June 8, 2009, 2:31 pm
My first impressions as a boy of 9 or 10 riding into Zion Canyon with my parents and sister Elaine were:
So, this is what a "national park" is like, "a wonderfully big and spectacularly beautiful … park."
Southern Utah writer Lyman Hafen, in the book "Mukuntuweap: "Landscape and Story in Zion Canyon," nicely captured the feeling of when he, too, was a lad and his father would raise the child's eyes to the "Towers of Stone":
"They were unreal, otherworldly in a little boy's mind — so large and looming and overwhelming as to force me to rub my eyes and wonder if I was actually awake," Hafen wrote.
But the grasslands studded with Fremont cottonwoods along the Virgin River and the two-lane road weaving, with appropriate pullouts and informational signs, among craggy, time-sculpted sandstone monoliths with grand names like "The Watchman," "The Patriarchs" and "The Great White Throne" proved just a little deceiving.
Intervening years and many a hike have given me a better appreciation of just what kind of "park" Zion is.
