Mountain Girl: Welcome to Zion!

Looking down into Toquerville, Pine Valley Mountains in the background

***Be Sure to click on any of the pictures for a slideshow of them all. They look SO good blow-up**

Wow! It is already the middle of June and I am in my 7th week of work at Zion. Now that I am finally sitting down to write I honestly cannot believe how much time and how many adventures have passed since I last updated this blog! Summertime is always bursting with energy, recreation and work for those of us forging a career in the greater professional realm of seasonal work and this year is no different. My 10-hour days (plus the commute) pretty much consume my Monday-Thursday time, but that still leaves three full days for hiking, climbing, scrambling, running, swimming, other general adventuring and perhaps some resting. I am learning that in the desert there comes a point in the year when you just cannot be outside because of the heat. During work days I am in the heat all day so on my weekends I have to pry myself out of bed at 5:30 a.m. so that we can squeeze the most out of the tranquil, cool morning dawn. The weather usually stays nice and tolerable until lunch time when all of a sudden you are overwhelmed with heat radiating off the rocks or sand or concrete and there is an insatiable need to drink water with every step. The desert environment is really intense but in the early mornings and late evenings, lasting longer with each warming day, there is another world waiting to be discovered and explored that is vastly different from the hazy heat of mid-day.

Luckily for us, we live in an extremely diverse climactic region with so many environmental, geologic, and cultural differences converging together. From our house in Toquerville we are an hour from the blazing shallows of Mojave Desert country, the towering red-rock sandstone cliffs of Zion, Snow Canyon and Bryce, the alpine meadows and snow-capped peaks of the Pine Valley mountains towering above us, and the high-altitude Markagunt Plateau surging east past Cedar City up to the Breaks and Brian Head Ski Resort. During the week I am building sandstone walls on Angels Landing Trail or making drain-runs into the Zion backcountry and on the weekends I can frolic in the snow-melt streams cascading down the sides of the Pines under tall Ponderosa and sturdy Mahogany trees. The cedar breaks provide even more of a refuge from the brutal desert heat and on average Cedar Breaks National Monument is thirty degrees cooler than Zion is!

Climbing in Paiute Wilderness

Another cool spot to explore is the Paiute Wilderness and Virgin River Gorge southwest of St. George in the Arizona Strip and Mojave country. This land is directly north of the western reaches of the Grand Canyon, all that are left before the Hoover Dam and Vegas, and is some of the most remote territory I have encountered. The landscape is riddled with ATV tracks and checker-boarded with cow patties and old corrals, but the adventurous hiker will look past these features and seek out the places that cows and OHVs cannot reach, the narrow canyons and the slot drainages, the winding creek beds and washes, and the steep rocky slopes. Opportunities for dry-bed canyoneering and low grade climbing are around every corner but watch your step because everything here is prickly! There are no maintained trails out the this desert country, only a desolate and lonely landscape harshly shaped by time, people, animals, wind and sun. So. Much. Sun!!

Reuben & I hiking the mountains

Just across I-15 from Toquerville starts the Pine Valley forest service district and one of the most isolated sections of forest in the area. The 10,000 ft. peaks jut almost straight up in spots while many ridge faces are lined with towering pillars of rock and trees. The foothills leading up the base of the mountains are a mix of red-rock sandstone canyon country and desert-forest environment with several drainages flowing out. It has this extremely classic feel, like you have seen it before in an old western film and someone on horseback should be riding down the next draw. This weekend Reuben took me up the Browse road to an old ranger station where an massive Sequoia tree stands, mighty and tall. A Sequoia! For those of you not familiar, Sequoias are those HUGE trees that grow alongside the towering redwoods of the Sierras and coastal ranges of California, Washington and Oregon. How neat to see one here beside dry Ponderosas and mountain Aspens! We hiked towards the base of the mountains from the giant tree and meandered along the creek spending the afternoon wading in the cold waters and reminiscing about all of our Bitterroot Mountain adventures last summer in Montana. It felt good to know that the comforting trees and high alpine meadows were still within reach of our desert playgrounds.

And then there is Zion. Zion National Park. I still have thoughts of amazement every day at work. The job is by no means glamorous, but what a life experience! Working for the Park Service feels like I have made it to an elite club of outdoor professionals and really is an organization that I could grow and develop with. There are so many parks and different jobs and opportunities so it has been really cool to work for a super professional, but still outdoor-oriented employer. My trail crew spent our first month doing trainings, getting familiar with the park, and hiking a ton of the trails on drain runs, where we hike the trails with shovels, loppers & saws and clear out any drainage features, like waterbars, or clear out trees or brush that have fallen into the trail. FUN! We hiked Angels Landing and Emerald Pools in the Main Canyon, the Chinle Trail on the south side and the Deertrap, Cable Mountain and East Rim trails, the Connector, Wildcat, Hop Valley, West Rim and Northgate Peaks trails up at Lava Point along the Kolob Terrace, Taylor and LaVerkin Creeks in the fingers of Kolob Canyons all the way over the the far northeastern borders of the park at Horse Ranch.

Northgate Peaks Overlook

Zion Trails Crew @ Coal Pits learning to use rock drills and chisels

And now we are into our first big project of the season: a retaining wall along the Virgin River on the beginning of the Angels Landing Trail. We start at Coal Pits along the western rim of the park where quarried rocks are drilled, sawed and then hand chiseled to perfection, loaded up and taken into the park and out onto the trails using Cany Com machines wheeling down the trail and across the bridge to our work site. Our work site is a really horribly eroded section of trail spilling down a steep sidehill towards the river bottom. We have dug out a trench and are working on placing our HUGE sandstone foundation rocks. Crazy huh? Luckily this week we fashioned a shade tarp that keeps us out of the unforgiving all-day full sun exposure and during lunch we can dip into the cool Virgin river so all in all- its a pretty sweet gig. Angels Landing is one of the most busy and famous trails in the park and so we are interacting with tourists all day. There are moments when you are doing something really intense or hard and some idiot walks by and makes a remark and in the heat and tiredness of the moment you can get really irriatated, but for the most part it has been really fun being around tourists on the trail. People are SO happy to be on vacation and visiting ZIon National Park and during this time of year it seems that over 50% of the visitors are international so on any given day I am interacting with people from all over the world!!

Ok. I think that is all the writing I can muster for one session. It is a shame because there are so many more amazing details I need to share, but that will have to do for now. Excuse my quick and incorrectly used grammar but who has time for spell check these days? : )

~Mary Lane~
6.18.13 Toquerville, Utah