#OurWorldIsAwesome – Edition 22 | Context on this series – we live in a beautiful world and National Parks are akin to the crown jewels of this planet. These landscapes remind us of the fine balance and complexity woven into the fabric of the world around us. Every time I spend a while inside one of these places, I’m reminded of how precious that balance is, and how much it matters that we try to understand the complexity and our own small role within it.
I think that’s what awe really is. We reach for the word “awesome” in the moments something helps us see our own insignificance — and windows into nature do that for me every time. So this is my small way of sharing it, and passing it along.
The first thing that hits you at Zion is the red. The canyon walls rise straight up in deep, saturated rust and rose, and the whole place takes on an otherworldly glow.
The walls kept reminding me of two other places at once. Their sheer vertical scale — sandstone rising thousands of feet straight off the canyon floor — took me back to standing beneath the granite faces of Yosemite. But the color, those layered bands of red and cream stacked across the rock, belonged to the Grand Canyon.
That double echo isn’t a coincidence. Zion, Bryce, and the Grand Canyon are all part of a single formation called the “Grand Staircase” — one continuous stack of rock where the bottom layer at Bryce is the top layer at Zion, and the bottom layer at Zion is the top layer at the Grand Canyon. So, standing in Zion, you’re standing in the middle chapter of this beautiful story.
Interestingly, Zion’s canyon was carved by the relatively tiny Virgin river. However, the river’s gradient drops somewhere between 50 and 80 feet of drop per mile, one of the steepest stream gradients in North America. A steep, fast river carries far more rock than a lazy one. And most of the cutting doesn’t happen gradually — it happens in short, violent bursts during flash floods that rip out huge volumes of debris at once. This process continues today, these magnificent canyons are still a work in progress.
There’s plenty to do within Zion. You can wade straight up the Virgin River into the “Narrows” surrounded by sky-high canyon walls with “hanging gardens” on the walls. The water can be chilly in the morning and cool and inviting on a summer afternoon. There are many opportunities to hike. And it is also a wonderfully bike-friendly park with electric bike rentals available aplenty in nearby Springdale (a gorgeous town).
One of my favorite memories from the park was this single enormous tree near the heart of the park.
Its canopy shades at least a hundred and fifty people at once. Sitting under it, I found myself thinking about all the shade it has thrown over a lifetime — the countless strangers who rested beneath it and moved on while the tree listened quietly to their stories.
A Learning a Day 