Ashleigh and I are "yearning for Zion", but not in the bad way. We drove from Jackson all day long to a Wal-Mart parking lot a couple hours north of Zion. On the way, Ashleigh noticed one of the trailer tires was low, and it turned out to have a bad valve stem, just like the other trailer tire a few days before. The guy who ran the local tire shop started out a little cold, but when we got to talking he said that his kin run the jade shop in Girdwood, where I have been a few times. Once we made that connection, he was peachy. It was a long, long drive but we made it and settled in.
The next morning we completed our drive to Zion and came in the East entrance, from Route 89. The rocks and mountains at that entrance are crazy, some have a criss-cross checkerboard pattern in them. Our trailer was just barely small enough to travel through the two traffic tunnels without requiring them to shut down the tunnel and make it one-way only, which would have cost fifteen dollars.
Because we arrived early on Saturday, we had time to do a hike on Saturday as well as Sunday. On Saturday we hiked The Narrows, which begins as a gentle riverside stroll, then the river becomes the trail and you literally hike in the river as far as you care to go. We went farther than 90% of the other hikers, which was about a couple miles. The water was normally about knee deep, but sometimes up to our bellies. The canyon walls were sheer cliffs on each side, maybe fifty to a hundred feet apart. It was an excellent hike because the water kept us cool in the heat (especially when Ashleigh fell in) and it was a very different type of hiking experience. Neither of us had ever done anything like it.
The second day we planned ahead and got up early to hike up Angel's Landing, which is a "strenuous" hike up to a lookout point 1500 feet up from the canyon floor. The river snakes around the rock which means it stands in the middle of a curving crevasse all around, with a long valley at the end. As it turned out, Ashleigh wasn't feeling well, and had to turn back a little bit into the hike. After making sure she was okay, I went on and made the summit, although my lungs were extremely pissed off by the end. I will try not to exaggerate: it was possibly the most awesome view I've ever seen, and if not the #1, then way up there. It was breathtaking. The pictures do not in any way give the full sense of how high up I felt, how steep the cliffs are, how expansive the view is.
I powered up that mountain at full speed, and I went down as fast as I could. The signs posted say it is a 5 hour hike, which I did in 3 hours. At the bottom of the hill I felt great, energetic, and alive. It wasn't for about a half hour before my body repaid me for what I had just put it through. I felt weak, starved for calories, and my pee was dark yellow even though I had drank almost a gallon of water. I felt then how Ashleigh felt before the hike; but by then she was feeling much better, so she drove out of the park as I tried my hardest to maintain consciousness.
We left the park right on schedule and drove south on I-15.
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