Grand Canyon Trip – Day 2 – Zion National Park

As mentioned previously, we decided to get up and head out in the early AM and try our luck getting passes for The Wave at the visitor center in Kanab, UT. We made two mistakes in this adventure.

We arrived at about 8:50, just before the 9:00 lottery, except that we were still on Arizona (Mountain) time and Utah is on Pacific Time. We were 50 minutes too late. This was soon discovered to be completely irrelevant though, since they had also gotten rain recently and apparently a high clearance, 4WD vehicle was the baseline requirement for getting to the trailhead… We had a Prius.

So, armed with the advice of the ranger at the visitor center, we headed to Zion, which was reportedly going to be less stormtastic over the upcoming days. There are definitely other cools things to see and do around the Kanab area, but we hadn’t really planned any and would have been playing a guessing game against the storms, so a return trip to Zion seemed to be the best option.

We got to Springdale, the town just outside of Zion’s south gate and got our evening accommodations settled around 11:00. Last time we were in Zion we hiked through the Narrows, which was awesome, but was not an option this time as there was a high flood potential and they don’t like the bad publicity of people dying in the canyon. We chose instead to attempt Angel’s Landing.

I believe Janet had been up there before. I had not. The last time at Zion we avoided it all together on the basis of me not liking heights. Nothing has really changed since then, but we figured we should at least go check it out. Check it out we did… about the time that going further involved clinging to chains on the side of a rock wall, I was done. Apparently the face-your-fears high ropes course we did back in 6th grade did not fix anything.

So, Angel’s Landing was a bust, though we did stop off and check out the Emerald Pools on our way down. We poked around a bit more in the park (the ice cream shop at the lodge was not yet open) and then walking through town to the hotel, but otherwise had an early night on account of the stupidly early morning.