A set of photographs taken from a day’s hiking in Zion National Park, Utah.

The park is centred around another wonderful water eroded red sandstone valley, cut through the same sedimentary depositions that resulted in both the Grand Canyon and Bryce Canyon. Ascending from the bottom to the top of these sites you can see more than 200 million years of fascinating geological history (pdf) – as well as the spectacular views.

The photograph below shows the trails we followed. We originally intended only to walk to Hidden Canyon, but the route was much easier than expected and so we continued on to Observation Point (from where the photograph was taken):

Although both of these routes are quite steep and classified as “strenuous” by the NPS, there really is nothing difficult about either trail while the weather is good. The combined distance was about 14km, with a total ascent of only about 750m. Despite being somewhat slow walkers, the round trip took only six hours.

We really enjoyed the park. It should definitely be high on the list of places to explore when in Utah.

The photographs were taken with a mix of the Olympus and Ricoh cameras. I strongly suggest taking a very wide angle lens – we ended up stitching numerous panoramas because our widest 24mm/28mm framing was simply not wide enough…