Zion National Park

Our new Lazy Daze - from order date to delivery was 8 months!

Well, we finally took our new Lazy Daze RV out for it's first real camping trip.

Tere and I headed out for Zion National Park on Sunday, September 1st where our plan was to spend the night in St. George and then stock up on food and supplies Monday morning before heading into the Park where we had reservations in Watchman Campground.  Thank God for Walmart as this has become our standard shopping location for our trips.  In addition to food, if we need any "extras" we seem to find it here, for example, we forgot that we hadn't kept our old campfire forks for cooking s'mores so we picked some up.

This was our view from the dinette in the RV.  Hard to beat this!!!

As we started our week here we found ourselves a bit sad as we realized that this was our first camping trip without any of the kids or my in-laws but we soon got very busy organizing the RV to our own tastes; Tere did a great job getting things placed in very practical locations.  I'm still amazed at how much storage space we still have in our rig (it's officially known as a 31' Lazy Daze Twin Bed).

Our week was going to pretty much revolve around hiking, hiking and....hiking!

This is a panoramic shot I took from the top of Watchman Point - beautiful scene!

 On Tuesday we decided to do a hike that was fairly close to our camp and one we didn't do last year when we came in May, so we decided to hike to Watchman Point where you can look back towards the entrance to the Park and to the town of Springdale.

And yours truly at the tip of the Point

The was a good warmup hike for our week.  We hiked 4 miles and climbed 686 ft. which is nothing compared to what was coming!

Wednesday we were feeling good so we decided to tackle a more challenging hike, that is the route to Observation Point.  The Park Guide categories this as one of the most challenging hikes for the tourists, meaning you needed to be in shape to tackle this.

Here are some of the pics from the hike to Observation Point:

Yep, we were hiking during a thunderstorm

The view from the Top of Observation Point.  Angels Landing is in the foreground to the right (we are looking down on it)

Observation Point at 6,508 ft above sea level

This ledge trail was about 1,700 ft. above the valley floor and it was virtually straight down

Good view of some of the switchbacks we had to climb

The stats for this hike was 9 miles and 4,462 ft of climbing.  We actually felt pretty good, I think all our hiking around home has really helped!  We definitely slept great that night after a hot shower and a great campfire under the stars (plus the s'mores)!!

Our plan for Thursday was to take it a bit easier due to the fact we pushed our bodies the day before.  We decided to do the Emerald Pools loop, which we did the prior year when we were here with Christian and Devin, but in the reverse motion.  This hike is a bit too touristy for me as it's not too difficult but it seemed like the perfect hike for a day after a challenging route.

Some views from the Emerald Pools loop:

Small stream flowing from the mountainside

Somewhere up there is the Middle Emerald Pool

The view across the valley from Middle Emerald Pool

This is the waterfall flowing from Middle Emerald Pool

A little friend that immediately made us think of Danielle!!!

This is the bridge across the Virgin River back to the Grotto

Love this view looking back up the canyon of Zion

BEAVERS!!!!

 

Where Tere and I had lunch; doesn't get much better!!

Our hiking statistics for the Emerald Pools Loop was 5 miles and 988 ft of climbing.  This day we spent some time at the Lodge where Tere scored some purchases from the Gift Shop; they were very friendly and held on to our purchases until we were done with our hike.  Again we finished the day with a great dinner, hot showers and s'mores while we watched the bats flying above our camp.

So here we arrived to our final full day at Zion and boy was I bummed!!!  I love this National Park, in fact it probably is my favorite, even more than Yosemite.  I love that there are difficult hikes that can get you away from the normal tourists that consider a 2 mile walk a "hike".  Zion has a great shuttle system and it's fun to see the touristy tourists watch you climb on board with your technical gear including trekking poles, and they kind of give you that "what do you need that stuff for" look.

For our final day and hike I had noticed a trail that snaked off to the right about a third of the way up the Observation Point trail on Wednesday; I went and talked to the Back-country Ranger to speak to him about it.  Seems this trail wasn't traveled much so immediately I was hooked and knew we had to try it!  The trail is the East Rim Trail to Cable Mountain so we set out from the same trailhead that we began our Observation Point climb.

This is what the trail looked like after we dropped from the Observation Point route.  We had to use rock trail markers to find our way; thank God for my Boy Scout experience!!

This is what our dining establishment looked like for lunch

The view as we were getting deeper in the backcountry looking back to the valley

Loved this shot because this is a ledge that was only about 1.5 ft wide and it was about 1,500 ft straight down

I thought this shot did a great job of showing how steep the climbing was for this hike

This was a pic from a spot when we were close to the top of the climb

What was great about this shot was it shows just how different the environment is on top of the butte from the sandstone rock that we climbed

Mountain lion scat, guessing about 30 minutes old

Beautiful trees at the edge of the butte

From the butte looking back towards Observation Point

More trail markers

Loved how the trees just grew out of the rock

Looking back to the top of the butte we climbed to

I love the old school markers

A friend we came across

This hike was a ball buster!!!  We hiked 12 miles and climbed 5,117 ft!!!  We both had sore knees by the time we finished as the downhill was punishing.  We only saw one other hiker the entire day so my objective of experiencing the backcountry of Zion was achieved, in fact I used my topographical map and compass at one point (thank you again BSA).  I didn't tell Tere until a couple of days later that the mountain lion scat was relatively fresh (I had told her it was a couple of days old) so I'm sure the cat was watching us.  I did review with Tere what you do if you see one plus I tied my emergency whistle to my pack shoulder strap.  Such an exciting and great hike where we experienced so many different environments in one route.