Zion - Place of Great Walls

From above, Zion National Park seems like an excavation torn into sandstone.

That is exactly what it is.  The canyon is formed by the Virgin River excavating the eroded sandstone and washing it downstream.

A tech talk put it into perspective for me.  The Lehigh River is a river that I used to paddle a lot.  It usually was about 50 to 100 yards wide and ran at summer volumes of about 650 cubic feet per second.  The heaviest I saw the Lehigh was at 3000 cubic feet per second.  At that flow, it was transformed into a great, powerful wave generator that pushed everything before it, including us paddlers.

The Virgin River runs normally at about 50 cubic feet per second, and in many places is in a channel maybe 20 or 30 feet wide.  At flood, however, it has reached 3000 feet per second, and has a fall rate of 75 feet per mile.  I would really like to see that - from a distance.

Bryce was a place where most views were from above, looking down into the cluster of hoodoos.  Zion is experienced mostly as a narrow valley bordered by the highest sandstone walls in the world.

In the late afternoon, the walls light up with both direct and reflected light.

Dawn, however, was the real jewel of this experience.  As the eastern sky began to illuminate a wall, the full moon was settling toward the ridge line.  The combination was breathtaking.