“Nothing can exceed the wondrous beauty of Little Zion Valley, which separates the two temples and their respective groups of towers.”
West Rim Trail, Zion National Park
But the traveler has not yet reached the gates of Zion, although distant views continue to appear and disappear. The Virgin River is now near at hand on the right, a swift, moody, meandering stream whose red waters are the creators of the fertile farms along its banks and sometimes their destroyers. The foreground landscape is red, although the broad, sloping buttresses of the mesas, folded, fluted and flounced ad infinitum, display buffs, yellows, grays, browns and purples.
Sentinel Peak, Zion National Park
Near Virgin City there is a view northeastward of sensational Guardian Angel Pass. Across Great West Canyon, apparently, stands an immense dam of rock cleft by a rectangular aperture as regular as if cut by engineers; surmounting the barrier are two towering white cones, the ghostly guardians of the gap. Another fascinating feature of the panorama is the complex convergence of the battlemented mesa promontories from all directions except the south; these carved and tinted headlands actually seem to advance upon the beholder. In the east are the pinnacled spires of the Eagle Crags, shattered to dagger sharpness.
Rockville, another village beside the Virgin, was founded by Mormon pioneers in 1861, and was long an important telegraph station. There is a petrified forest in the vicinity.
About five miles beyond, the two profound chasms, the Mukuntuweap (Zion) and the Parunuweap, converge; and the two sublime domes, the East and West Temples, with their incredible crests of crimson bleeding down their pale precipices, soar above the rushing waters. Springdale, the last Mormon hamlet, is passed; then the Ranger Station at the southern boundary of Zion National Park.
