Southern Utah is currently experiencing drought conditions. There has hardly been any rain since October. While never really a good thing, a drought year does have its silver linings. One of those is that you can do some spectacular higher elevation hiking in Zion well into the winter. In wetter years, the high elevation is subject to heavy snow and icy conditions, making hiking treacherous.
In early January, my wife and I decided to take advantage of the dry conditions to hike the West Rim Trail. The entire trail runs approximately 14 miles from Lava Point in West Zion to the Grotto parking lot. Our plan, however, was to do an out and back hike starting at the Grotto, going partway, then return to the Grotto. We hiked from the valley floor but had to start from the Lodge parking lot because at 11:30 AM, the Grotto lot was already full. Still, we managed to do a 9.5-mile round trip hike and finish before sunset.
After crossing the bridge at the Grotto and hiking along the Virgin River for a bit, the trail starts to climb fairly steeply until you reach the entrance of Refrigerator Canyon. At this point in the trip, stunning views of Zion are already presenting themselves.
The trail continues through Refrigerator Canyon for a short distance on an easy, mostly flat trail. You may see Bighorn Sheep in the canyon. There was a small group of females nearby, one of which came down from above closer to where we were, but on the other side of the canyon from the trail.
It is always amazing and humbling to see them navigating the canyon walls so nimbly. It looks so dangerous, but they do it with ease and grace.
After traveling through Refrigerator Canyon, the trail turns and goes steeply up a section called Walter’s Wiggles, a series of tight switchbacks that seem to go on forever. When you do finally reach the top of the Wiggles, you come to Scout Lookout where the trail to Angel’s Landing splits off from the West Rim Trail.
At the junction, we continued along the West Rim Trail and soon after, found a very nice viewpoint overlooking the Virgin River 2,000 feet below.
From this point, the trail continues north and moves a little west of the main canyon. Around this area, the elevation is reaching the highest point of our hike, at about 6,600 feet. This is an elevation gain of about 2,300 feet from the Grotto. Looking to the west are views of some amazing peaks.
Then the trail turns back and drops down about 300 feet to a bridge crossing a small drainage, before heading back up on the other side of the bridge.
To me, this is where the trail becomes most spectacular. By this point, the crowds have been left behind and you are definitely deep into the backcountry of Zion. As I had mentioned at the start of this post, in wet years this could be covered in snow and ice. But we only saw a few tiny patches of almost entirely melted snow in the most shaded locations off of the trail.
The West Rim trail continues far beyond this point, eventually climbing a steep sandstone wall until you reach the forest above at Cabin Spring and all the way to Lava Point. In separate hikes, I have covered quite a bit of spectacular scenery in West Zion, but most of it is not directly on the West Rim trail.
If you are doing a day hike and don’t plan to continue to Lava Point, you need to turn back somewhere. Note that during the winter, the road to Lava Point is closed, so if you get all the way there, you have to come 14 miles back! We were almost 5 miles in now and had a tough 5 miles to go back before dark, so we turned around here, though I would have loved to at least reach Cabin Spring.
Have you ever noticed that when doing an out and back hike, the back part of the hike is always harder than the out part? This hike was no different, even though it was mostly downhill on the way back! But the reward was to get to the Virgin River in the late afternoon when the Virgin River is shaded and just the taller peaks still have soft light on them. What an amazing time to be in the canyon.
An interesting anecdote happened on the way back near Scout Lookout. We met a couple of young people from out of town headed towards Lava Point carrying climbing rope and a couple of very small packs. But that’s strange, it was getting late by now, shouldn’t they be going the other way? We stopped to talk, and they told us they had just climbed up the face of one of the cliffs from the valley floor to the trail. Good for them, that is no easy feat! In surprise, we asked them if they really planned to hike to Lava Point now. Lava Point? No, they were headed towards the Grotto. Kindly, we pointed out that the Grotto was the other way. They thanked us profusely and turned around.
A note about weather in Zion. Rainfall amounts tend to be highly variable year-to-year. While this year is a drought year, the spring of 2023 was quite wet. I will post about that wet spring in the near future. Rains will come again. In fact, the forecast calls for possible snow over the area for three days starting tomorrow. We will see if it actually happens.
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