Where the Pines Meet the Desert, the Herd Rushes Through

The east gate of Zion National Park is perhaps one of the less dramatic entrances one can enter through to get access to the canyon.  Much of the landscape is low in relief in comparison to much of the inter-mountain west, and the vegetation consists largely of scrubby pines and things that can tolerate sandy, arid conditions.  Most people entering the park from the east pass by this seemingly unremarkable, almost typical scene of the Colorado Plateau while looking forward to the canyon, tunnel, and other sights beyond.  The truth is, transitional areas are often overlooked in favor of the areas they border.  After all, who wants to see a stunted tree on the edge of a desert, or slushy snow at the snowline on a mountain?  If you ask me, that is taking a "glass half-empty approach" to watching the world unfold around us.  Instead, try seeing a tree growing as tall as it can despite all the odds against it, or watch as the slushy snow feeds little streams that turn out to be the source of a mighty river.

So what do you think of this scene?

At first glance, there is nothing really remarkable about it.  The Ponderosa Pines in the background are hardly impressive, the sagebrush in the mid-ground is altogether too common, and the yucca up front is in flower, but otherwise is as common as the sagebrush.  Then again, things look a bit lush for having all that well-drained sand around, and while pines and desert scrub can appear together, they often do not.  Indeed, there are two different worlds converged into one here, the equivalent of being several hundred miles north and south of a respective mid-point at the same time.  Not ten miles southwest of here is the Mojave Desert, devoid of any sort of tree that claims more than twenty feet of sky, while a mere five miles to the northeast is a forest of pines,spruces, aspen, and flowing streams.  In the meeting places of these two worlds, such as in the space seen above, species co-exist in a marvelous natural garden that makes room for just about any plant one can find in North America, short what can be found in the most tropical and most northerly climes.

Most people wait for the fall to watch nature go through changes, but in places like southwestern Utah, they can do this around the year.  The environs of Zion National Park contain the frontiers of the Mojave Desert, the Great Basin, the Colorado Plateau, the Wasatch Mountains, and the geological diversity of rocks and minerals spanning millions of years of sequential development, all of Utah in miniature.