A Trip Through the Cathedral
Zion. It is a word and a concept all at once. As a word it can mean Cathedral or Temple, but then again, also desert or river. Like the term Ithaca to the Greeks of Homer, Zion can mean the holy City of David to the Israelites. To me, Zion will always be the holiest of places where God, as I know him, shows himself in the canyons of Southern Utah. I’m not sure if it’s the light in that canyon or the way we burst forth into it from the East from underground in the tunnel through Mount Carmel, but it is all spiritual to me.
Chris and I had unloaded the bikes from my perfectly functioning trailer in the parking lot of Westin Lake Las Vegas. This artificial oasis in the Nevada desert, by the man-made Lake Mead is intended to look like Lake Como or Bellagio. The parking lot looks like any state park boat launch lot you’ve ever seen. We headed up through the Lake Mead National Park towards The Valley of Fire State Park and the Moapa Valley north of the Lake. It is a barren, but spectacular piece of wilderness with a fine federally maintained road through it. The scenery is as good as any in the Southwest, including on The Bicentennial Highway (Rt. 95) that we will ride later this week. That is funny because it is not much of a widely known destination and doesn’t get lots of tourists since the most notable attraction is Valley of Fire and that is accessible from Interstate Rt. 15 to the northwest. So we had the road pretty much to ourselves, which is a tranquil way to start a day of riding.
There are parts of that wilderness that look a lot like Death Valley or the Mojave. All three could be location sets for the Lawrence of Arabia scenes of the Al-Nafud desert, called God’s Anvil in the movie. This is the place where if you fall asleep and slip off your camel, you die (unless Lawrence comes back for you). The temperature was only in the 80’s when we drove through and neither of us fell asleep. I have been in the Jordanian desert near Wadi Rum where Lawrence of Arabia was shot (during a visit to the “lost city” of Petra) and I have even been in the Al-Nafud, north of Riyadh (visiting the Ramadan camp of a rather famous and wealthy Saudi prince). We even passed a Lost City Museum in Overton on our ride today. Not such a coincidence before cars and motorcycles since these desert areas are so inhospitable.
From there we headed up the highway through the northwest corner of Arizona. This area is called the Virgin Valley Gorge and it would be a spectacular ride were it not for all the trucks weaving through the canyons at 80+ m.p.h.. that white-knuckle ride led us to Rt. 9 through Hurricane, Utah, where polygamy is supposedly still rampant. You can see lots of housing compounds and imagine the wifely pecking order and how those lives are led, “Under the Banner of Heaven”. As you pass into Springdale, you can’t help but start to feel the busy National Park syndrome that takes over that little town. There are roadside parking ticket dispensers for miles before the Park entrance. There is no Zion free lunch in Springdale. The road up the side of Zion, climbing Mt. Carmel, heading up to the tunnel is also crowded and slow-moving. But that is for a perfectly good reason. When you climb that wall, you are scaling the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica….on the inside. Everywhere you look and at every turn, the canyon walls of red and orange rock are breathtakingly beautiful and supernaturally large and clustered around one another. Your first thought…this is not a normal spot.
Zion Canyon is only fifteen miles long and 2,640 feet high at its peak. But then again, St. Peter’s Basilica is only 448 feet high and is still the holiest place in Christendom. I must not be the first person to ponder the analogies of this magnificent canyon and the mother-ship in Rome. How do I know? The names given to peaks hold that clue. There are Angels Landing, The Great White Throne, The Court of the Patriarchs, The West Temple, The Sentinel, Towers of the Virgin and The Alter of Sacrifice with its red sandstone seeming to drip like blood down its sides. These names meant that the original explorers of the valley, who were Spanish explorers and Padres like Escalante and Dominguez, had their Christian spiritual moment brought to the fore when first seen. That all happened in 1776, strangely enough, the year of our founding as a nation via the publication of The Declaration of Independence, all the way back in Philadelphia.
Utah, being of such a unique historical anomaly by virtue of its religious founding by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, commonly referred to as Mormons, gives its great places names that connect to its spiritual foundation. It was Jedediah Smith who did more than declare all he saw to be the commercial property of The American Fur Company. But true and permanent settlement of the canyon didn’t happen until 1847 when Mormon farmers came south from Salt Lake City and began scratching the earth for a family living. They named the area Kolob from the Book of Mormon, meaning “the heavenly place nearest the residence of God”. The name Zion was given to it later, in 1863, by Mormon settlers, specifically to likening it to that same place of peace referenced in the Bible. But that was only Federally recognized as its name in 1919 by the newly-formed National Park Service. But through all of that inspiration, it was the spirituality of the canyon that made it jump to mind in all its ethereal glory.
I first visited Zion in 1994 on a solo motorcycle trip, astride a cherry-red Honda Goldwing. It blew me away like no other place of natural beauty ever had. For twenty-seven years I have said that visiting Zion was more than a pilgrimage, it was attending church. The words of William Wordsworth, attributed to the rainbow, say it best….My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold…..
And there were Chris and me, slow-playing our way up the canyon. We stared from the road to the soaring walls and back, doing our best not to miss a turn and make this a more spirit-filled event than we had planned. That wall-hugging ends when we arrive at the catacomb or crypt of the mountain, the Mt. Carmel Tunnel, built in 1930. This would just be a long, 1.1-mile dark and unlighted tunnel except for the windows on its north side that magically appear in the dark and look very intentionally placed to preview the coming attraction (assuming you are traveling West). No cathedral does that.
Zion was not turned into the drive-through wonder that it is very long ago. Today, pilgrims like me come in cars and on motorcycles (and even RV’s). We gawk, we stare, we marvel, but mostly we pray. We pray that our trip through the cathedral rewards us with the spiritual enlightenment we all seek.