2005-07-02 Dam Tour 2005-07-03 Cedar Breaks and Bryce Canyon 2005-07-04 Red Canyon and Grand Canyon 2005-07-05 North Kaibab Trail 2005-07-06 Virgin River Narrows 2005-07-07 Zion Canyon and Gooseberry Mesa 2005-07-08 Water Canyon 2005-07-09 Red Rock Canyon

Day 6 (Thursday, 7/7/2005)

Angel's Landing, a 1700-foot-tall obelisk nestled into the "Big Bend" in the Virgin River, was unwittingly named by one of the early explorers to the park who exclaimed, "only an angel could land on it."  The name stuck, and others have commented that it also deserves the name because attempting to climb it greatly increases your risk of becoming an angel yourself.  The trail is somewhat unrelenting both in its difficulty and its high pucker factor.  It ascends all 1700 feet up to the spire over only 2.5 trail miles, and a good chunk of that elevation gain is encountered in the last half mile.  The trail starts out with a series of steep switchbacks carved out of the side of Cathedral Mountain by the CCC in much the same way that they engineered the trails in the Grand Canyon ... in short, a 3-foot ledge with a cliff on one side.  The trail then enters Refrigerator Canyon (formerly "Icebox Canyon"), a hanging slot canyon between Angel's Landing and Cathedral Mountain, and runs the length of the canyon before ascending a series of extremely steep switchbacks called "Walter's Wiggles".  Walter's Wiggles were named after the first superintendent of Zion NP, who had engineered the switchbacks as a way to get up onto the ridgeline adjacent to Cathedral Mountain.  This ridge affords access to the spire of Angel's Landing in one direction and to the West Rim of the canyon in the other.

Scout's Overlook sits at the top of Walter's Wiggles, and from here one can get a sneak peak of the nightmare that lies ahead.  For continuing on up to the landing, there is no real trail per se but rather a series of chains that follow along a narrow backbone with a 1000-foot drop into Refrigerator Canyon on one side and a 1500-foot drop to the valley floor on the other.  The backbone starts reasonably wide and actually descends for a bit into a saddle where it widens out into another platform.  From there, however, the path up requires crossing an 18"-wide ledge with nothing between you and the Lord but a piece of True Value hardware.  The backbone then turns sharply upward and starts to ascend the spire at a dizzying angle, now providing three rather than just two directions in which to fall off the mountain.  And yet dozens of people were going up and down it continuously, like little ants on a Moebius strip.  Heights don't normally bother me, at least not enough to have prevented me from going on every trail I've attempted thus far.  But I am prone to vertigo, and the 18" ledge was threatening to give me an out-of-body experience.  I opted to exercise the better part of valor and park under a convenient (and totally out of place) shade tree in the saddle, which a couple of like-minded hikers had aptly named "Sanity Point."  The rest of our group braved the full ascent, however.

We came down off the landing at around 1 PM and proceeded a l'autobus back to Flanigan's, where the guides prepared a picnic spread out by the pool.  The girls decided to pitch it in for the day, but David and I and the two guides set off toward the southwest to do some mountain biking on nearby Gooseberry Mesa.

Gooseberry Mesa is a recent mountain biking find, having been an official trail for only about five years.  The mesa's numerous slickrock patches were first explored extensively by bike in the early 1990's by two brothers from the Hurricane Valley.  The brothers would initially venture off the jeep road and play in the slickrock that ran immediately adjacent to it, but eventually that became too easy and they looked for a way to connect the more difficult off-road sections into a continuous trail.  They petitioned the BLM for creation of a trail in 1996 and were granted permission in 1998.  Initially, the trail they constructed over the next couple of years was known only to locals, but only a scant few years later, Gooseberry Mesa is near the top of the list of places that mountain bikers think of when they hear the word "slickrock."

We got to the top of the mesa at around 4 PM and, given the lateness of the hour, decided to do a quick ride out to the point and back rather than spending too much time playing on the slickrock.  But there was still plenty of slickrock to be had along the jeep trail and at the terminus of the road, where the trail goes completely off-road for the remaining couple of hundred yards out to the point.  The point of the mesa gave us a breathtaking view down into the Hurricane Valley to the southwest, while some of the formations of Zion popped above the ridgeline on the northeastern horizon.

Returning to the van, we backtracked down the washboard mesa road into Springdale and to Flanigan's, where we took much-needed showers and met the girls for dinner at the on-site restaurant.  Everyone savored the evening, knowing that it would be our last on the road.