with a loop. We got going rather quickly and soon I was hauling Zyla up the hill.

 Jacqueline was getting a little winded also because she was now halfway through pregnancy. We all did rather well and eventually popped out above the trees on a nice open plateau. It was lunch time, which I quickly finished. Jacqueline and especially Zyla were going to take a bit more time. I let them eat on this flat place among a sea of hoodoos and red rocks. I continued up the trail to go to a viewpoint. It was a nice spot, but only a short distance, so I was back before lunch was done. I tried to get the two of them moving, but a two year old has a mind of her own on how quickly lunch will be over. '
Besides, we thought that we had the entire day anyway, so there shouldn't have to be too much of a rush. But this was July, so as we passed the noon hour, we knew what likely could be rolling in, big thunderstorm clouds. At this point, we had blue sky, but that was likely to change. We started hiking again as the trail immediately dropped elevation then began climbing again. Sure enough the wind started to pick up and the gray clouds rolled in. We worried a bit because we were so exposed with not much vegetation in this area. But as we kept moving it soon became apparent that turning around and going back again would give us no advantage over continuing the way we came.
We came upon what could be called the Golden Wall. Along the entire trail were interesting formations including a gravity defying rock perched like a golf ball on a golf tee. This trail was excellent and there were no other people on it. Maybe that was just because they were smart enough to realize that the strong winds and dark clouds out to the east were a good sign that just maybe this wasn't the best time of day to be out hiking. Zyla was enjoying the wind and just kept saying, "It's windy," over and over again. I tried to keep us moving quickly, but Jacqueline had to take it at a good controlled pace because there was a baby in her belly.
The trail seemed to go up and down as we traveled mostly to the south. Eventually it took a turn to the west, but it continued climbing and we were open and exposed to the elements. Jacqueline, of course, was giving me advice on how bad of an idea this was, while I was just trying to get away from the high exposed elevation. Still, we were not too nervous as the storm clouds were not producing much rain or much cloud to ground lightning. They just looked rather intimidating. We finally made it around the Golden Wall to what looked like the high point of the entire hike.

Then the trail finally began to go down hill. The weather also began to clear up. We still decided not to take the turn off to Castle Bridge, which sounded like a nice spot, but we had to stay aware that the weather could still turn on us. We ran into the only people that we saw on this hike and talked to them a bit. From the high point, the trail continued to go down until we ran into the road. We always hope that Zyla will sleep on these hikes, but instead she was awake the entire time. Most of my time hiking is spent with Zyla constantly singing in my ear. She is fun, but it makes for a much louder experience for me and sometimes makes conversation with Jacqueline challenging. There was an excellent paved bike trail that we were able to follow back to the campground. That gave us the ability to spend the rest of the day just hanging out reading books and playing with rocks. Zyla was rather interested in the crazy squirrels that were rather aggressive. We had a yummy dinner and then bed time. We were prepared this time for the cold, but July was sure a lot different then June. It was very humid out and Zyla this time was rather sweaty in the tent. Instead of her down coat to sleep in, she was just in a pair of pj's. We did end up sleeping well, but once again when morning hit, we had to be quick with our packing to get Jacqueline back for work. We enjoyed having at least this one day off for going camping together as a family was just such a fun time.