Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Just Another Thousand-Ton Rockfall in Zion


This is the photo from our latest rock slide that occured on Saturday. Highway 9 was closed for several hours to traffic.


The Park Service posted this image Saturday of the ZNP road crew cleaning up a giant rockfall just east of Canyon Junction. Thankfully, this kind of stuff typically occurs overnight, when the roads are empty. Nightly rockfall is typically small – watermelon and wheelbarrow-sized boulders – but sometimes, as above, a significant piece of sandstone crashes down, smashing to thousands of bits and blocking the road for quite a while. When you realize just how much rock and rubble falls onto Zion’s roads, it’s sort of amazing to realize there has never been a catastrophic, car-crushing accident via rockfall (at least to my knowledge).

1 comment:

janis said...

OMGoodness! How frightful! Even the "small" melon sized ones would freak me out. Great photo Brooke.
BTW~ LOVE THE NEW BACKGROUND!