Day 4
A cold wind whips my hair across my face, into my eyes and mouth. Bundled in my gortex rain jacket, hood snugged tight, I clutch at the small paintbrushes on the picnic table in front of me before they roll away in a strong gust. A group of us are huddled in various nooks around the Kolob Canyon overlook, doing our best to capture the land’s reds and purples and the sky’s sterling gray in our little watercolor journals.
Not what we expected—at least I’m wearing jeans today. The weather is playing trickster, as it did in this part of Zion Park two days ago when I was trekking to log cabins. But those of us who are here for this art workshop love both art and nature, and we gamely dip and mix and blot and reflect, painting our thoughts in colors and writing the landscape in fine-point ink.
I’m surprised at how quickly one can conjure up a scene of rocks and sky, however impressionistic, and even more surprised at how free one can be with the colors before them. Of course, this is the art of art, seeing what one sees with their own unique vision, and interpreting that with pigments, lines and washes. And in this terrain, even with the somewhat ill-tempered weather, we are not lacking for inspiration.
I finish my don’t-lift-the-pen-from-the-paper exercise (one of my favorite results), and we all hike a short distance to another view from within the red canyon walls. We sit in the dirt along a narrow trail, gauging our perspectives on the scene. I am struck by the elegant simplicity of this cliff’s particular shade of deep russet jutting into the platinum sky, and this is what I paint. For me, it is all about these two planes of color meeting, dominating this moment of the world. The instructor comes by and furrows her brow at what I’m doing, eliciting me to use more color, to stop using “brown”. So I do, and because those colors are not in my heart, I ruin the painting. I reel in the lesson of giving over my voice to another like the expert I am.
Later, on the way back to Zion’s main entrance, I think about that painting. I’ve gotten a ride with Kim, who’s a landscape architect for the park, and a master at creating her own life. Sitting in Kim’s pickup truck in a grocery parking lot, waiting while she does a few errands, I repaint the entire picture. Exactly as I want it.
Day 3
Up and out of the tent with the chill sunrise, a breakfast of hard boiled eggs, banana bread and grapefruit juice, and the day is mine.
I head east, through morning’s light on red canyon rock. Canyon Overlook trail, off the park’s east road and just past the rock tunnel, is short, but so filled with deserty goodness that I take my time. Layered sandstone canyon walls, beehive rock formations, sculptures of uptwisted tree roots, juniper and prickly pear, all red and green and yellow under a clear blue sky. Everything is a picture. But I am camping, and have no ready way to recharge my camera battery, so I wrestle between my photographic euphoria and a sense of rationing. The desert, of course, does not move one to moderation. It is a place of extremes, be it weather, terrain, scale or beauty. I do my best.
Back to camp for an early lunch, and then I catch the shuttle up the main canyon for the “real” hikes. Just riding up the canyon is a visual feast. The rust-red sandstone walls tower so far above that I see their tops through the bus’s skylights.
I warm up for some climbing with a short, steep walk to Weeping Rock – an enchanted hanging garden in a rock alcove, constantly raining a delicate veil of groundwater across its opening. Then on to Hidden Canyon, a steep and sometimes dicey mile up switchbacks, carved stone steps, and eventually slanting white-orange sandstone terraces, adorned with chains for the hapless hiker to hang onto. As the path lifts me steadily up, I can look across in any direction to thousand foot cliff faces of russet or white, while occasional pines and aspens greet me at turns in the trail. At the top, the entrance to Hidden Canyon, I scramble a quarter mile through sand and boulders through the narrow rock-walled alley to see a freestanding grey stone arch, abiding quietly out of sight of most visitors.
By the time I’m descending back down the tilting inclines of the trail, I am enraptured. I’ve soaked in the heart-ravaging beauty of this place the way a dry sponge gasps up water, and I am overflowing with it. So when I reach the fork that marks the beginning of the 8 mile round trip trail to Observation Point, and as I sit on a low stone bench munching my farmers’ market honeycrisp apple, cheese and almonds, something in me clicks. Through sheer inspiration I decide I am capable of more than I thought. And although it is already 3:30 in the afternoon, I begin my next climb—this one 2100 feet, and the longest of the day.
I set a deliberate pace. Most people hike this trail for the spectacular views at the end. But at the first bend, and at every single turn thereafter, the landscape ahead of me folds and unfolds into enchanted scenes of texture, sculptural shapes and extraordinary colors. Walls and alleys rise in ochre and bright yellow, vivid orange and white and salmon-rose. Green ponderosa pines and junipers, carved rock strata, sandy washes and craggy peaks all add their unique dimension to the terrain. Gold oak leaves flutter here and there like ornaments, or rare birds.
The color palettes and scope of this type of landscape break down the crust of our habitual thinking like a fresh breeze in a stale room. I feel like a small child waking from a nap and rubbing sleepy eyes open for the first time. The plodding daily routine I knew at home, that had begun to deaden my sense of my own life, doesn’t stand a chance against this kind of power, Nature’s power. And I learn how important it is to go INTO the canyons, to become a part of what's there, to feel it all around me rather than catching brief views from cars or rims. Maybe this is the lesson that Zion gives me, to apply to that numb life of mine when I go home.
I make it to the top, legs somewhat rubbery at the final switchbacks, but with a fresh reservoir of awe to draw on later. The view is, of course, inspiring—oddly, the views here keep looking to me like gigantic painted movie backdrops, cinematic in scale and with a certain unapproachable artistic presence, like a sweeping scene from Gone With the Wind, camera-softened at the edges for added feeling.
Except that here, no added feeling is necessary.
Day 2
The wind is more than we bargained for, let alone the rain. I opted to wear shorts in light of yesterday’s 80-some degrees, but at least I have my Gortex waterproof windbreaker.
Today three of us are in the Kolob Canyon portion of Zion National Park, northwest of the main park. I’m joining two of the park archaeologists for another excursion into a different past. With shovels and a rake, we trek an easy 2 ½ miles to check on a couple of cabins built between 1920 and 1930 by Mormon settlers. In Idaho, the old cabins I’m accustomed to seeing belonged to miners, so it’s a bit odd to me that these particular one-room structures were built as summer or vacation homes.
We cross Taylor Creek again and again, padding through the damp pink earth and gravel, protected from the wind at least now that we’re down in the canyon. The streambed glows a warm salmon pink, confetti-strewn with fallen yellow leaves. On the way in, my companions Jeremy and Dan point out what they call “the luckiest cottonwood tree in Zion National Park” – a wind-curled tree of damp-darkened bark with a few gold leaves left, standing only inches away from where an enormous red boulder came to rest after tumbling from the canyon wall opposite.
At the second cabin we move a pile of milled wood, left over from another project, out of sight, climbing through the trees and scattering the pieces. We are surrounded by tree-sprays of damp yellow leaves. Then we bend into the work of earth moving, shoveling and raking away a berm of (thankfully) soft earth next to the cabin. After lunch and some photographic documentation, we head back as a steady light rain digs its heels in.
This may not sound like fun to most people – I am on vacation, and I even paid to do this. In the rain. (Well, I didn’t anticipate that part.) But I am happy in my adventure, exploring and discovering and helping and learning, because this is the kind of thing I love to do, the kind of thing I still wonder if I should have headed toward long ago in college. And to be in this place, in this kind of landscape, is instant inspiration.
As we walk out we marvel again at the effect of this unusual weather here, its added drama and dimension. The sky hangs low, white mist drifting and draping over the tops of the red cliffs and formations around us. It reminds me briefly of pictures I’ve seen of China, but surprising and vivid with color.
Driving back to the main park, damp and muddy and chilled, we leave the cloud cover and come into the bright desert sun. Behind us, a wide, fat rainbow stretches across the road, grinning like a Cheshire cat, upside down.
Day 1
A hot day, in sun and wind whose gusts pull at my straw hat. Fragile sandy soil caves gently under my feet as I walk with a Park Service archaeology crew through sage and prickly-sharp black brush. With sketchy directions and photocopied topo maps, we search a bench of land for a few noted Anasazi sites, eyes honed for pottery shards and rock patterns that could indicate a room block. We find some, with a few standing flat rocks that once divided food storage bins for a people’s survival. We flag and pace the perimeters, map and photograph the features.
I look around and see what those other, ancient people saw: the river fork coursing below the bench, bright now with its oasis of cottonwoods in fall yellows and greens; the red dusty desert with its wind; scattered junipers and mountainous rock formations banded in orange and rose and white. There was no road for them, or hotel across it, or plastic water bottles or restaurants or graph paper. Seeing the broken pieces of their painted pottery, blue-grey and black and whitish, is a novelty and a fascination for me, a bridge to something distant and simpler and mysterious. For them, they were surviving, and the vessels they created and the walls they built were all toward that purpose. And I envy that kind of simplicity, where your task each day is to attend to the basic needs of your life, the seasons, your extended family, where you live outside and know that you are inseparable from the land, with no thought of bills and cell phones and unfulfilling jobs working for other people. And I am projecting, of course, for I cannot know the hearts and minds of these people, and the joys they found in their work or their sufferings in hard winters. What I do know from the imprints they left, and the energy that abides there still, is that I like them, and that they lived well.
As we drive out from the site, I see my first roadrunner speeding through a field on the left, and we all laugh about two wild turkeys who are still facing off in the same tree we saw them in this morning – as if the day’s hours, or centuries, had never happened.
Sleeping outside for five nights, I breathed in Zion.
Sitting near my tent each evening, collecting myself from my day, I made a simple camp dinner and wrote in my journal, hearing the same daily rhythm of sounds: the shuffle and clink and voices as tents were raised, camps established, meals prepared or cleaned up, campfires built, toothbrushes, hats and flashlights found. But beyond the sounds of temporary human hubbub (we are just visitors here), I found the greater voice of this place: cricket song rising as dusk set in; aspen leaves, their yellow glow dimmed by evening, rustling overhead in the clear desert wind; the star-crystalled dark night sky; the towering presence of the red-cliff formation called the Watchman, tall and tapered like a vast rock sail at the edge of the campground. I believe these outside nights let the soul of this place come into me, whispering into my dreams, breathing through my mind and skin like an intuition, or a healing, or a promise. I will give up a shower or two for that.
But it was the days that revealed the essential beauty here. Surrounded by landscapes that both lifted and diminished me with their scope and intensity of color, I explored and discovered.
