Zion: Angel's Landing and More....

After our fun little cabin adventure at the Grand Canyon we made our way over to Zion. I kind of wanted to go see Bryce but it was 18 degrees there at night, so we opted to stay warm. Last year i mentioned that i never did anything in the main canyon of Zion during my week long stay at the park, so this time, since Maree had never been to the park at all, i decided to spend the majority of my time there, where most of the official trails are.

We wanted to go to the Narrows, but the cold front that came through made that undesirable. Our first excursion into the water, to a hidden oasis i knew about, was frigid. So i took Maree up to the famous Angel's Landing, a 2,000 foot monument in the middle of the canyon.

Once again, i was shocked at how many people visit the park now. The trail was totally packed, and up near the top, where you need to hang on to chains for safety on the extemely exposed trail, we found ourselves waiting for minutes at a time as endless caravans of visitors came down from the top.

There are a lot of switchbacks up the Angels Landing trail.

Although the total height didn't seem as impressive to me after the years of other experiences i've had, the trail does still offer a frightening amount of exposure that is amplifed by loose sand on the rounded, sloped rocks. I have to admit i was a bit scared. In fact, i was shocked to be more afraid now than i used to be, which was bizarre (since i just mentioned the total height being less impressive than i remember). Maybe it was the high winds.

Maree is getting scared right when things start to get fun.

Maree, on the other hand, was frightened to death. It was too bad because she became paralyzed just a short distance from the top, and could go no further. Once someone experiences a paralyzing fear like that there isn't much you can do to talk them out of it, so i let her sit on a narrow bench of rock while i made a quick trip up to the top. At least in this instance she thought i came back much sooner than she had expected.

The view on the top looking down at the road and the Virgin River 2,000 ft below.

The next day the winds became so strong that rangers advised people not to go on the Angels Landing trail at all, and with all the sand in the air we decided to go for a drive instead of walking in the high cliffs. But we did do one other hike before leaving directly across the river from Angels Landing. Maree enjoyed Hidden Canyon, even wandering far up canyon, off trail while i went to find the way to nearby Echo Canyon.

This is where Maree could go no farther. You can see how scared she is, poor girl...

We saw California Condor Number 57. I never thought i would see a Condor!

And we saw one of these!

This is the piece of land i want.

I also used that day to test out a new lense. I had rented a Canon 17mm TSE lense. It's a tilt shift lense, which means it can correct for parallax like a field camera. I'd been excited about the possibilities of the lense, but the huge price tag made renting one for a week seem like a good idea. I picked it up from Las Vegas on the way out of town, and played with it a bit in our cabin, but hadn't used it since then because it was so heavy and cumbersome. Eventually i decided that the only way i could force myself to really use it was to make sure that it was the only lense i had available, so i left my others in the room that day.

This image shows how you can use the lense to make those popular "miniaturized" pictures of just about anything. It's fun.

This image shows what you can do when the lense is used correctly. Notice that the long narrow slot canyon on the far right of the photo is nice and verticle all the way up and down the photo. This would be very distorted on a normal wide angle lense. For a 17mm lense that is impressive.

The lense has a HUGE crystal ball attached to the front of it. It looks very cool, to be honest, but there is so much glass that it seems it would be impossible for the thing to take a crisp image without any distortion. The results are exactly the opposite. It has virtually no chromatic aberration, and it is extremely sharp, if you focus it right. It's manual focus only, and i had a lot of difficulty getting the plane of focus to line up with the scenes i wanted. By the very end of the day i was finally starting to get some better results, and those are posted here.

The two images above may look the same at first glance. The top one is taken using the lense with no tilt corrections, and the bottom using the maximum tilt that the lense will allow. It may be easier to notice the cliffs and trees on the left look slightly "straighter", while the mountaintop on the top picture has been very stretched out on the right side due to the wide angle. The difference is so subtle that i don't think it is worth the price tag. The camera wasn't moved during the two shots.