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Angel's Landing and Zion Canyon Overlook

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Angels Landing Zion National Park UTA few weekends ago I went back to Zion National Park in Utah with a couple of friends. It was my 4th visit to Zion, and in the past I have done some of the easier hikes as well as hiked the Virgin River up the "Narrows" slot canyon, so this time I was looking for something a little more "out there on the edge".

Nothing fits that bill more than the Angel's Landing hike which takes you 1500 ft (450m) above the canyon floor to the edge of vertical cliffs overlooking the canyon. The hike in itself is about 2.5 miles (4km) each way, but the last half mile is the most challenging as it is not only very steep, ascending almost 500 ft in that last half mile, but the trail is along the narrow razorback ridge that runs out to the spot called Angel's Landing. The point was named Angel's Landing, by the way, by Frederick Fisher who was said to exclaim while exploring Zion in 1916 that only an angel could land on the monolith.

Looking at the accompanying photo of Angel's Landing you don't get the impression that what you're looking at is a narrow fin of rock, but that is in fact what it is.

Our reading about the hike online scared us, not just because of the steep climb (our average age qualifying for being "of a certain age", and we all have sedentary jobs), but also because we were weren't sure how we'd do on those vertical edges. But we were up to at least giving it a shot and going as far as we comfortably could, and hopefully all the way.

Anyhow, you can read the story of the hike and whether I made to Angel's Landing or not along with the photos I've posted. You can also see some shots I took along the Zion Canyon Overlook trail that we hiked in the late afternoon.

Angel's Landing and Zion Canyon Overlook Gallery

Angel's Landing and Zion Canyon Overlook Slideshow

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Samoan Youth

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This young man was preparing with his friends for his moment of fame on the stage at the Samoan Village at the Polynesian dance festival called Pasifika in Auckland in March this year. Samoan Youth Canon EOS 20D 1/30sec at f/20 ISO 200 Canon 70-300mm lens at 300mm More photographs from the same Pasifika Festival day can be found in my new post, Faces of Pasifika 2007 — A Day at Auckland's Pacific Festival .
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Faces of Pasifika 2007 — A Day at Auckland's Pacific Festival

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The 15th anniversary Pasifika Festival poster — a collage of the Pacific cultures the festival celebrates. On Saturday 10 March 2007, I spent the day at the Pasifika Festival at Western Springs Park in Auckland. It was the festival's 15th year — an annual celebration of Pacific Island cultures that has been part of Auckland's calendar since 1993, and which typically draws crowds of well over 100,000 across the day. Nine Pacific villages are traditionally represented — Samoa, Tonga, the Cook Islands, Niue, Fiji, Tuvalu, Tokelau, Kiribati and Tahiti — with music, dance, food, arts, and craft from each community sharing the same park for the day. I usually visit New Zealand earlier in February, but in 2007 I was there in March and it was the first — and, to date, only — time I've been able to attend Pasifika. I hope to make it back one of these years. But I came away from that single visit with the str...
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The Watchman and Virgin River — Painterly Winter Landscape

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The Watchman and Virgin River, Zion National Park — Painterly Winter Landscape — © John Corney The Watchman is one of Zion National Park's most recognizable formations — the peak that rises up just past the south entrance, often photographed reflected in or framed by the Virgin River as it winds through the valley floor. I photographed this view on the same January 2006 trip as the other winter Zion piece in this collection, with the river running low and the cottonwoods and willows along the bank stripped bare for the season. I worked this one up with AI assistance into a full painterly interpretation, the same way I've approached the rest of this Zion series — directing the process the way a film director works with a cinematographer, choosing what to carry forward from the original photograph and what to push harder. Here that meant leaning into the warmth of the low winter light against the cool snow on the upper ridgeline, and letting th...
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