Amazing adventures: Zion National Park offers hikes from easy to strenuous

ZION NATIONAL PARK — My first impressions as a boy of 9 or 10 riding into Zion Canyon with my parents and sister Elaine were:

So, this is what a "national park" is like, "a wonderfully big and spectacularly beautiful … park."

Southern Utah writer Lyman Hafen, in the book "Mukuntuweap: "Landscape and Story in Zion Canyon," nicely captured the feeling of when he, too, was a lad and his father would raise the child's eyes to the "Towers of Stone":

"They were unreal, otherworldly in a little boy's mind — so large and looming and overwhelming as to force me to rub my eyes and wonder if I was actually awake," Hafen wrote.

But the grasslands studded with Fremont cottonwoods along the Virgin River and the two-lane road weaving, with appropriate pullouts and informational signs, among craggy, time-sculpted sandstone monoliths with grand names like "The Watchman," "The Patriarchs" and "The Great White Throne" proved just a little deceiving.

Intervening years and many a hike have given me a better appreciation of just what kind of "park" Zion is.

Born a century ago as Mukuntuweap National Monument and re-christened a national park in 1919, Zion, with its multifaceted canyons and beautiful vermillion, pink, orange and white sedimentary cliffs, has turned out to be, for me, a magnet in every season.

Just weeks ago I walked into one side-canyon wonderland with members of my family, including wide-eyed baby Summer, strapped in a baby-pack to the chest of her father, Chris Harris. There we caught a glimpse of a springtime world of light and shade called the Emerald Pools.

We chose our steps carefully on the muddy trail behind the sprinkle of waterfalls while gazing in wonder at the blue sky and orange-red cliffs reflected in the pooling waters and gleaming on the boulders before and below us, as if gems were embedded in the ragged rocks.

"What I loved about that hike was I hadn't been hiking for quite awhile, and that was a relatively easy hike for me to do," says my niece Angela Harris. "And we had a 6-month-old with us, too, and we could strap her to Chris and she could come with us. She almost fell asleep!"

So the Emerald Pools hike, just more than a mile long, like the even-shorter trail up-canyon to the dancing line of droplets from Weeping Rock, is a simple initiation walk — a sampling of the deeper, higher and, yes, more strenuous tramps one can make in Zion National Park.

Zion's trails — and in some cases one must take the term "trail" lightly — have given me indelible memories of Utah's wonders.