The original plan was to go to Havasupai the weekend of August 2nd through the 4th. The morning of the 2nd we were informed that the flooding had been bad there for a couple of weeks, so we turned to plan B, Zion's!
My friends Clark, Matt, and Kaitlin camped just outside of the park at a fairly cheap campsite. However, food wasn't as cheap as we thought it would be so we were pretty discounted to spend so much money at a restaurant nearby. Overall, so happy with the campsite because it had nice showers for free!!!
Friday, we kind of slept in until about 8:30, got ready, and headed to the park. They have these cool shuttle buses for free once you pay to get inside the park ($25 for one vehicle for a 7 day pass! So cheap!) and so we rode those to any trail head we wanted to do. That morning we did the Emerald Pools trail and the Weeping Rock trail, both short but cool trails.
That afternoon, after eating food at the lodge and taking a short rest under the giant tree in front of the lodge, we took the shuttle to the Angel's Landing trailhead. I was so excited for this one, because all I had heard was how amazing it was at the top and how scary it was climbing up. If anyone knows me, they know I love adventure, so naturally I was so stoked for it.
And the top was everything I could have imagined!! The views were breathtaking. You could see the entire park, up both canyons. The river looked like a tiny brown snake, the road was even smaller. Get this, the drop-offs on the sides of Angels Landing is about 1,400 feet. I looked down at one point (while hanging on to the chains that are put there for our safety and my sanity) and I got one of those "holy crap I'm going to die" feelings. It was awesome, ha ha! I couldn't even see the side because it was just a sheer, steep cliff.
A thunderstorm came up on us while we are climbing up, and me being the paranoid person that I am about lightning (I have had too many close calls), I suggested that we hurry to the top and not spend too much time once we got there. The lightning wasn't too close, but it was coming fast. Luckily, it didn't start raining until we were already climbing down. Still sketchy though!
Day 2, we decided to sleep in again (if you could call it that, the ground was hard so there wasn't much sleeping going on) and then set out to do The Narrows. This is only hike I had done back when I went in high school, so I was excited to do it again. When we got there the water was super muddy (we called it Willy Wonkas chocolate river) and the bottom is filled with huge rocks that make it hard to walk in. On this hike you're in the river about 80% of the time, which made for slow going because nobody wants to trip and fall into that river. We hiked upriver for a couple hours until we felt like turning around. It was pretty fun because there was so many people, so crossing the river was like an obstacle course, you had to dodge foreigners and boulders. Speaking of, I feel like we were the only English speaking people there!! So many people speaking different languages, mostly French. We heard that and German, Italian, Spanish, and some Asian languages that I would never know which is which. Haha. The people watching was pretty awesome.
Overall, it was an amazing weekend and so much fun!! Its definitely something I want to do every year. When I drove home on Tuesday, me and my dad (he flew up to drive home with me) drove through Zion's so we could ride the shuttle around, so I could show him all the places we went. We saw a gigantic desert bighorn sheep, we may or may not have started a traffic jam when we stopped to look at it. Haha, whoops!
Well I'm having fun at home so far, I've been on more dates in the past week than I have in Provo the last four months. Crazy, huh? Anyway, pictures from the trip!!
1 comment:
Looks like so much fun!!!
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