This isn't the best picture I've ever taken, but to me, it's the most important one. Not because of the image, or the light, or anything I can show you.
This is the story of what it took, of the where, and of the how.
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The Subway
Zion National Park
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This spot is in the Zion National Park wilderness and is called the Subway. It's carved out by the rush of the small river over ions of time into the two canyon walls and now appear to be a tunnel through them. It's a place not visited much. The park service only gives out permits for a maximum of 40 people a day, and the day I went there, only five.
I first heard about the Subway a couple of years ago and have since studied pictures of it, read about it many times, and found out just how special it could be.
To get to it, would mean a nine mile hike through the canyon and up the river. That's what the stories tell you, but they don't come close to telling it all. I realize that even a nine mile walk on a sidewalk to someone old and fat like me would is a challenge, but I figured if I took my time and kept things at my pace, I would be OK.
How stupid I was.
I started off in the dark with only my head-lamp to show me the way along a nice level trail over the mesa for the first half mile or so; came to the edge of what I had read was a steep descent into the canyon, and just stood there in awe and fear of what this really meant. I don't know how far it really was down to the river below, but to me it looked like thousands of feet into an abyss down what could not have been called a trail anywhere east of the Mississippi. It was so steep that at times I felt like I was just stumbling and falling down the path rather than hiking down. But I was continuing. It couldn't get worse. Stupid move number two.
There was not a real path to follow, but only three miles of scrambling, climbing, pulling myself over boulders along the sides of the river, with no other way to go upstream because the walls of the canyon were so close that these obstacles blocked any other way of progress. The few easy patches of walking on the riverbank, few and short, were like little gifts. The cairns stacked by earlier hikers to show the way around particularly tough stretches became reasons to rejoice. It became three miles of doubting myself, and cursing the extra fat on my middle and the camera in the pack on my back.
Finally, five hours after I left the car in the dark, I got out my camera for the first time and made the image above. I stayed about half an hour, wanting to wait for different light than I had at the time, but consumed by the thought that if it took me this long to get here, how long would it take to get out and how soon dark was coming. I started back, hopping those same rocks, doubting myself with every one. My knees and ankles screaming at me, calling me every bad word they knew, joining me in my quest to just have it over. After what seemed like hours (wait, it was actually hours), we made it to the bottom of that climb out of the canyon, and had a decision to make.
I sat there on a rock, by this time barely able to move, and came to the realization that I could either make it up that climb or just sit there and die. It sounds dramatic, but those were the only two choices I felt I had at that time. It really wasn't much of a choice after all (drama again), so after a half hour or so, the three of us, knees, ankles, and I started up. At first I was telling them "go to that big rock 50 yards ahead and you get a break", then it was "go 25 yards", and eventually became "stop screaming at me and we'll stop in five". It took one-hour-and-forty-five minutes to get there, but we did it. We drug ourselves across that mesa top to the parking lot, twelve hours from when we started, where two of the others that passed by me on the way out, were without a doubt waiting to toss a coin to see who had to go back down the trail and see how the fat guy was doing.
I had made it, but why?
I have strong feelings about this, but need to think longer on them. As they say...........
Stay tuned in.
