We just got back from a fun Spring Break trip to Zion National Park. It was our first real trip in the motorhome. We were so used to our trailer, so there were a few things to get used to about the motorhome but it turned out great! (The best thing was being able to get up and move around while we drove. The kiddos could use the bathroom, I could get snacks or drinks for everybody, and I even threw a frozen lasagna in the oven while we drove down so it was ready when we got there. Score!) Another new thing for us was towing the Jeep, which also went well. We loved taking the top off and enjoying the gorgeous scenery around Zion.
Get ready for lots of pictures of rocks. Zion is basically a bunch of rocks. Arranged in breathtakingly beautiful arrangements!
Here we are on the first night we got there, driving through the tunnel and looking around.
The next morning we got up and did the Canyon Overlook hike. (It started out with a meltdown from Bree. She is usually a pretty easy-going kid, but every once in a while she just has to have a freak-out tantrum, for seemingly no reason, and then she resets to sweet Bree again. She wanted to hold
my hand across the street instead of Bryan's so she sat alone in the Jeep for a few minutes and screamed.)
I like this selfie. Heads cut off, but we're all smiling! (Bree loved collecting pine cones. She carried 3 for this whole hike: a daddy pine cone, a mommy pine cone, and a "weeny" pine cone. She kept saying, "
I'm the weeny!" Ha ha!)
One silly thing that we kept doing was scrambling up side-hill rocks into little crevices. I'm not much of a scrambler, but the 2 big kids and Bryan were all over it. Zion is wonderful for "parkour." The kids would walk along the trail, jump up on the nearby rocks shouting "Parkour!" all over the place.
Another fun desert activity: Lizard Hunting! They are fast little buggers and unfortunately we couldn't catch any. But we had fun trying.
We did the Angels Landing hike on Thursday. It's fairly long and steep, but we all really enjoyed it. Luckily there is a nice stopping spot called Scout Lookout about half a mile before the actual Angels Landing peak. I waited with the kids at Scout while Bryan went on the rest of the way. Next time I'm at Zion I want to go the whole way but it's much too scary for the kids. Bryan said there is a section where you have huge cliffs on both sides (800+ feet on each side) and only about 3-5 feet across to walk on, while holding on to a chain to keep you safe.
Here's my view from Scout Lookout. You can see the trail continue on the right side of the photo.
Bryan took these next two pics. You can see how narrow the trail is. (It's hard to tell in the picture, but there is a huge cliff between the 2 sections of rock on the left. The cliff on the right is obvious.)
Here is Bryan out at the very end. Gorgeous! (And the scenery isn't half-bad either!) ;)
On our way back down we snapped a picture of the "Walter's Wiggles
" switchbacks. From the internet: "The wiggles take their name from Walter Ruesh, Zion National Park’s first superintendent, who in 1926 set about constructing a trail to Angel’s Landing. Amazingly, Walter had no engineering experience."
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| (I found this picture on the internet, which shows Walter's Wiggles from another viewpoint. They are steep!) |
We stayed in Watchman Campground, which is right in the park, and it goes along the Virgin River. The sand is beautiful! (honestly, the sand texture was so nice. It was finer than the beaches we visited in Florida this year!) The kids loved playing and digging in the sand.
Friday we planned to hike some more. But, unfortunately Bree needed a reset again! We were on the shuttle bus, which was getting very full, so Bryan put Bree on his lap to make more room for other people. She flipped out! Screaming and wigging out and embarrassing us, so we hopped off at the next stop and let her have her meltdown. I took Miles and Tess up a short little trail while she screamed at the bus stop. She was so mad at Bryan. Fuming, she yelled at the top of her little lungs, "Dad! You ... are ......a......
dingbat!!" Bryan had to step behind an information sign to crack up. And he heard some other people standing nearby cracking up too. Aah, what can ya do? Sometimes a four-year-old's gotta tantrum!
After that she was sweet as pie again. So, on we went to the Weeping Rock trail. It was fun to walk under the "rainfall" from the rocks above. A park ranger said that some of the water coming out at Weeping Rock is a thousand years old! That's how long it takes for the water on top to seep slowly through the sandstone.
This photo is at the Riverside Walk. Right where we are standing is where you would continue on if you were going to hike The Narrows trail. Just head right on into the water and up you go! That is not a hike I would ever want to do. It's just too dang cold hiking in the water for more than half the time, sometimes waist deep, and especially because I'm too dang scared of flash floods! Drowning is a huge phobia of mine, so I have no desire to do this hike ever. (It was closed anyway. They said the threat of flash floods was "imminent" at this time of year, so it was closed to everyone.)
Thanks for reading about our trip to Zion! It was a beautiful and fun trip!
