On Saturday, after the UWHEN conference, adventure awaited at Zion National Park. Now, I’m familiar with the White Mountains in NH, the Green Mountains in VT, the Appalachian Mountain Chain, & now even the Wasatch & Oquirrh Mountains in UT. But nothing prepared me for the majesty of the mountains in Zion. Even when first entering the area taking the exit off of I-15, towards the park, suddenly you see huge rocky precipices jutting into the skyline at such a scale beyond imagining. I’ve never seen the Grand Canyon (one of the things I plan to do out here, of course, given the proximity), but the views that met me certainly have prepared me for its grandeur.
Well, at least, I believe it has. I mean, I just didn’t know how affected I’d become by what I saw.
This blog post will offer a lot of pictures more than text, just simply because nothing I can write can do these scenes justice. Even the pictures slightly convey the breathtaking beauty. I kept thinking of Bierstadt paintings of the West, the stunning colors & the unbelievable scale of the peaks looming so high–higher than any peaks I’d even seen. One can easily understand that concept of the “sublime & the beautiful,” where the sublime refers to the awe & fear in seeing something of such magnitude, beyond all comprehension, that it instills a loss of words, a loss of comprehension.
What remains is only a visceral experience. One of instinct & hardwired animal fear, hard to describe.
A moment of pure awe & even panic occurs in driving through the 1.1 mile tunnel through a mountain, with periodic air vents with views that allow some semblance of light to penetrate its darkness. The oppressiveness of that darkness reinforces the sheer human feat of completing that tunnel through mining & removing rubble, finished in 1930. There’s a quiet solemnity in thinking about the lives lost tunneling this road through the national park, up impressive pitches of mountainside. Washout still causes the roads to become impassable in two-lane capacity, so cars have to take turns to wend their way up & down.
That kind of freaked me out. I was already clutching the car interior for dear life, looking at the steep drop-offs below.
An unexpected delight took the form of wildlife by the side of the road, in young or female bighorn sheep grazing nearby. Next to the American bison, the bighorn sheep stands out as an iconic animal of the West. And these are the things that have my imagination running, when I see new landscapes of which I’ve long read about or poured over historical pictures in old books. I’m reminded of Picturesque America & its etchings, or the antique books of old photographs of the Western expansion & frontiers. There’s something mythical about that era & that imagined America, its ruggedness, the hostile elements.
Even when driving back from the park and St. George, back up to Salt Lake City, I felt surprised by the remaining huge expanses of undeveloped land remaining in Utah. You just can’t see anything like that in New England anymore. Not really.
More entries to come on Zion & the beauty of Utah’s southern landscapes, including a visit to an abandoned ghost-town where Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid was filmed. I watched that classic western film after visiting Zion & Grafton, & it felt so surreal to see the same views & landscapes made famous appearing almost exactly as they had those many years ago. These are the kinds of things that bring me closer to myself. Excursions into nature feed my soul & sharing that beauty lifts my spirits. A much-needed respite & reminder that this is truly what life is about–not jobs, not prestige or things, & not the petty trivialities of the mundane.
Rather, we all need to make time for what really counts. Being a part of the bigger existence you can only feel when you’re outside & stunned by Nature, humbled into a position of genuflection & nothingness.
