Monday of spring break, Travis and I hopped in the maybe-not-so-reliable Saturn Vue and headed south. Turned out the car made the trip okay, but with the newly developed ticking noise from the engine, and the howling noise from the transmission and/or u-joints, I was a bit nervous the whole trip that we were making the right decision by not opting for a rental car for the week. But in the end, the universe gave us a pass on car trouble and the car survived without incident.
Our first obstacle was a spring snow storm between Twin Falls and Ogden Utah. The visibility was never too bad, but the road looked like a sheet of ice between furrows of snow, and the traffic was crawling. But again, the universe was on our side and shortly south of Salt Lake city things began to clear up again.
We made our departure from Boise pre-dawn so that we could get to Zion in time to hike Angle’s Landing, but we didn’t count on the road construction and crowds in the park. There were so many cars and people we began to think we were out of time. But once in the park, we found some folks that were leaving and waited for their parking space near the visitor’s center. A 45 minute wait for a shuttle and we were off to The Grotto.
Half a mile up the trail we ran into Brian Fleggler. He was in his running gear and was just returning from the overlook. He said there was a huge number of people waiting to get up Angle’s Landing, people yelling at each other and general chaos on the trial and suggested we avoid going that way. We were not detoured.
Past the switch backs, coming off of the first chain, there was indeed a non-stop, very slow train of humans coming down the route, and a large crowd of humans waiting to head up. We bypassed the first chain, Travis on the left, myself on the right, but the next section was impassible until the down-hikers stopped flowing.
The delay made for a good photo opportunity. The Cliffs here are just fantastic.
Once back on the trail, we had a clear path to the summit. I considered taking out the Drone and making a couple Ariel passes, but there were still too many people and somebody would have been miffed. Back at the car and we headed off to the east. We made it as far as Kanab before stopping for the night. The town was packed with tourists, the wait at Pizza Hut was long. And we got the last room in the second hotel that we looked at.
The next morning we continue to East to pagewhere we made the small hike to Horseshoe Bend. Again the place was packed with tourists and there is a sign warning against drone flyage. But that Overlook is always worth stopping at.
Our next stop would be the back office country at the Grand Canyon. At first we thought we would have a good chance at getting a campsite in the canyon, but after seeing all the tourists, we knew our chances were Slim. They did in fact have one opening far east of horseshoe Mesa, but we weren’t really that interested in hiking there. So we opted for a one day Trek from hermit’s rest to Tonto Trail and over to Bright Angels Trail. I was a little nervous starting out, because this was a 25-mile hike and we haven’t done any endurance training to this point.
Once on the trail of things looked promising. We didn’t see any other hikers for the first two hours. Once on the Tonto Trail we ran into a couple of parties mostly of the campsites few mid Trail.
The weather was beautiful and we typed fairly slow, so that I could take care of my sore ankle. By the time we got to Bright Angel Trail my confidence has grown tremendously, and we picked up the peace as we started to ascend.
The sun went down and it started to get dark about the time we were at the one and a half mile house I took out my headlamp and we finished the hike in the dark.
After a quick slice of pizza at the park restaurant, we headed off to Williams to rest up in her hotel room.
The next morning we have enough for Las Vegas.