“Gaaaaaaaaaary!” and yet again, more tales from Zion

Being photographers, Miss Molly and I hate carting around massive camera gear when we don’t need to. Molly even contemplated not bringing her camera on her vacation to HAWAII last week (she did bring it though, thank god, and has amazing photos to show for it). On hikes, I usually just pack the camera with a wide lens. But yesterday, while we hiked Observation Point, we ditched the SLRs completely and instead carted Molly’s brand-new, fancy-schmancy, pocket-sized tourist camera. It tends to overexpose and has a crappy digital zoom, but those faults are forgiven by the fact that it takes video. We took so many ridiculous videos during the eight-mile hike that I planned to do a big, fat video post… that is, until I realized I don’t know how to compress them. So for now you are stuck with only photos. Videos coming soon.

We were totally obnoxious hikers (repeatedly singing in opera voice, “trumpeting,” and even singing the Planet Unicorn song), but there weren’t many people around to witness it. Luckily, we only came across a handful of people on the trail. Apparently everyone was at Angels Landing that day, including fellow photographer Gary.

Considering the top of Observation Point offers an excellent (although ant-hill-sized) view of Angels Landing, Molly and I screamed “Gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaary!!!!!!” over and over and over again across Zion Canyon… because surely Gary would see us and wave back. When we ran into him at a restaurant that night and crashed his date, he said he thought he saw us up there, but sadly, no, he couldn’t hear our calls. Bummer.

Yesterday’s hike was one of the most beautiful hikes I think I’ve been on… at least the part when you get outside Zion Canyon. Zion Canyon is beautiful, don’t get me wrong, but it always seems to look the same from any angle. And the sight of a road going down the middle of it just ruins it for me. However, the much-less-visited east side of the park (which you spend a good deal of time in on the hike to Observation Point) is glorious. I’m currently planning many more voyages into its belly (and also about a million more voyages in the other areas of the park, the state, and the region). Huzzah for spring! True, it’s been snowing all day today, but that is March for you… and it will be nice again tomorrow. In the past week, I have gone on four hikes, totaling just about 20 miles and ascending over 5,000 vertical feet. I still have about 800 million more miles and a trillion vertical feet to cover.

ANYHOO…

we saw a goat

and a swan-shaped log

I pretended to be an arch

and Molly pretended to meditate

there were beautiful clouds

the moon rose

and then we crashed Gary’s dinner

many more photos can be viewed here, in my Zion Flickr album.

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