For those of us longing to ogle Mother Nature in the nude, there are few places better than Zion in the wintertime. Limbs of the cottonwood trees, which come fully clothed with leaves come summertime, now stand buck naked.
Beyond tower the canyon walls with sandstone cliffs bare as a pole dancer in a Texas strip club. Fortunately, a lap dance in this au naturel environment can be had by simply lacing up the hiking boots and setting off down a trail.
The premiere hike in Zion Canyon is up Angels’ Landing. It’s a steep, twisty climb up to a saddle followed by a walk up a death-defying narrow ridge to the top of a cliff overlooking the Virgin River Canyon.
Even though the Park Service has installed chains for folks to use as handholds, some still manage to fall to their deaths. “Scariest hike in America,” one YouTube video touts.
We did that hike ten years ago when we came to Zion to celebrate the New Year weekend. After 38 years living and climbing in Colorado, the hike for us was a piece of cake.
This year, the route up to Angels’ Landing was snow-covered and icy, we were told. While we did have traction cleats we could strap on, Dianne and I decided to skip the crowds and explore some of the other trails. One of them was to the Emerald Pools.
There are actually three Emerald Pools. Lower Emerald Pool has a nice waterfall feeding it.
That waterfall is fed from the Middle Emerald Pool, which has its own tiny waterfall.
Upper Emerald Pool is fed by a towering waterfall dropping from a notch in the box canyon cliffs. In summertime, this place would be swarming with people. We shared it with maybe a half-dozen fellow hikers and a Park Service volunteer.
Another hike took us up the Sand Bench Trail, which offered lofty views down the canyon toward the tourist trap of Springdale and up Pine Creek Canyon toward the switchbacks and tunnel. We only met one other hiker on the route.
Late on our final afternoon, we walked the paved Riverside Trail up through the lower end of the Zion Narrows where decades ago, we led a Sierra Club group down from the top.
On this walk, we watched an avalanche of ice break off from the cliffs and land on the trail below. A half mile beyond, the route begins to hug the near vertical cliffs. To prevent an ice fall from bonking hikers on the head out here, Park Service has wisely closed the trail beyond.
