The Virgin River

The Vir­gin River — © Copy­right 2012 by William Beem

I vis­ited Las Vegas last week to gather some infor­ma­tion for a new book. Before I left, I made a list of the shots I wanted to get, loca­tions I needed to visit, and pre­pared every­thing in advance. That’s just the way I am. No spontaneity.

That went out the win­dow when I made a deci­sion on the flight out of Orlando to visit Zion National Park. It’s been on my list to go back for a while, and it sud­denly occurred to me that I could make it hap­pen on this trip. I called my friend Andy, who lives in nearby Hen­der­son, and we took a three hour drive up to Zion and wan­dered around the scenic route for a few hours.

The rush­ing water of the Vir­gin River sur­rounded us. Even on the drive there, we encoun­tered this river a few times. It beck­oned me. Florida rivers don’t rush. Things are slow in the South. The Vir­gin River isn’t that large or deep. In fact, I could cross it in two jumps in some places. What it lacks in size, it makes up by being a fast & slip­pery lit­tle sucker. I know it’s slip­pery because I damn near slipped and fell into it a few times work­ing my way across on those rocks.

I crossed the river to get to this van­tage point, took my shots for a while, and then decided I found a bet­ter way out from my pre­car­i­ous posi­tion on the rocks. Unfor­tu­nately, I under­es­ti­mated the ground on the bank. Most of it was fine, but there was a sec­tion that had some seep­age from some­where that I hadn’t noticed. Basi­cally, it was red muck. Slip­pery red muck. My foot want in, sank a bit, and then I started slid­ing very quickly down into the river.

Being from Florida, I’m no stranger to muck and I reacted quickly. I put my other foot down where the first one landed and repeated the same result. I said I reacted quickly, not wisely. After run­ning in place like Scooby Doo for a while, I finally fig­ured out some dif­fer­ent foot­ing and got the hell out of there. My bet­ter path slung red mud all over my shoes & pants and had me climb­ing up a steep wall for about fif­teen feet — all while car­ry­ing a tri­pod & expen­sive Nikon cam­era. I returned to the rental car out of breath and some­what filthy, but I got my river shot.

Please enjoy the photo. I suf­fered for my art.