Finishing Utah: From A to (Katie) Z

Guest Author:

Katie Z. joins Stacy and Karl to explore the wonders in winter!

Fair warning – I don’t have the same skill set as Stacy, so I can’t let my pictures tell my story for me. But I want you to know how amazing and diverse and mind-blowing all this stuff is, so buckle up for the ride. This is gonna be a nerdy journey! 

One goes through life with certain expectations of things being where they are supposed to be, and behaving the way they are supposed to behave (it’s how it’s always been). So when your East Coast self arrives by airplane at night, in the lights of Vegas, and drives through a darkness punctuated only by the pinpricks of a growing number of stars to a campground in the desert, the next morning’s sunrise is pretty darn magical. It was a small little campsite on the Arizona side of Lake Mead, mainly RVs with some tenting spots on the upper elevation, but the stars were beautiful at night with the bare outlines of the hills breaking up the horizon and nestling us into a cozily between them. The air is so clear that the hills come alive with light well before the sun shines above the edges of the folded and serrated peaks worn sharp in places by wind and the rare rains, but looking like soft sand piles in other places with the golden light warming them against the blue sky. You’ve seen it in photos and movies, but being there and seeing it with your own eyes, and feeling the dryness on your skin and in your nose... It’s so different. Different plants, different terrain, different feel in the air, different smells, different bird sounds… even the sound of the dry gravel beneath your feet. Like Dorothy waking up in Oz. 

Some tea and quick breakfast, pack up the tent and off we go!

This level of surprise and awe stayed with me for most of the trip. We went into a WalMart on day one to get our groceries for the week. Nothing too different here, one WalMart is like any other. The standardized experience of a national, windowless big box store. So we were half way through the parking lot (a parking lot just like any other) when I happened to look up, and shout! “Mountain! There’s a Mountain!” A beautiful, snowcapped peak! Straight ahead! Duck, duck, duck, goose! Same, same, normal, normal, normal - Woah, magic! Even when you shouldn’t be surprised, like leaving a Visitor’s Center in a National Park, it somehow sneaks up on you – Mountain! Big and close and impressive. If you don’t like gorgeous views, this would be a terrible place for you to visit. 

The other thing you don’t realize when you’re from the East is that these mountains are everywhere! They have mountains out here like we have houses there. You drive for 2 minutes and there’s more of them. You drive another two hours and they just keep coming! Good lord! The first three days I was out with Stacy and Karl I just couldn’t wrap my head around how wonderful that was – they just kept coming!!! And they’re all different. Some are red and abrupt, some have slow inclines and rocky surfaces, some are single tall snowcaps, some are a big pile of pointed crags all massed together, some have flat-tops and crumbling edges. And they just rise up - stately, massive, silent. Defining the paths, behaviors and lives of the animals, plants and people around them. So, just a little bit awesome.

It’s also neat to see how much it all changes in such a short distance. Within 5-hours drive you go from solid desert conditions to the snow-covered terrain of Dixie National Forest and Fish Lake Forest, with enough water to support conifers and aspens. That’s the same amount of time it takes to drive across Pennsylvania. Thanks elevation gains! We wandered around between 1,200 feet to almost 9,000 feet on this week-long journey. And it made for some pretty fun times. I especially enjoyed practicing self-arrests with the ice ax while killing time for our ranger-led snowshoe walk at Bryce! 

In one week we visited Capitol Reef, Zion and Bryce National Parks (plus the quick stop at Lake Mead and the Hoover Dam on the first evening). And I gotta say, going in the winter was magnificent! If you’ve only seen it in the summer, go back! If you read Stacy’s last post you saw it can be tricky working with the weather, and I bought my ticket ready to bail and head somewhere else if the weather didn’t cooperate. But it’s so worth the gamble! Obviously, I’d love to go back (and often), but if I died without seeing these places in the summer, I would feel okay about it. That’s how cool they were in winter. Plus, we still saw tons of critters (one bald eagle chased a magpie right over the road about 20 feet in front of Elle causing much screaming, pointing, and a much-required u-turn for photo stalking). *Check the bottom of this post for our full list of critters.* And the weather was amazing. The whole area got several weeks of snow and then the storms passed away leaving us with days that were sunny, in the 40s, with bluebird skies and just enough snow to play in. Bonus – the morning of my flight to Utah I slipped on ice during a marathon training run and had a very swollen tendon in my foot/ankle. Fortunately, we had plenty of driving time for recovery and very convenient roadside snow buffet for perfect on-demand make-your-own ice packs so I was ready to party when it was hiking time. How convenient – thanks roadside snow!

Although all the parks were stunning, Capitol Reef was by far my favorite!

For those of you in the Pittsburgh area, it’s like comparing Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water vs Kentuck Knob. You love both but one is impressive and was designed for short visits, and the other is meant for living in every day. Capitol Reef is Kentuck Knob. We aren’t the first and we won’t be the last people to enjoy living under the grandeur of those red cliffs! 

I guess our campsite was okay... 

Karl kept having to remind me that the things I kept calling brooks and streams (like this one just behind our tent site) are generally called rivers out here. I thought everything was bigger out west, but apparently only in season? This river had neat ice formations, with ripples and curves caused by the fast-moving water as it froze. It was very popular with the local mule deer population.

Water pockets like these (below) hold water and serve as important habitat for insects, tadpoles, and more in the harsh desert landscape. Can you spy the Katie in The Tanks? Here’s that big scenery I was looking for!

With reasonably predicable weather patterns and decent access to water, 11 Mormon families staked their claim here in the 1800s, creating the town of Fruita – so named for the orchards they planted and which are still maintained by the Park Service. We saw them pruning a few trees during our visit, but when they are in fruit park visitors are allowed to pick some. The town set up shop right under the massive walls. This was a common thing to see in this part of Utah - you’d be driving down the highway and see a horse’s pen right under a wall, or a house, etc. Maybe not the safest choice, but by far the most picturesque! 

The Fruita Schoolhouse, complete with wood-burning stove and dunce caps in the corner.

It’s no picnic though – this area didn’t get electricity till after WWII because it was so hard to get in among the canyon walls. But long before the Mormons settled in, Native Americans lived in the shadows of these walls. A semi-nomadic people that anthropologists refer to as the Freemont culture, they farmed and hunted in this area from 600 – 1300 C.E. and left petroglyphs we can still see so clearly in 2017 C.E. (Petroglyphs = carved images; pictographs = painted images.) The oldest thing I own came from my Great Grandma and is maybe about 100 years old?... How old is your house? How old was your car when you start referring to it as old? Remember when your coworker casually mentions the year they graduated as “so long ago” and your jaw dropped because that was like, yesterday? Or, how your two-year old cell phone is completely out of date? These are 1,000+ years old. It’s rare for human-made things to last this long, and it’s pretty special.

While wandering around you also notice there’s all these big black rocks, sometimes whole fields of them, that don’t seem to match anything else. Those are volcanic rocks. Yup, Utah has volcanos!!! What, you didn’t know? (Okay, they have been dormant for a couple million years, but still, I bet you had no idea! Kind of makes you wonder where else is hiding in plain site…)

Being in these places gives you a different sense of scale than you grow up with in the East – in both time and size. The walls towering over our sunlit campsite are composed of dirt that was blowing around in the time of the dinosaurs. No joke. We were walking in dinosaur land (well, there weren’t actual dinosaurs in this specific part of Utah – southern Utah was too busy going back and forth between being an inland sea, a coastline and a series of freshwater lakes). But the three layers of rock visible in Capitol Reef reflect the Triassic and Jurassic Periods – the prime dinosaur time! 

What you see in this picture is what’s called the geological record - the earth kept a photo album of the big moments in its life (here’s prom, and its first car…). The difference in the rocks show us when a big change happened, so we name the periods of time occurring between those changes (e.g. the Triassic Period). 

Click here for the Geology Side Spur.

In the middle of the trip, we took a brief spin through Zion National Park. Zion is beautiful in winter. Zion is beautiful anytime. I will let Stacy put in some pretty Zion pictures, but I’ll use this silly one. Sometimes it’s hard to really grasp the scale of something as big as these mountains. I like the way the fallen “tiny” chunk of mountain makes the car next to it look like an insect. Not the first car… the other one. If you just said, “What other one?” then you get my point. That little chip that fell off the mountain is 4-story-building HUGE!    

These are big rock features. Zion highlights for me were: the waterfall with ice breaking off in the sunshine, hearing the crushing charge of ice down another water fall (damn that was loud and terrifying!), running around in our icetrekkers (like yaktrax) and laughing at the slick ice (you won’t stop us!). And I loved the weeping wall. (It’s hard to look at a big solid rock – one that’s solid enough to arch above you like a very short cave – and wrap your head around the idea that water is seeping through miniscule pores in this mountain above you. Humans can visualize a drop of water, a little trickle of water, but a few molecules of water wiggling through solid rock and weeping out in big old drops (quantities we can see and understand again)? That’s like Star Trek transporter levels of cool. And it’s just happening all the time.) And the birdies! We saw a towhee, an orange-crowned warbler, and a mountain chickadee! (Oh yeah, and giant canyon walls carved by a river. Just a couple million years of the powerful effects of the thing that makes all life possible… No biggie.)

One last crazy rock thing before we move to squishier subjects… Ranger Joe at Bryce Canyon National Park explained that much of the cementing agent for the rocks in this part of Utah is calcium carbonate. And the specific source of the calcium carbonate in Utah is waaaaaay over yonder in the High Sierras. Hold on to your hats folks, it gets even more amazing. Because once upon a time the sierras were not big mountains in the sky, they were underwater. Not only were they underwater, but the High Sierra area supported a huge coral colony. That coral all went extinct and the coral we have now is totally different and completely unrelated – it evolved entirely separately millions of years later! And the Sierra Mountains rose, and as the coral skeletons eroded away the water carrying those teensy-weensy coral particles eventually made its way into Southern Utah and all those dead particles of coral skeleton formed the cementing agent for much of the rock formations there. (Mind exploded at this point, but it was cold so it wasn’t too hard to clean up the ooze. The problem is the mini-brainquakes that happen every time I retell this story!) It’s hard to stand in the middle of Bryce Canyon, in snowshoes, at 8,000+ feet of elevation, after driving through mountains and forest, and think about all the warm seas and deserts and billions of dead corals under our feet. I hope I get to be part of something this cool when I die.

The air and water is so clear in these parks they get dark sky ratings of 2. And on the best days, you can look from the North Rim Trail in Bryce and see the North of the Grand Canyon (about 100 miles).

This is the longest blog-novel ever – especially if you took the geology spur. I’m going to claim it’s in sympathy with the long, slow pace of everything out west. It was a magical time warp in many ways. Item number one – time moves slower when you’re on vacation. You know what I’m talking about! And this blog post is proof – how could we fit so much amazing and awesome into one week?! Not even Neil DeGrasse Tyson could explain it. And number 2 is obviously all the geologic evidence we got to witness and wander through. But it’s not just the land itself that is patient and slow, it’s the living organisms too. Stacy mentioned in her last post that we got to see bristlecone pines in Bryce. The oldest living bristlecone in Bryce is around 1,700 years old. And there are dead ones in the park as old as 3,000 and still standing. Coming from the east coast, where everything is wet and decaying and we’ve got mushrooms and bacteria and slugs and all kinds of other decomposers around, it’s hard to wrap your brain around this sort of thing. When we find a 200-year old tree we say “oooo” and are filled with wonder. Even in what we consider old growth forest in our neck of the woods, the trees are probably not past 400 years old – not much older than the US Constitution. And sure our smallish mountains are truly ancient (“My mountains are so old, they started shrinking before yours were even born!”), but with all the terrain constantly reinventing itself and covering the rock with green and brown stuff, heaving with the urgency of life, it’s hard to notice all that ancient bedding beneath. Out west, the only thing making any soil is little patches of cryptosoil – a living crust on the earth made of cyanobacteria (AKA blue-green algae – in the desert? Who knew?!), but also includes lichens, mosses, green algae, microfungi and bacteria. This is what starts the work and eventually makes it so that a tiny scrubby tree can take root in the rocky wildness of the place. And as Stacy mentioned – don’t touch it! Because it will take years to grow back after you step on it. 

Here’s the slowest fight to the death ever recorded… lichen in slow motion battle for territory. My money’s on the orange (if our money still has any value when this fight is finally over).

As we drove through the snow-covered Fish Lake National Forest, Karl pointed out that Aspens are one of the largest living things on Earth, because they clone themselves and are connected underground. And it turns out they’re also one of the oldest. Fish Lake National Forest contains the oldest colony of quaking aspens in the world – with a root system estimated at 80,000 years old! Sooo… sorry oldest hemlock tree in PA that’s like 800-900 years old, teamwork won this contest. Packrats don’t live all that long, but they keep using the same nest for generations. The oldest nest in continuous use in Bryce Canyon is (drumroll please…) 30,000 years old! (Oldest evidence of humans in North America is 13,000 – 14,700 years ago. Sooo… we’re all immigrants and the packrats have first dibs?) But it’s a trade-off – harsher environment with variable access to water, big winds, high elevation and sun exposure, not much soil or nutrients… it’s a specialized ecosystem in Utah, for sure. And the things that live there have cultivated patience in response to the harsh conditions. This blog post has been harsh and dry, and hard to cross – do you feel older and slower and more patient now too?

But even though it’s harsh there, and even though we visited in winter, boy did we see some amazing critters and plants. (Some were on farms, but why not count them? They were living in this ecosystem and we saw them!) Here’s a quick run-down:

Lake Mead (Night/Morning #1):

American coot (duck)

White-Crowned Sparrows

Red tailed hawk

Northern mocking bird

Night-calling bird at lake mead – no idea, but it called in the night. That’s all I got!

Big fish in lake mead (24" and pretty deep and wide) – unsure of species

Capitol Reef (Days 1-3):

Lots of mule deer!

Grey Fox 

Rabbit (they have 4 out there, not sure which one we saw)

Horses

Cows

Ravens

Turkeys (seriously huge, their footprints were almost as big as my hand)

A dormant Carpenter Bee (was nesting in the free park firewood log, found when we split the log, I assume it later because a tasty and nourishing meal for a turkey)

Between Zion & Bryce (Day 4):

4 Bald Eagles

2 Golden Eagles (a mated pair)

Magpie

Llama

Black-faced sheep 

Bison (all the other farm animals are obvious, but want to clarify, this is farm bison)

Flock of ducks in pond (under an eagle in nearby tree, ducks were dark in color but didn’t get a good look)

At Zion (Day 4):

Mountain Chickadee 

Orange Crowned Warbler 

Spotted Towhee

Mule Deer 

Prickly Pear

Aspens

At Bryce (Day 5-6):

Hairy Woodpecker

Stellar's Jay

Mountain Chickadee

Black Capped Chickadee

Pygmy Nuthatch

Utah Juniper

Ponderosa Pine

Bristle Cone Pine

Limber Bristle Cone Pine

Manzanita

Mountain Mahogany (this tree has feathers!!!)

Mahonia (looked like a scraggly short woody vine with red holly-like leaves

Gambel Oak

That’s Southern Utah.

I think you should go! GO GO GO GO GO GO GO!!!!!

Actually, I think you should go anywhere and everywhere with Karl and Stacy. They will show you amazing things, be great company, and generally enjoy every moment in life – even the hard and frustrating parts. They are the most magical thing I found in Utah. Thanks Karl and Stacy – I couldn’t ask for better travel companions to share this adventure with! And I love you very much!

-Katie