Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Weeping Rock and Emerals Pools

Today we started our short visit in Zion National Park. Until now I underrated this park. Probably because the most popular part of it is located across the road 9 that is commonly used for transportation from Kanab to Springdale or Hurricane. Of course views from the road are amazing, but you can find many more valuable gems in different areas of the park.
Our goal was to see Weeping Rock, Emerald Pools and Angels Landing in main part of the park and later go to the Subway. Life verified plans and we saw only Weeping Rock and Emerald Pools and what's even worse, have proper pictures only from Emerald Pools. Photographing Weeping Rock appeared to be a really big challenge and we didn't manage to take a single good picture of this place.
The problem with photographing Weeping Rock lies in the nature of the place. It's a kind of a small arcade in the big rock and you can enter there. From the rock above you water is still oozing and you see a droplets of them falling down. Good pictures I imagined should have a slightly blurred droplets in the foreground and mountains in the background. I could see such picture with my own eyes, but wasn't able to register it with camera. After playing about an hour with this place we gave up and went to Emerald Pools.
Emerald Pools trail leads from the Zion Lodge through Lower and Middle to the Upper Emerald Pool. You can easily get wet on this trail, because water falls directly onto the path. We somehow managed to get to the Upper Pool staying dry and took few pictures. In the Upper Pool I was playing a bit with squirrel and have some nice pictures. Moreover it was a very funny story - one guy asked us if we work for National Geographic (probably because of our impressive gear). We answered that not yet, but would be happy to sell him some pictures. Unfortunately he refused. I hope he was a seer.
Trail to the Emerald Pools took us a lot of time and we had to cancel our plans of visiting Angel's Landing. Instead we returned to Weeping Rock - unfortunately this time we also didn't take even one good picture. We finished the day with some shopping and finding hotel in Hurricane, then preparing for Subway trail.
Both pictures had been taken on the Emerald Pools trail.

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