Zion National Park

Our last camping post of the summer. This trip is one we were really looking forward to and, for the most part, it didn't disappoint! I'll get the annoying part out of the way first and then I can just go on and on about how awesome everything was.

The annoying part:
This was our longest camping trip yet--Thursday night to Monday afternoon--so I really had to plan our meals carefully. Especially since our cooler is teeny-tiny. Luckily we got a camp stove, so we were set!
The first night was going to be tin foil dinners cooked over charcoal, since campfires aren't allowed in August, but we found out that in the national parks charcoal isn't allowed either! We decided to just fire up the stove and cook the foil dinners in a pot. Everything was pre-cooked, it just needed to be heated. But as soon as Matt lit the thing, flames started spewing out of a random piece that we were 99.9% sure wasn't supposed to be on fire. We tried it again, decided we didn't want to explode or die, and decided the thing was toast.
This left us with three potentially dinner-less nights ahead of us. We picked cold potatoes from the foil for dinner the first night, and we were in a private campground the second night so we were able to cook over charcoal, but by the last night we had resorted to the lowest, most desperate of measures. We ate cans of chili that we had left on the dashboard all day to cook in the 100+ degree heat. We also made instant mashed potatoes from a water bottle that was left in the car all day too.

The most disgusting part? After hiking all day long in the blazing heat that sun baked chili actually tasted kind of good!

Other than that little blip, it was a pretty awesome trip. The heat drained us pretty quick, so our hiking stamina was down, but that didn't stop us from seeing some incredible things.

Of course, we had to do Angels Landing. That was our first hike of the trip. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, this is apretty treacherous trail because you're one step away from falling to your death on both sides and all you have is a burning hot chain to hold on to. You can kind of see the chain trail in this picture:

But we made it, in all of our "Y" pride and glory. It's certainly not the highest summit but the view was breathtaking. And there is a lot of satisfaction in climbing to a spot that the pioneers swore was only accessible to the angels :)

The next day we hiked to Observation Point. It was very long and hard and hot (can you see my sweet sweat straps?) but worth it. You just don't get a view like this every day!

We also hiked up Hidden Canyon a little ways, which I would highly recommend. Once you get to the canyon there's no trail so you just pick your way over rocks and through trees and stuff. It's super green and almost foresty, not at all like the trail we had just been on.

Here's Matt at Weeping Rock. This was a cool jungle-ish place too. The water also brought the temperature down a few degrees which was nice.

The Emerald Pools. Not a hard hike, but we were absolutley melting at this point and feeling a little dead. I was so sweaty I didn't even want to take my backpack off. But it was still awesome!

There were lots of tadpoles and friendly squirrels. (Matt's face in this picture cracks me up every time. I'm even laughing as I type this.)

The sun cooked our chili but killed our bananas. So weird. So gross.

On our way out of town we stopped at Kolob Canyons. Holy cow! It was so cool! And it was just 5 minutes off the I-15. Well worth the stop. These pictures don't do it justice, but the mountains were so beautiful and red, and it was nice and quiet because hardly anyone was there. It was a great way to end the trip!