Hiking near Zion National Park: water in the desert

                                          

While hiking in Snow Canyon State Park and Zion National Park, I have been learning about how to track water in the desert.

I do not mean finding water to drink in the desert, although certainly after a mountain thunderstorm there are pools and grateful visitors everywhere.

I refer instead to the way that water leaves its imprint everywhere, since of course the desert is all about water: where it was, where it might come again, where it is not now.

Water created the grandest sculpture between 1.4 million and 27 thousand years ago in Snow Canyon. Rivers cut canyons which in turn filled with lava.  The presence of lava then re-directed the flow of water which cut new canyons.  So as we hike among lava covered caps of  Navajo sandstone, we are actually climbing up to the floors of ancient canyons.

The lava covered this ancient sand sea, and was so hot that it turned the sand into sandstone, creating petrified dunes of rock, which are now eroded into fantastic shapes and spires.

There are lots of tracks to be seen of water eroding stone,

but I did not know that the different stripes of color on the sandstone are created by minerals carried in flash floods, and by water leeching out iron from the rocks.

Of course there is water in the desert.  Each moment of every day the Santa Clara river cuts this canyon, and its cool shade is home to an entirely different ecosystem of plants, birds and animals.

Yet as I climb the rim rock to a high vista, I think the water tracks in stone are like the tracking of inner wisdom in a Journey Oracle reading. One feels the mystery of something near, and can still hear the echo of its power.