Paria Canyon

Upper Paria Canyon involves is a pretty hike through a canyon, but it involves many crossings of the river. In April, a few days after some light rain, it got to knee-high and didn't have a strong current. Still, most of us got tired of walking against the mild current and fighting the sucking mud (the signboard at the ranger station said "No real quicksand" so we made a lot of jokes about all the fake quicksand that sucked our feet in) and decided to turn back after we'd gone about three miles in. The most interesting sights were the "nichos", caves within caves.

As it turned out, I was very glad to have turned back when I did, because it gave us time to head over to the Condor Viewing Site, below the cliffs where they release the California Condors. I'd never seen a condor before, and we saw six in the air! I got fairly good views through the binoculars at the viewing site -- enough to get a good sense of how condors look in the air, and to see some aerial sparring -- but alas, no photos.

Up: Vermillion Cliffs


Creative Commons License All photos are copyright Akkana Peck,
licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC-BY-NC-SA).
Please inquire if you're interested in commercial use.

Shallow Sky home | Mail Comments