Yo!
Hope you all are having an amazing day so far.
Today, I felt inspired to share one of the most recent places we had the pleasure of exploring...
Zion National Park
Zion NP is located in southwestern Utah, a landscape that's filled with all sorts of ecosystems and diverse natural features.
Our campground was close to the northern edge of the park, which allowed us to explore both the most popular valley as well as the lesser-known gems scattered all over the park. From the picture above, I'm sure you can gather that the rocks that the many valleys are sculpted from are not typical. They have this incredibly vibrant red-orange hue to them, and this photo doesn't even do it justice.
We decided that our first drive into the park should be to the main entrance on the south side. It wasn't too bad of drive, and it was incredibly interesting to experience the dramatic change in landscape in a very short period of time.
Upon arrival to the NP, we drove around, mostly without an aim, simply seeing what there was to see. Eventually the road came to an end (as all roads tend to do), and we ended up taking the first hiking path that we saw. This is something that I really love about my family: we don't always feel the need to plan things. We go with the flow, per se, finding things that we wouldn't have found were we carefully planning every movement.
On the hiking path, you enter this fairly narrow valley that feels cozy. I turned around to look the way we came, and immediately took my camera out to snap a photo.
The rest of the hike was a nice little stroll, great for soaking in all of the aspects that Zion offers. It was pretty cold that morning, and that fact was evident in the giant icicles that formed on the valley wall.
We weren't quite tired after that first hike, so we found another that was further up the road. This path was very fun to walk along, mainly due to the diversity in the look and feel of every turn. At one point, the path was following the shape of the wall, but then all of a sudden turns into this bridge-type path that felt quite unsteady. To our right was the massive wall of the valley, and to our left was a long drop into the valley below. My mother usually avoids situations like these, because she is scared of heights, but this time she fully embraced the shaky path, even posing for a picture.
On our next trip into the park, we went into the much less busy north entrance. I didn't exactly hold any expectation of what this secondary section of the park would hold, but any expectations I was subconsciously holding were shattered. In some ways, I fell in love with this section of the park even more than the main part.
Once we saw the incredible beauty of the area, we had a spontaneous hike. No preparation, no idea where we were going, but it was incredible. On our way back to the truck, the wind picked up a considerable amount. So much so that we had trouble walking in a straight line. On top of that, the temperature dropped approximately 20 degrees in the time we spent hiking, which we had not expected (or planned for). It was quite the experience.
For our second excursion into this side of the park, we went off the beaten path a little bit. We saw an amazing valley off to the side of the road, and we simply took off walking, not exactly knowing where we were going (as usual). The valley is sort of shaped like a wedge, starting wide and then quickly getting narrower and narrower as you walk towards the back. We clambered up to the top of an overlook the allowed us to look over the entire valley. At some points, it was rather...sketchy...to say the least. But, we didn't die, so that's good!
We spent hours wandering around the valley, going every which way in search of the next amazing feature. At the end of the valley, where it comes to be only eight feet wide, we tried to go further, but an avalanche of rocks were blocking the path. I have no doubt that we would have been off in the wilderness for many more hours if we were able to continue in the spirit of adventure...
That was my trip to Zion National Park! I hope you enjoyed reliving this adventure with me. I still have many more photos to comb through from this wild adventure we're on, so keep an eye out for my other travel posts!
Peace :-)
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