THE WORTH OF A WORD

Former ZFP President‘s Parting Thoughts

For more than 40 years I’ve collaborated with the artist Roland Lee on several projects intent on sharing the story of Zion in words and images. I’ve provided the words, and Roland, the images. We’ve had an ongoing debate about which medium is more powerful. Roland’s watercolors of Zion have become iconic works of art, and he usually wins the debate by reminding me that, “A picture is worth a thousand words.”

Yet Zion sparks a desire in many to paint in words, even when words can fail us. In forty years of trying, I’ve never quite been able to translate to words what I see and feel in this canyon. So, I’ve often turned to others who have done it for me.

Frederick Dellenbaugh, who accompanied John Wesley Powell on his second expedition of the Colorado River in the early 1870s, returned to southern Utah three decades later as a freelance journalist and painter. He spent a couple of weeks in the canyon in the summer of 1903, working on a series of oil paintings he would exhibit in the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, and researching the article he would publish in the January 1904 edition of Scribner’s Magazine.

In 2007, thanks to supporters like you, Zion Forever was able to obtain one of those long-lost paintings and bring it back to Zion where it is now part of the park’s collection. That collection also contains an original copy of Scribner’s Magazine in which Dellenbaugh expressed the impact of his first encounter with the canyon in words like these:

“Away below, sage-covered slopes extend to the distant green of Virgin City, overshadowed by the towering magnificence of the Great Temple, standing unique, sublime, adamantine . . . There is almost nothing to compare to it. Niagara has the beauty of energy; the Grand Canyon, of immensity; the Yellowstone, of singularity; the Yosemite, of altitude; the ocean, of power; this Great Temple, of eternity . . .”

Each time I come to the end of that soliloquy, I’m convinced there are times when a word is worth a thousand pictures. That word, “eternity,” captures the essence of what you and I, and all of us who support the Zion Forever Project, are doing as we work together to make a difference for Zion, now and forever.

Lyman Hafen Former President & CEO