Flutterby™! : Zion pictures

I mentioned that the trail up to Hidden Canyon in Zion National Park was carved out of the cliffs, with slippery sand on the rock acting like ball bearings, and chains to hang on to to counteract that lack of friction. Here Charlene finishes out such a stretch where I've gotten to a wide enough spot that I felt comfortable yanking out the camera.

The views from the trail were spectacular. There'll be a large update of wildflowers from the whole trip later where I'll include the small stuff, but many of the walls of Zion are like those at Yosemite, just in sandstone.

Also amazing are the number of trails across the way carved into those cliffs, we had to haul out the binoculars once or twice to verify that that funny colored spec moving across the face across the canyon was a T-shirt and not some bizarre slow-moving scarlet bird.

One of the cool things about getting off the pavement in a national park is that if the trail has a specific destination, as you go you start to become friendly with the folks you're leapfrogging along the way. So we had some good exchanges as we climbed over some of the more treacherous obstances on our way up Hidden Canyon. The canyon was narrow and mostly sandy-bottomed (I'd hate to get caught in it if there was water there), I only had problems going over one obstace, mostly because I was wearing Birkenstocks and carrying a camera pack and a camera around my neck, and the particular move was one that most people who'd braved the earlier obstacles had turned around on, a face climb 10 feet or so above a shallow pool. Others had more trouble earlier on, but there was a good comraderie as we suggested routes and footholds along the way.

We found the promised arch, nestled on the right side of the canyon, actually rather inconspicuous. But it was icing on the cake of cool polished sandstone formations and towering cliffs: