Happy Trails.
The Zion Shuttle makes nine stops. Excluding the two trails beginning at the Visitor’s Center, four of those stops have access to trails with elevation changes that are less than 100 feet and thus deemed easy. I opted to start with the most distant of the three remaining trails – the Weeping Rock Trail. Weeping Rock is also the shortest and steepest of the three, rising 98 feet in just two-tenths of a mile.
The “weeping” phenomenon occurs when water that has found pathways of descent through porous sandstone encounters rock it can no longer permeate. However, gravity still must rule the day so the water oozes out the side of the permeable rock which now weeps but joyfully so because the water now feeds a sort of hanging rock garden.
My next stop was the Grotto Trail. This is a half-mile trail that starts (or in my case ends) near Zion Lodge and meanders along close to the Floor of the Valley Road. The guide notes a 35-foot elevation change but it’s so gradual that the trail seems flat. Before I set out, I crossed the bridge to the junction with the Kayenta Trail where I got a good look at (I think) Angels Landing.
And now a public service announcement from my Kanab hosts.
When I began planning this trip, considering the places I wanted to visit and looking at possible routes and my plans originally included exploring some of the Escalante area of the Grand Staircase in addition to Bryce and Zion, Kanab seemed like an ideally centered location. I then remembered that a year or two ago my nephew and his family had been in southern Utah and had been deeply moved by the tour they’d taken at Best Friends Animal Society in Kanab. At some point in my research, I discovered that they have a limited number of “cabins”
for overnight stays with any net proceeds supporting the sanctuary. It seemed ideal. (If you open the screen cap the white dots near the center are the cabins.) I was also able to take a tour of the site.
Here’s a little history of Best Friends Animal Society: In 1984, a group of 31 friends with a common vision of “finding homes for unwanted pets while advocating the importance of no kill” united to start Best Friends. They’ve made significant progress toward particularly that second goal. According to their website, from their founding in 1984 to the present day, the number of animals annually euthanized in shelters has dropped from 17,000,000 to 2,000,000 and they believe they can make the state of Utah a no-kill state by 2019 with a goal of making the U S no-kill by 2025. (Update: It took a little longer than they’d hoped but on 27 February 2024, Governor Spencer Cox declared Utah a no-kill state.)
I have inferred from material on their website that their initial property was in Arizona but sometime in the 1990’s they were able to purchase 3,000 acres – that has subsequently expanded to 3,700 acres – in what is now called Angel Canyon roughly five miles north of Kanab.
Although they take many of the most difficult to adopt animals – animals that have been abused or neglected, animals with special medical or dietary needs, or animals that have some sort of physical limitations – they have an adoption success rate that exceeds 80 percent. Best Friends took in 22 of the dogs from the Michael Vick incident and through patience and love, have now found adoptive homes for nearly all of them.
In another example of the breadth of their service, the first stop on our tour was the area called Cat World where they typically house between 500 and 600 cats, many of whom share living space. We visited the buildings that house cats with F I V (Feline Immunodeficiency Virus) or feline leukemia. Our guide told us that most of the cats are adopted but only to homes where they are the only cat or where any other cat also has the virus. At this point, I’m going to pause and let Best Friends speak for themselves. And here’s a site where you can read stories about some of the special needs animals in need of adoption.
Other areas of the sanctuary include Dogtown, Horse Haven, Piggy Paradise, Bunny House, Parrot Garden and Wild Friends. The sanctuary also includes two cemeteries called Angels Rest. Best Friends makes a lifetime commitment to their animals. Those that are not adopted, live out their lives in the sanctuary They also accept the return of animals whose adoption is, for any reason, unsuccessful.
Sadly, shortly after visiting Cat World, the battery on my digital recorder died so I wasn’t, as I thought I was, recording our guide telling us about some of the other animal areas in the sanctuary and, of perhaps equal importance, missed his recounting of the films that were shot at the Disney Barn built when westerns ruled the cinema and Kanab was called Little Hollywood. (According to movie locations plus, the barn was built for the movie Fort Dobbs and the site has appeared in a number of movies and television series over the years.)
The biggest disappointment of my stay was the dogged continuation of partly cloudy nights that meant I’d experienced not a single brilliant night sky. And tomorrow, I’d be off to Salt Lake City where light pollution would render the presence of clouds irrelevant.