Walls of Zion

Day 17   April 22, 2015

Another beautiful day, starting with a 38 degree temperature.  We drove over to Zion for a day of sightseeing and hiking.  As we arrived in the area of Zion the mountains became massive rocks. 

It was like driving into the bottom of the Grand Canyon.  The difference would be that the walls are not a solid barrier.  There are multi mountains with very different peaks surrounding the entire park.  Describing this is very difficult, since there are no mountains, anything like these, near our home area.   Coming into the park we had to travel to two tunnels.  One of the tunnels was over a mile and it was restricted for RV’s, which we weren’t driving.  Upon arrival to the visitor’s center, we chose to hike the Angel Landing trail;

it is a 2.8 mile trail with a 1600’ climb.  Since the park doesn’t allow private travel on it’s roads, they had set up shuttles.  They worked really well in getting us to our trailhead.   The trail had two sets of switchbacks on it. 

These were extremely tough, thank goodness for the trail having solid footing.  When we reached the top of the switchbacks there was an area just before the final climb for those of us that wanted to think about going on.  Well, I thought too much, knowing that all we would have to do is climb up a steep narrow trail holding on to a cable.  At one point was a section that was about 5 feet wide with 1000’ foot drop off on both sides.  We let a little thing like this change our plans of climbing on up to Angel’s Landing.  As we watched people go up the cable, there was a woman who froze on to the cable and couldn’t go either up or down.   After a lot of help from her husband, she was able to come down to where we were.  It was fun to watch youngsters, who were in great shape, run up the trail.  Most of us weren’t quite so eager or in such good shape. 

Climbing down wasn’t bad at all, but it still was really tough.  Reaching the bottom we wanted to do one more little trail that took us to some pools of water, this is really unusual out here in the desert.  Both of us were happy that our hiking today was over, when we finished this trail.  When we rode the shuttle back to the visitor’s center, we determined that we had enough.  Jan went in to find a couple of post cards.  I sat just outside, with our packs and walking sticks.  When I didn’t see Jan for the next 15-20 minutes I thought I should go in and see everything is ok. 

She wasn’t there.  Okay, so she went back to the car (300 yards).  So, I walked to the car, still no Jan.  At this point I thought that I would walk back over and try to find her.  There was no cell service and no wifi available.  Luckily, there was Jan about 20 feet from where I had been.