Zion National Park, Day 2

We set our alarms for early. Like... early early. The kind of early that momentarily puts you in a rotten mood when you set your phone's alarm to the kind of time that someone who said they stayed up all night partying would say they stayed up until. That early.

There was a certain excitement flowing through us, though. We were waking up to the purpose of our visit: The Narrows!

For me, it was the kind of excitement that made it a little hard to fall asleep, but very easy to wake up. The kind of excitement that had me acting like the stereotypical go-getter that characters in movies find more than just annoying.

The Narrows was something I had kinda heard about and read about a little... A slot canyon formed by a stream that you had to wade through in parts. I'd seen pictures. I'd read the Wikipedia entry. Ya boy likes to be informed.

One thing that photos sometimes fail at being able to capture and replicate is scale. Photos without humans tend to be harder when it comes to showing off massive sizes because it's hard to find a good basis of comparison. A grown pine tree can be between X-and-Y feet tall, so even a tree can often fail to allow the viewer to grasp the scale being shown in a photo.

So I may have been informed about the Narrows, but boy oh boy was I not prepared for the sheer immensity of the slot canyon's walls. I'm talking hundreds of feet in some places. Just... a rock wall going straight up into the sky. It's dizzying and a little bit disorienting and a little bit alien feeling.

I love being on Earth yet feelings as if I'm exploring a different planet entirely.

Just like how photos can sometimes not represent the whole picture of something, so too do words often find themselves being insufficient. How can I convey how breathtaking it is to walk through a canyon carved by water over the millennia? A place that - with its near-vertical rock walls and seeming endlessness - is unique unto the entire earth itself?

The words I'm typing just ain't cuttin' it. I promise you.

I guess maybe the true power of photographs isn't their ability to represent or replicate a certain scene, but - when combined with memory - how transportive they can be.

I see these pictures and I'm back there. I feel the water sloshing around the (not at all) "waterproof" shoes we rented. I hear the river. I feel the nip in the pre-sunrise air. I'm once again enveloped by the kind of noisy silence only nature can provide. I hear our grunts as we make our way over huge rocks; I see us pondering the best way to traverse them. I under the water again (yes, I swam in the blessedly cold waters of the Virgin River).