Breaking Out All Over

Zion National Park, Utah, is home to some of Earth's most stunning landscapes. This is a land of towering, colorful sandstone monoliths, deep hidden canyons, free-flowing rivers and diverse plant communities. While each season has its own charms, the month of May is a particularly pleasant time to visit. Temperatures are often ideal, wildflowers are blooming, and because of recent rain and snowmelt, one can view seasonal waterfalls. There is also an abundance of visitor programs and workshops catering to all ages and interests.

My daughter Olivia, 23, accompanied me to the park recently to take in the sights and sounds of spring, and hike a bit. We started our visit at the Zion Canyon Visitor Center, where we hopped on the free shuttle bus and headed up to the most popular and perhaps most stunning place in the park, Zion Canyon.

From April through October, the bus is the only transportation allowed up the six-mile Zion Canyon Scenic Drive, but it's convenient. We stayed on the shuttle until its final and most northern stop, the Temple of Sinawava. There, we set out on the Riverside Walk, an easy 2-mile paved trail that follows the North Fork of the Virgin River. While many return visitors often skip this trail in favor of more challenging hikes, we considered it an outing too good to miss, especially at its springtime prime. Mule deer are often seen, wildflowers are blooming and the leaves on the deciduous trees are just peeking out.

Our first stop was only about a hundred yards up the walk along a spur trail to see a seasonal waterfall a couple of hundred feet high. We continued up the Riverside Walk through a riparian woodland full of swampy areas and lovely hanging gardens. Hanging gardens form where water seeps out of sandstone cliffs, providing a compact habitat for such plants as maidenhair ferns, scarlet monkey flowers, golden columbine and blue shooting stars. These pretty pockets can be found throughout the park, including on the Weeping Rock Trail and the lower Emerald Pool Trail, which are both accessible from trailheads along the scenic drive.

The Riverside Walk is the place to start a day trip upstream to the world-famous Zion Narrows. But the route involves wading up the stream itself, so with the river swollen by snow run-off and rain, spring isn't a good time to take that hike. In fact, at the time of our visit, it had been closed to hikers for about two weeks because of heavy water flow.

Those with adventure in mind, and plenty of river experience, can take advantage of the excess flow in a different way, by paddling a boat (inner tubes are never allowed on any watercourse in the park) down the river. There are plenty of restrictions in order to secure a permit and a small window of opportunity for this journey. You'll need to talk with the folks at Zion's backcountry desk, at the visitor center, but if you are up to the challenge, it's really a great way to travel. Permits are only given out if the river is flowing in excess of 140 cubic feet per second, and none are given if the flow is more than 600 cubic feet per second. Flows between those limits are typical from now through late May.

After enjoying the Riverside Walk -- an easy stroll of a mile upstream and another back down -- we again boarded the shuttle. We got off three stops down, at the Grotto, a picnic area and trailhead for one of the best hikes in the park, Angels' Landing. Since we were short on time and have done this epic hike many times before, we skipped the challenge, looked at the picturesque stone cabin here, then strolled down the river about one-half mile to the Zion Lodge area.

After a quick bite to eat at the lodge's outdoor cafe, we headed across the street to the Emerald Pools trail system. This is a great place this time of year because the snowmelt adds volume to its four waterfalls. We hiked to the upper one, where we found an impressive stream plunging a great distance into a pool by a pristine sandbank. The stream rendered the box canyon pleasantly cool on a warm day. There were a few too many people here for my liking, but next time, I'll visit as early in the day as possible in an attempt to have the place more to myself.

"In May, everything is great in Zion; days are warm, but not too warm, and it is still more like spring than summer," said Michael Plyler, director of the Zion Canyon Field Institute. The institute offers workshops on a variety of outdoor subjects and chooses May to offer some of its best.

One of Plyler's favorite institute treks is the Rim to Floor Hike, which the field institute will offer twice in late May. He leads these all-day 10-mile hikes along the East Rim Trail down to Weeping Rock.

"There is an abundance of wildflowers depending on elevation, and we might see sunflowers, lupine, paint brush and mallow," he said. "And there might also be cliff roses in bloom, which are wonderfully fragrant." The park boasts about 900 species of plants spread from an elevation of about 3,600 feet in the lowlands to 8,700 feet in the higher reaches. Besides altitude, water and shade are also factors affecting when they bloom.

The shuttle's last stop before the visitor center is at the Zion Human History Museum, where we took in some small exhibits of Indian basketry and antique surveying equipment. Besides its displays, the museum offers a variety of ranger talks. Depending on which days you are visiting, topics include "Footsteps in Time," which is about Utah's human history; "Water, Rocks and Time," which delves into the geology that created the landscape; and "Zion Zoology," about the park's permanent inhabitants, such as mountain lions. All ranger talks last approximately 20 to 30 minutes.

We decided to skip the shuttle back to the visitor center and took a spur path over to the Pa'rus Trail, which in turn took us half a mile to the visitor center.

More than 290 bird species are found in the park, including many year-round residents such as Cooper's hawk, red-tailed hawks, hairy woodpeckers and American kestrels. Wild turkeys can often be seen along Zion Canyon Scenic Drive. Plyler said this time of year the most common birds are finches, but scrub jays, pinyon jays and western bluebirds are around, too.

"You also have a chance of seeing a California condor," he said.

He has seen these extremely rare birds fly over the main canyon in June and July, and said they hang out near Kolob Reservoir, referring to the area just north of the Kolob Terrace section of Zion, about one hour's drive from Springdale.

There are many ranger-led activities during May, including "Ride with a Ranger," an informative, two-hour morning tour aboard the shuttle up Zion Canyon Scenic Drive.

In the evenings, the Watchman Campground and Zion Lodge have programs that run about 45 minutes. The campground program is open to all visitors to Zion, not just those camping. All are child friendly, and updates on the specific topics that will be covered each day are posted at the visitor center, campgrounds and museum.

The park encourages all visitors to bring a reusable water bottle or hydration system and refill at one of the water bottle filling stations at Zion Canyon Visitor Center, Zion Lodge and Zion Human History Museum and some shuttle stops.

I have visited the park probably 50 times, often camping overnight or staying in different hotels and inns. On this visit, we decided to try a place new to us, selecting Springdale's Best Western Zion Park Inn.

It has the amenities you'd expect from a modern chain hotel, such as a heated outdoor pool and oversize parking spaces for trucks and RVs. And it offers a few more often associated with family-friendly resorts -- a putting green, horseshoe pits and courts for basketball, volleyball and badminton.

But as a person who spends much of her working life traveling, the virtues I most appreciated were traditional: good food, soft beds, and rooms as clean as a John Dillinger getaway, all so close to the Virgin River we could feel the water-cooled breeze.

Contact Deborah Wall at deborabus@aol.com.