Mostly Pictures

Ode

You sicken me with sweetness
honey, thick and sharp,
running slowly enough
to savor the process
of biting numbness
as I shrink from your
cloying ways.

Oh honey, how I've missed
the slight bumps
granulations in the smoothness,
irregular pockets of purity
when crystalline clarity
spills out and melts away.

Poem:
Honey is delicious. Also, it's a bit of a metaphor about how something too sweet can be overwhelming, but the good moments make up for it. I don't know if that comes across very well, but it was in the back of my mind while I was writing.

Observation:
Turns out this post is having a bit of trouble posting. I got an error message, and things are freezing up, so I'm just going to get what I have up (hopefully), and try again tomorrow. I think it's the pictures that are making things a bit complicated. Anyway, thanks for reading, and I'll be back at it soon.

Me:
I still have vacation stories up my sleeve, but they seem less exciting the more removed I get from them, so I'll sort of skip around to the interesting stuff. Sunday we woke up quite unmolested, packed quickly, and entered the Needles section of Canyonlands. There wasn't anyone taking money, so even though we had a pass, it didn't seem like it was doing much. We hiked from Elephant Hill trailhead until we had seen some pretty views, and turned around to continue on our quest to see more parks. Needles is interesting in that it offers a different sort of rock formation to look at, but it definitely seems like it would be better to attack this park from a backpacking approach than day hikes. So I made sure we had seen what I thought was a good representation of what the park had to offer, and we were off to our next park.

Is it just me, or does this look like Snoopy the dog on his red house? Okay, I guess usually he is lying o his back in the comic and this looks like a dog on its tummy, but considering I hardly ever play the "what does that look like?" game, I thought this was pretty decent.

Next up was Capitol Reef. In a similar fashion to Canyonlands, this park doesn't have anything I would call astonishingly beautiful. It's just a nice place to be. Then again, being as partial as I am to the western United States, almost anywhere would qualify as a nice place to be as far as I'm concerned. Having witnessed Rebecca's love of water firsthand at Mill Creek, I decided the best hike for us at Capitol Reef was Sulphur Creek. The trail is simply the creek bed (though you can take an overland route to cut distance if desired. I've hiked this before, but as with every water-based trail, this offers a different view around every bend. In the later parts of the day the orange glow of the sun really brought out the color, and all in all, it was a nice, rather relaxing walk in the water. The waterfalls were pretty, too, even if I did almost fall down one. Don't worry; in addition to not dying, I even managed to catch my sunglasses as they fell off my head and threatened to plunge over the edge.

And now, by popular request (the only request), the story of how I hiked Bright Angel Point (with pictures). To understand why my sister wanted to hear about this story you should probably know some things about me. Or rather, I should clarify some things you probably already know about me. As a person terrified of dying (as I would assume many are), I take decent precautions to not put myself in situations where that might occur. As such, I tend to avoid heights. Okay, I'm just scared of heights. The other thing you have to realize is that this trail is high up in the air. There. I've pretty much set the scene. We drove into Zion after a decent night's sleep intending to hike the Narrows. However, we knew the water had been pretty high recently, and as such, had a backup plan of skirting death at high altitude prepared just in case we weren't able to go with our first option. Lucky me, the water was too high to hike in the safe canyon floor, so we got to go up on top instead. (They only let people hike the Narrows if the water is under 140 cfs for 24 hours, and that was the first day it had dipped below the mark. We came back to it later in the week (obviously, since I've written about it), but it was still quite high even then.



Also, it was hot enough that this happened:

We grabbed the shuttle to the Grotto where the trail began and started our hike. It looked like this:

And then it looked like this:




(In case it doesn't show up that well, this photo is of about eight switchbacks up what is basically a vertical wall.












Here is a better photo (not mine).













I thought that was quite a bit of elevation gain for our hike, but I knew there was another section to go. The so-called Angel's Landing. Having crested the top of our last switchback, we were greeted by a view of what lay ahead. At first glance, I thought I could probably do it. Then I noticed that what I could see was not the extent of what was in store. After going up a narrow strip of rock, we had to go down, and then back up even higher to reach our destination. We could see people (really small-looking people, really far away) climbing up and down on their hike either out or back, and I started to think this was going to be quite a task. I'm incredibly sure I wouldn't have done it on my own, but if Rebecca was going, I was too. In my head I was thinking I wanted to be there in case anything went wrong, but looking back, that's just like thinking "Well, if one of us is going to die, the other might as well be there to watch. Or potentially die with them." So not the best logic ever, but it resulted in me having something to talk about, so no complaints here. Now there weren't many places on the trail I felt like stopping to dig a camera out of my bag (since I needed all of my hands for clinging to whatever solid objects I could find), but here are some pictures I do have:

A view of what we climbed up.



















And a view of how pointless it was for me to be there in case Rebecca fell. Sheer cliff walls, and about four feet to walk on the entire way. Never again (probably).














A view down the canyon. It sure was pretty. Too bad I was constantly too afraid of where my feet were to be looking around much.

















A view back the way we had come from.














We eventually made it back to safety, hiked a bit further on the rim trail (bad idea and not worth the time or effort), and descended back to the canyon floor. The descent was quite hard on my knees, but overall I was mostly just happy to be alive.