Читать книгу Utah's National Parks - Ron Adkison - Страница 7

The National Parks of Utah

Stretching across the southern third of Utah are five of perhaps the most magnificent national parks in the nation. These parks embrace some of the finest and most unusual examples of erosional forms on the globe, and they are truly among the wonders of the world. Utah’s national parks are a veritable wilderness of stone, and indeed much of the land in each park has been recommended for federal wilderness designation.

Many serious hikers, however, shun national parks, believing that such areas are tourist meccas where a wilderness experience is difficult, if not impossible, to have. That may be true for some of our national parks, but not for Utah’s. Even in Zion National Park, where annual visitation averages more than two million people (nearly half the total annual visitation to all Utah national parks), the hiker can enjoy magnificent, wild country and a good deal of solitude only a short distance from most any road.

The majority of park visitors spend only a day in each Utah park, viewing the scenery from the comfort of their vehicles as they try to see as much country as a one- to two-week vacation will allow.

For visitors with limited time, these parks indeed have a great deal to offer. Much of the parks’ scenery can be enjoyed from park roadways, and numerous short trails, many of them nature trails, offer visitors a chance to stretch their legs, smell the desert’s fragrance, feel the wind in their faces, view seemingly endless panoramas and incomparable landscapes, enjoy the delicate blossoms and the perfumes of myriad wildflowers, and observe desert creatures going about their day-to-day lives. Many short trails require no special hiking ability, and some are accessible to handicapped persons in wheelchairs and even to baby strollers.

For an extended stay, each park has one or more excellent campgrounds, and some are available to large recreational vehicles. Each park also boasts a visitor center and interpretive activities that include ranger-led hikes and evening-campfire naturalist programs.

For the backcountry enthusiast, each park also contains broad stretches of pristine wilderness, and in some places, particularly in Capitol Reef and Canyonlands, hikers can roam for days and not see a single soul.

Visitors to the majestic landscape of Utah’s national parks will enjoy a wide range of scenery, including vast plateaus clothed in cool forests of pine, fir, and aspen; magnificent canyons up to 4000 feet deep; soaring cliffs, some of them sheer and smooth from top to bottom, others broken and fluted with great buttresses and columns; cliff-edged mesas, some capped by stone, others topped by velvety grass-lands and “pygmy” forests of pinyon and juniper; broad desert valleys and sun-baked desert flats; domes, crags, arches and pinnacles of solid stone, colored in nearly every shade of the spectrum.

Double-O Arch, Arches National Park

Another part of the scenery in Utah’s national parks is the diversity of plants and animals, all of them living in delicate balance and adapted to the rigors of the high desert, where rainfall is scant and undependable, and where temperatures can be excessively hot. This desert country of the Colorado Plateau may seem harsh and unforgiving, inhospitable to human life if not to plants and animals, but humans have lived and even thrived here for thousands of years. Park visitors will encounter granaries and cliff dwellings of the Ancestral Puebloans (formerly referred to as the “Anasazi”), rock-writing panels dating back more than 2000 years, old homesteads, cowboy line camps, and even farm equipment.

Yes, Utah’s national parks have a great deal to offer to everyone, from chapters of natural history and human history to chapters of earth history spanning more than 300 million years. Recreational opportunities are also diverse, ranging from dayhikes to extended backcountry treks, horseback rides (in Zion and Bryce), 4WD trips, and river float trips.