Through a miracle, I have recovered around 25 essays that I thought had been permanently lost several years ago when I changed hosting services to the current one. Imagine my thrill at finding them on Google Drive the other day. So, I have decided to repost some of them. This one, Canyon Cathedrals, was written after a fabulous trip out west probably around 2012. I hope you enjoy it:
Canyon Cathedrals
I spent the last week hiking in three of our country’s western national parks as part of a Road Scholar tour. The trip was a first for me in many ways. To begin with, I am not a hiker and so was a little leery of what would physically be required of me. I prepared by purchasing a great pair of hiking boots and eight pairs of soft hiking socks, a backpack with multiple compartments, and a fanny pack with a heavy duty water bottle. The boots were perfect, the fanny pack a joke, and the backpack turned out to be one of my better traveling purchases since I was able to carry my rain gear, an extra fleece, chapstick, sunscreen and the necessary water bottle much more easily on my back rather than around my waist in that weeny fanny pack. And, although we did go on some strenuous hikes, I was able to handle both the topography and the altitude much better than I had feared.
Secondly, this was my first Road Scholar tour, and I had no idea what to expect, particularly of an organization that until recently went by the name “Elderhostel” - a moniker that brought to mind visions of aging hippies in earth shoes and tie dye. What a pleasant surprise to discover a variety of interesting people ranging from age 49 to 83. I came home with two new Facebook friends and lots of email addresses.
My biggest concern though was that I didn’t particularly want to go on the trip. I had agreed to go because my husband really wanted to see the three parks on the tour - Bryce, Zion and the North Rim of the Grand Canyon - but all I could envision was dry, treeless, boring geography. Boy was I wrong!
Zion National Park. What can I possibly write that can describe the beauty of God’s creation there? On the first day we hiked along the bottom of a lush green canyon following the meandering Virgin River until the canyon walls were so close that a stone could easily be tossed from one side to the other, with the river passing through at a place aptly named “The Narrows”. Instead of walking in a dry desert I felt I was walking in a rain forest - trees overhanging the path, ferns and other plants growing out of the sheer rock while water trickled down from above. Later that afternoon we hiked to the Emerald Pools, ponds colored green by algae and fed from waterfalls spilling out of the canyon walls. As we left Zion we ascended from the canyon floor passing tall, beautiful rock formations ranging in color from red, brown, pink to white, and traveling through a one mile tunnel cut through solid rock. I hated to leave.
Like most of us, I had seen many pictures of the Grand Canyon, but I was totally unprepared for what awaited me. The most startling surprise was how green and treed the North Rim side of the park is. We drove through acres and acres of spruce and other “Christmas tree” conifers. Dry and barren it was not! The trees at the North Rim are everywhere, even right up to the edge of the canyon. But the most awe-inspiring experience was the canyon itself, the magnificence of which cannot be adequately conveyed in pictures or words. Even standing there in person, I was unable to completely assimilate the unworldly grandeur in front of me. What must the first humans have thought when they encountered the Grand Canyon? Surely that only a Power greater than man could have created that splendor.
I ended my week in Bryce Canyon, and a fitting end it was, for Bryce is truly one of God’s Canyon Cathedrals. Bryce is full of astonishing columnar rock formations known as “hoodoos”. It takes hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years to form hoodoos, and once formed they don’t last that long in geological terms but plenty long in people time. Our first day in Bryce we hiked the Queen’s Trail to the bottom of the canyon, a three-mile round trip at 9100 feet elevation that taxed my reserves to the max. I sounded like the big bad wolf of three little pigs’ fame by the time I returned to the top, huffing and puffing trying to suck in all the oxygen I could get! But, what a hike and so worth it. The sight of the hoodoos stretching towards the deep blue cloudless sky will remain in my mind for a long, long time.
I live in the North Carolina mountains, and I always tell people that I find my Higher Power here in the dark forested Appalachians, formed many millennia before the western mountains and canyons I recently visited. But, my trip to Zion, the North Rim and Bryce reminded me that my Higher Power can be found there as well because anywhere we see the grandeur and magnificence of creation, we find the Creator. I am so glad that I made this trip.