Zion National Park: Parunuweap

People complain about how crowded Zion is but they don't seem to realize, fortunately for me, that just walking a short distance from almost any point on the road will get you away from crowds in minutes. As long as you don't die from lack of water, or too much water, or get lost, Zion offers tremendous backcountry hiking opportunities that allow you to experience pristine desert wilderness completely alone, all day long.

Jimmy scouts for the best way out of the East Canyon.

High enough to no longer see the road canyon.

The wilds of Parunuweap.

To prove this point on our second evening hike I took Jimmy this time to the Upper East Canyon. There we hiked up out of the canyon, across some open desert, to the edge of Parunuweap Canyon. Parunuweap is a large canyon almost as big as the main canyon through the park but it is closed to the public for what i strongly suspect are political reasons, rather than conservation or scientific reasons. In the good ole days there was an official maintained trail that went from Zion to what is now Hillsdale, Utah with signage, chains and everything else. I have seen some of the fractured post holes in the rocks on the Hillsdale side on Canaan Mesa, where the trail ended.

The landscape gets all tilted as you approach the edge, making it hard to get close without falling into the canyon below. It's a thrilling but tricky area to wander around in, trying to see what's down there.

A bunch of Moki Marbles.

Finding the easiest paths.

It is not easy to get around with dramatic narrow fins of rock separated by huge cliffs, one after another.

There were a lot of incredibly delicate erosional rock sculptures. Behind the "tripod" you can see an even thinner filament of rock peeking out on the left.

This thing was full of tiny holes in a fractal erosion pattern, with sunlight shining through.

Parunuweap is a Paiute word bestowed on the canyon by John Wesley Powell, who was the first white guy to explore the place. It means "raging waters" or something similar. The word sounds out of place among all the secular names on the landscape but before it was a national park it was called "Mukuntuweap National Monument." Mukuntuweap means "straight canyon" and was applied by Powell to describe Zion's main canyon.

But anyway, even you can't hike up the East Fork of the Virgin River into Parunuweap Canyon you can still walk along the top. For this hike i wanted to visit the rim, wander along the edge, and make a loop down another canyon to get to the road. It was something i had done many years ago but my memory was pretty foggy.

It's hard to visually communicate the scale of these landscapes. This is a picture of Jimmy, in the circle. He's standing up. He had wandered off into the distance to try and get a better view while i sat and ate a sandwich, and it wasn't long before i had a hard time keeping track of him. You really eat up time wandering around in the vastness because there is so much to look at in your immediate surroundings. Walking up and down these slopes wears you out sooner than you expect.

Here's a closer crop of the same picture. You can see him on the lower left half of the picture just below the trees.

Things went well except that we decided to get started too late. From the top of the East Canyon there was a trudge across some open desert. The sage and juniper choked plain of loose sand and thick cacti patches was more overgrown and longer than i remembered. Maybe things really had grown! Eventually we made it to the rim and spent some time exploring the crags, seeing how close we could get to the edge, which wasn't well defined.

Jimmy wandered off on his own. I had a sandwich in the meantime. Afterwards we made our way westward working our way around the back end of the high south mesas until we came to where we wanted to get back into the East Canyon.

This 500 foot cliff looked insurmountable. so we had to walk around it.

Traversing along the top of the cliff we could finally see to the bottom and even had a peek at the East Fork of the Virgin River.

Some cool hoodoos in a sandy area. There were animal tracks all around them.

Up close you could see that the thing was full of holes going all the way through it. It looked like it was barely holding together.

Here my memory and the map both failed me. We spent a lot of effort slowly climbing up while we traversed along the high sides of the mesas so that we didn't lose altitude but when we got to "the pass" between watersheds we found out we could not get down into the canyon we wanted to be in, from our position. We could get soooo close, but not all the way without risking death. That's very typical of the way things work in Zion's backcountry. The maps are far from detailed enough and even when using dead reckoning, what looks like a sure bet might turn into a dead end only 20 feet from your goal.

The sun was setting and we had only three options. Option one was to climb a couple of hundred feet down steep slopes, cross to the other side of the canyon, and climb back up a couple of more hundred feet to the ridgeline we needed to be on, then work our way down the canyon as originally planned. Option two was to continue the way we had come across what looked like super easy, beautiful hiking down the front side of the mesa we were next to. That looked preferable, but like i said, we didn't know if we would get turned around near the very bottom. We took the third option, the safe bet, and turned around, going back to our original starting point.

Another cool set of hoodoos. This pair looked completely different from different angles. One of them looked half melted.

Walking into the sun towards the East Temple.

Our turning around point. We needed to get on the narrow ridge on the far left with the trees growing in the shadows. We were obviously in the wrong place to do that. The sunny slopes ahead were extremely tempting.

It was frustrating but probably the best choice because even going that way we got back to the road in dark twilight. The good thing about the hike for me was that it was fairly rugged on my feet, giving me blisters on both heels (i couldn't wear boots because of my toe) and cutting up my legs really well, yet my broken toe didn't hurt any more than it did when i went swimming at Lake Powell. So it was the end of my vacation that marked the healing point for my foot.