Stand next to the Virgin River at the bottom of the steep Zion Canyon and try not to think about time. It’s impossible. And while you stand there, the river keeps working.
It was late February when I visited, a week after a major snowstorm swept through the upper reaches of Zion National Park. From the Temple of Sinawava at the end of the park’s road, I took the Riverside Walk as it hugged the banks of the river. The snowmelt seeped down the sandstone walls, filling the air with the scent of damp earth and the occasional song of quiet trickles.
All I want to do is press my hands against the stone and listen. Even the breeze seems to have something to say. We are made of the same things, this canyon and I – the same atoms, just arranged differently, for now.
When night falls over Zion Canyon, the colors and textures of the walls drain away. What remains are the black silhouettes of the peaks against a sky full of stars. There is nothing left to see but up, which is where human eyes have always gone when darkness falls, before we learned to banish it. Even the smells have changed, the earthy scent of damp stone giving way to something faint and sweet drifting across the desert, a fragrance I couldn’t name.
The air is clear and cold, perfect for stargazing, but the Moon is almost full, flooding the canyon with pale light. I raise my hand to block its brilliance so I can see the stars.
How long have these stars stood as witnesses over the landscape? The sand along the river’s shore has been crumbling from these walls for hundreds of millions of years, and the stars above have looked down on all of it, or so it seems.
Orion over Zion National Park
I look to Orion for an answer. He is the central character of the winter night sky, and people have been telling stories about the stars for as long as there have been people to look up. My European ancestors saw a hunter with his faithful dogs, Canis Major and Canis Minor. The Māori of New Zealand saw a canoe, with Betelgeuse and Rigel at its two ends, three brothers sitting in the middle at the belt, and three fish caught from the stars of his sword.
The Ojibwe people tell the story of the Wintermaker, whose body is made of the same stars as Orion, but whose arms stretch across the winter sky: one hand reaching to Procyon in Canis Minor, the other to Aldebaran in Taurus. If winter lingers as Orion retreats into the spring sky, the Ojibwe send their children outside with bows and arrows to shoot at the Wintermaker to drive him away.
But when the canyon’s layers of sediment settled over 220 million years ago, not a single star in Orion existed. When the last dinosaur walked through the mud nearby, leaving behind footprints that still remain after 60 million years, Orion wasn’t there to watch.
When the Colorado Plateau made its greatest push upward 10 million years ago, the light of Betelgeuse finally winked on, joining Bellatrix to form the shoulders of what would eventually become the most recognizable constellation in the winter sky. By the time the Virgin River carved a knee-deep gouge into the earth, the hunter was still not fully formed.
The youngest stars illuminating the nebula in Orion’s sword are only 10,000 years old – half the time that has passed since humans first walked in this canyon.
The Virgin River is not finished shaping this landscape. The canyon will grow deeper, and while that’s all happening, Betelgeuse will go supernova and die, changing Orion once again. And somewhere in all of that deep time, one brief witness stood at the bottom of the canyon on a February night and tried, just for a moment, to hold it all in mind.
