The Mountains Will Crush You
Nature’s balance of power
I took the most scenic bike ride of my life yesterday.
We’re at Zion National Park playing the Zion Canyon Music Festival in Springdale, Utah. We got here a day early to enjoy this beautiful, majestic little section of Earth.
Except it’s not that little.
You are greeted by massive walls of rock (otherwise known as, “mountains”) with every turn. You almost always know that a mountain is around the corner, but you never know what’s at the base of the behemoths.
Sometimes it’s a beautiful field of sunflowers, sometimes it’s a bunch of mule deer eating grass in the field, not even bothered by the humans around them a little bit. There are lizards, weird bugs, and predators lurking from a distance that you can’t even see.
That’s the fun gamble of going out into a place like Zion. Coupled with the beauty is immense danger — perhaps more than anywhere else.
While most visitors are doing easy hiking and sightseeing, there’s an inherent risk in visiting a place like this. With life comes death, with beauty comes horror.
The mountains put you in your place. It’s hard not to wind through the valleys, lurking in the shadows of Earth’s past, and remember that we are mere residents, not…
