Posts tagged Zion national park
Zion National Park (Day Three): Angels Landing
Zion National Park (Day Three): Angels Landing

We now come to the last day of our Zion National Park trip. We saved the hardest hike for last, which, in hindsight, is a good thing, because I couldn’t walk the next day (more on that later). Angels Landing is the most famous (or infamous) hike in Zion, and, as we learned during the hike, the most dangerous. In the last 21 years, 14 people have fallen to their deaths on this hike, the most recent just a few weeks before we did the same hike. Had we known this, would we (or at least I) have done this hike? Probably not. More on that later. I should also mention that we inadvertently saved Angels Landing for last because they had to repair a section of chain that had broken away in the previous days. Which was a whole other awesome anxiety to pile on to this hike.

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Hiking, TravelHannah Schultzhike, hiking, Zion national park, angels landing, death, refrigerator canyon, walter's wiggles, switchbacks, chains, scout's lookout, fear of heightsComment
Zion National Park (Day Two): The Narrows and the Emerald Pools
Zion National Park (Day Two): The Narrows and the Emerald Pools

If you read my first post about this trip, you’ll know that our Zion adventure came in the middle of a very busy semester during my PhD program, so I didn’t do the ~ best ~ job researching and planning beforehand. I’d done some cursory reading on how to make sure that the water level isn’t too high; otherwise, the Narrows is impassible. But it had completely slipped my mind to think about the water temperature. Or question my assumption that a canyon/river hike is the same as a normal hike. I can only imagine that the poor NP ranger we asked about water level and the conditions of the Narrows the previous day was giving us weird looks for looking as if we wanted to hike 9 miles in 45-degree water wearing only leggings/shorts and a t-shirt (which, in fairness, was our original plan).

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Hiking, TravelHannah SchultzZion national park, national park, narrows, emerald pools, hike, hiking, waders, Zion outfitters, virgin river, riverside trail, slot canyon, upper pool, middle pool, lower poolComment
Zion National Park (Day One): Watchman, Pa'rus, & Canyon Overlook Trails
Zion National Park (Day One): Watchman, Pa'rus, & Canyon Overlook Trails

It’s my eventual goal to hike every national park in the U.S, so for the past couple of years, I’ve been asking my in-laws for a National Parks Pass for Christmas as a good motivator to wrangle Ryan into a couple NP trips throughout the year. When my NP pass was bestowed on me for 2022 and we didn’t have any Spring Break plans, I knew we needed to go on another camping trip. Popular national parks tend to fill up quickly (like 6 months out), but by some miracle, there were still a handful of spots available in March for Zion, one of the parks we’d been wanting to make it out to. So at the start of my Spring Break, we packed up all our camping and hiking gear and made the 27-hour drive from Kentucky to Utah.

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Hiking, TravelHannah Schultzhike, hiking, Zion national park, watchman, pa'rus, canyon overlook, trail, trails, camp, watchman camground, springdale, utah, tunnelComment