I’m currently on vacation, spending Thanksgiving with my girlfriend in Utah’s Zion Canyon. Yesterday, we hiked a beautiful trail called Angel’s Landing. Though most of it was paved, it was still strenuous at times, as were ascending over 1000 feet in about two miles of horizontal distance.
We departed from a parking lot and picnic area called The Grotto. In the shadow of towering peaks, dotted with bright yellow trees, and adjoined by a wide but shallow river, our jumping off point already had an exciting feel about it. Other hikers unloaded gear from their cars and snapped photographs of the prismatic canyon walls as small children played in the fallen leaves that carpeted the lawn. You’d never believe that driving just a few dozen miles in any direction would plunge you into the midst of a vast, dry, brown and featureless desert, in no small part because it was quite chilly in the shade and the morning wind. I donned a fleece, wind shell, hat, and gloves before leaving the car.
Our trail crossed the river via a sturdy bridge and began its ascent up a sloping rock pile that formed the base of a sheer-faced peak. The terrain here was scrubby and green, with few leafy trees to shield us from the desert sun that beat down on the exposed mountainside. Within minutes, my hat and gloves were in my pockets and my jacket was unzipped. A few minutes after that, I was carrying the jacket and regretting having brought it at all.
When we summited the rock pile and reached the canyon wall proper, the nature of the trail changed dramatically from a gentle, diagonal slice across the debris to a sharp series of switchbacks up and around the cliff face. After a few of these demanding circuits, the path opened onto a bridge across a dry ravine and over to the side of an adjacent peak. This once again put us on flat terrain that followed a riverbed for a while. Judging from the lush plant life, this wasn’t ordinarily a dry riverbed, just one that hadn’t seen rain for a month or so. That was a shame, because flowing water surely would have made for an even more picturesque hike.
Eventually, we left the river’s edge and began ascending again, now flanked by the wind-shaped walls of Zion Canyon. From up close, you can see a remarkable amount of texture and sometimes even find tiny caves large enough to hold a person.
Towards the end of the trail, it gave way to a series of extremely steep and tightly wrapped switchbacks with no purpose other than to rush us as quickly as possible up the last hundred feet or so to the summit.
As it turned out, however, this brought us only to Scout’s Landing, still an impressive vista but 
not the endpoint of the trail. To reach Angel’s Landing, we’d need to undertake a perilous climb across about 500 feet of sheer cliff face. Chains embedded in the rock to aid climbers would be the only thing standing between us and a plunge of more than 1000 feet to the canyon floor.
Multiple signs cautioned against horseplay and warned that slips on the path to Angel’s Landing had resulted in death. Near where we stopped to snack at Scout’s Landing, several other hikers were discussing the recent sentencing of a man who allegedly pushed his wife off of this very cliff.
It occurred to me that if Emily were to slip, I might find myself falsely accused of murder. Besides, I’m not much for heights, and there were other sights to see, so we elected not to undertake the last 500 feet of the climb to Angel’s Landing. We still had a quite nice view from where we were:
