Snow Falling in Zion

This coming week is Novell's annual Brainshare convention. We have customers and partners flying in from all over the world to attend. A couple of GroupWise partners flew in a couple of days before the show and decided to do some hiking in Zion National Park. Several of us from the Provo office joined them for what turned out to be a very unique Zion hiking experience. All in all there were 8 of us: two from the Netherlands, one from Germany, one from Bulgaria, two product managers from Provo, the son of one of the product managers and myself.

I knew that we were in trouble when I checked the weather on Saturday morning and discovered that there was a 100% chance of light snow pretty much all day. It's not often that the weathermen feel confident to predict anything with 100% surety. We decided to press our luck and hike anyway. I, being the eternal optimist that I am, decided to hike in shorts. After all it was nearly 50 degrees in the morning before we started our hike. Weatherman be damned, I refused to believe that it was going to snow.

As we started our ascent up to angels landing there was a light drizzle. It was actually still warm enough that it wasn't a problem. Considering how hot I normally get when I hike, it was almost refreshing to hike in shorts in near freezing temperatures. This may very well be the first time in my life that I haven't sweat profusely while hiking.

By the time that we got to Scout's lookout. the light drizzle had turned into a near blizzard. Seeing the snow fall in the canyon was incredibly beautiful. It is the second time that I have seen Zion in the snow, but the first time that I've seen it while actually hiking.

Despite the beauty, the snow added a certain element of danger to the hike. The snow made it way too treacherous to hike the rest of the way to Angel's Landing from Scout's lookout. It also made the descent back down Walter's Wiggles somewhat harrowing. I think that Svetlin had it the worst. The shoes that he was wearing had no traction whatsoever. He mostly slid all the way down the wiggles.