Moominmama's Adventures: Last of Zion, heading to Kodachrome Basin State Park

In which Moominmama takes a snowmelt shower and is asked the question: hoodoo you love?

Put off by the amusement park crowds in Zion National Park, Moominmama drove out to the western end to hike Taylor Creek. It's one of the rare trails off the beaten track that's not closed down due to a landslide. But I wasn't the only person trying to escape the crowds

Though the hike is labeled easy to moderate, high water in the creek discouraged those who didn't want to get their feet wet or challenge their balance hopping across stepping stones. After a couple miles, many hikers turned back, giving Moominmama a little of the peace and quiet she craved.

Already higher elevation from the start, the hike wends through juniper and pine, criss-crossing Taylor Creek up a high-walled red canyon into piles of heavily shaded, now-slushy snow. 

The canyon dead-ends at a high cliff that channels snowmelt over an arched cave. The water sprinkles down forming an icy patch below the arch then trickling down into the creek.

When another hiker stripped down to his shorts and stepped onto the ice to take a shower, Moominmama was inspired to do likewise (removing fewer layers).

I hadn't had a shower all week, and the icy water was miraculously refreshing. Moominmama is not the first to notice the unusual effect a cold plunge has on the mind. Not just invigorating, it's like mainlining joy. I all but bounced down the trail on the way back.

This was definitely the high point of my time in Zion and the most exhilarating of the hikes thanks to my icy shower!

Leaving Zion, I headed next to Kodachrome Basin State Park, which is in driving distance of Bryce Canyon National Park and part of the protected land in the so-called Grand Staircase of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

Moominmama will have time to explore both those parks, but I started with Kodachrome, named only after Utah got permission from the Eastman Kodak Company to use the word.

It is a colorful park with striped layers of sediment. I've moved from the older Navajo sandstone in Snow Canyon and Zion, to the Entrada sandstone, with its strange eroded shapes that look like Henry Moore sculptures at every turn. 

The stone, also present in Arches National Park, is often so soft that generations of hands, tracing the shape of earlier hands, can carve a wall like the photo at the top! 

These softer, and more recent, soils are the home of the hoodoos, the spires that dot the landscape at Bryce Canyon and here. At Kodachrome, the hoodoos have a variety of creative names.

There's Ballerina Spire and the Hat Shop and Geoduck. There's even an arch, Grosvenor Arch nearby. Here's the Fred Flintstone hoodoo, at left. Can you tell?

There are multiple theories, it turns out, about how these hoodoos were formed. In many cases, it's obvious that harder rock on top, like shale, protected the column as the sandstone eroded around it. Others are what's left of fins broken apart as cracks filled with water then froze and broke off the adjacent rock. But a new theory suggests that some hoodoos may have been minerals extruded upwards through gaps in existing rock. And if they solidified into a harder rock, they would remain standing as the rest of the stone and soil washed away.

Moominmama is learning that all sandstone is not alike and the gift of the Grand Staircase is the way it has exposed geologic time for all to see. Each of the steps represents a different era, a different climate. I am trying to learn how they all stack up!

So more on that in a future post. For now, I leave you with more Navajo sandstone and the view from the East Rim of Zion National Park. I can understand why the crowds are coming, and I sympathize with the park service for all it's doing to keep people on well-trod pathways. But next time, I'll visit in the dead of winter, I think!