Into the Red Rock Country
Red Rock Country
The streets end with the western edge of Zion, but until then it’s a clapboard house kind of neighborhood, with sunflowers, cornfields, and cottonwood trees. Yesterday the mayor of nearby Hurricane proclaimed global warming to be “just so much malarkey” stirred up by environmentalists, and I cannot help but wonder if this is a disturbing indicator of the local political climate.
Our friend Steve, who moved here five years ago, doesn’t worry about it. He is an avid cyclist who loves the stunning natural beauty of the area, and he has found good friends here. He skips the Mormon television channels on his television, succumbs to WalMart for necessities, and notes that in general it’s just a neighborly, small-town place. He has to stop at the post office today, and we wait in the car, and it takes a long time because the postmistress is tearful. “I think her husband left her,” says Steve.
We are going to the Kolobs, and specifically to a finger canyon at the south fork of Taylor Creek, a sandy ravine lined with red cliffs that rise on either side to 1500 feet.
“With every storm,” says the sign, “ephemeral waterfalls from runoff and snowmelt cut back into the sandstone headwall, carving the canyon longer and deeper.”
Indeed there is a carved and sculpted look to the place, and the rock is marked by mineral stains and water-etched lines and swirls.
It’s hot, and the trail begins on a decidedly uphill theme, but the walls of sandstone are glowing, and there is the sensation of entering a wonderland. We walk through a dry creek bed, soft with salmon-colored sand, and at one point the trail opens out and we veer left to a meadow and sit there for a while. I watch a swallow soaring near the top of the cliff, echoed by its shadow.
Resuming our walk, we marvel at the color and the churned up chiseled rock and Steve points out the rock-climbing eye bolts on an astonishing vertical wall. Sometimes we are surprised by verdant sprigs of tiny trees and grasses growing through cracks in the rock.
We encounter no one else, absolutely nobody.