Lone Rock Beach

B & I picked up some picnic supplies at the Safeway in Page (I got a roast beef sandwich; she got her patent pending smoked-salmon-in-iceberg-lettuce dealio, and we both got a bottle of the least bad wine they had [1]), and headed to Lone Rock Beach, one of the coolest places on Lake Powell.

Unfortunately, minutes after we showed up, a sandstorm sprung up. The wind was almost at a gale, making it hard to eat (or use my camera -- I worried about the lenses getting scoured by sand). We ended up having our picnic behind the car and sulking about the whole affair.

The good news is, I love Lake Powell's vibe -- modulo the wind, it's pretty quiet, and has these eerie monoliths sitting off shore. Probably a nice place to catch the sunset too.


[1] Algorithm for the Page Safeway wine selection process: Take the bottom two shelves of wine at a Safeway in California, then move them to the top shelf.

Picnic at the Narrows

Hiking the Narrows is a famous activity at Zion. Naturally, I hadn't heard of it. When I mentioned that I was going to Zion to my much more outdoorsy, sleeps-with-scorpions-in-her-tent friend Robin, she started IM-ing me and hopping up and down:

"Are you going to hike the Narrows?!"

I Googled the hike, and discovered:

(i) It's 16 miles one way.
(ii) The gorge is generally flooded with the Virgin River, and requires you to wade through it for most of the hike.

The short answer is that unless the road trip was going to end with them finding my body dead of exposure five miles into the hike, no, I would not be hiking the Narrows.

Happily, you can get to the beginning of the Narrows by taking a (dry) one mile or so hike. Very pretty, and as it turned out, there was so much water in the river from spring flooding, the hike was closed anyway. Take that, ultra-hikers!

Even more happily, for once being overcast worked to my advantage. Without direct sun, I was able to handhold this wide around 1/8ths, and get the slow-water effect that is frequently (over)used in landscapes, and of course, Cartier-Bresson teaches us that the best thing that can happen to a river is to have people picnicking beside it.