So, I'm off on Friday to Zion National Park to go canyoneering with Jake. You can read about our first trip through the Virgin River Narrows,
here. This time, we're going to take
a course in canyoneering (which is like rock climbing, only in reverse- and you swim) at the
Zion Adventure Company and then the next day, we're going to
hike Orderville Canyon, which will be our first technical hike (meaning we'll be using ropes and harnesses).
While I was in Page last month, I picked up John Wesley Powell's
The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons, which the one-armed Civil War veteran (and founder of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which seemed to determined to honor Powell's memory by removing any trace of danger or wildness from the Colorado) wrote after his first scientific expedition down the Colorado ended in three of his men dead and the rest of them barely escaping with their lives.
It's a great read for anyone who's ever been to the Colorado Plateau (which is mainly in Utah, btw) and especially fun for someone who wants to write about the region, because Powell has such a damn hard time describing the place. Photos barely do it justice and words are even more difficult since at the end of the day are just signalers to shared human experiences and because most of what you see in Southern Utah has no parallel anywhere else, poor Powell winds up describing canyon walls as being "as long as from Church Street to Canal Street in New York" or usually he just gives up saying that description is "to beggar language and pall imagination." It's a bewildering and eerie place that doesn't seem so much inhospitable to man's existence as it is indifferent.
There's a whole section on Zion as well (then known as
Mukuntuweap Canyon), including a description of the Narrows, the "Rio Virgen" and the story that the Kai'vavits people told him about the area around Zion which they call Tu'muurrugwait'sigaip Tuweap', which means "Rock Rovers' Land." He also seems weirdly obsessed with lava flows.Here's some fun Utah/Canyoneering/Colorado River Links. Cuz it's fun.
