Southwest National Parks Part 1

Justin and I have grown up a lot since college

Howdy do, we are currently relaxing in a hotel room in Boise watching O Brother Where Art Thou. My college pal Justin Hand is getting married tomorrow and I am recovering from his bachelor partylast night. Most of this is going to be about some of ourhiking/National Park adventures throughout the southwest. So for the various parents and grandparents that may be reading this allow me to reassure you that no harm has come to Myk or myself and all the adventures described herein were completed safely. (Ok I did get hit in the face with a piece of wood I was hatcheting but the damage was minimal).

Or not

So far, Myk and I have been only been uploading a few pictures from our phones on the blog. We have actually been taking a disturbingly large amount of pictures using a nice camera that we have on loan from Ry-bagel (fanks). We haven’t yet begun to actually sort them properly but we had some time and got through a few (hundred) and are posting some on Picasa/Google+ for you guys to check out. We are still working out the bugs so find em if you can for now but if the link doesn't work let us know. Some of these we will probably do some minor photoshopping on at some point to fix em up proper but for now we figured we could share some of the raw photos. So anyway here goes…

Grand Canyon

Do wha?

Whoa Grand Canyon. Whoa. We did not know what we were in for. Of course we knew we couldn’t
very well skip the grand canyon especially since we would basically be driving right past it, but I think we both sort of thought of it as the ho-hum stereotypical national park that’d just be full of tourists and nothing too special. False. The Grand Canyon is spectacular and ridiculously huge. We camped near the canyon that night and spent most of the day just trying to drive around and away from it in order to move on towards Zion National Park.

            We drove up from Sedona and did some minor sightseeing, going to different points and looking at the canyon and saying, “damn” and “golly.”   We did a quick little 3 mile roundtrip hike into the canyon which was no small feat on a 103 degree day, at least the getting back up portion. To give any of you who have never been to the Grand Canyon some scope of how huge and deep it is, we walked 1.5 miles going down and we were clearly nowhere near the bottom.  We had initially felt that we should have allotted some more time for hiking in order to go deeper into the canyon, but we were quickly disavowed of that fallacy on our hike back up. By the time we got up (keep in mind it was 1.5 straight up, 103 degrees, and we had little to no cover from the sun) we were pretty wiped out and went to the nearest campsite, after buying some beer and hotdogs. The next day we spent slowly driving out of the park stopping frequently to take pictures of the Grand Canyon at increasingly mind-bogglingly beautiful vistas. Our next stop was Zion National Park in Utah (Keep reading below a few more gratuitous canyon pictures).

Zion

So a few disclaimers about our day at Zion, we didn’t take many pictures and we definitely survived. We did a hike to a site called Angel’s Landing which boasts having one of the best views and one of, if not the, most difficult day hike in the whole park. We took the trolley into the park from the visitor center and as we traveled through the valley they told us about the Mormons who found and developed the park prior to it becoming a national park. Just the trolley ride through the valley was an experience. I was consistently blown away with how amazingly beautiful Utah looks. Truly the whole Southwest is like another planet. The landscape is all shades white, gold, and brick red morphed into extremes of canyons and rock jutting skyward shaped bizarrely by the elements. Zion is an excellent example of this (though Bryce Canyon is shaped even more insanely, more on that later).

This is what happens when Justin sees a log he thinks looks like a squirrel

            Back to the hike. Angel’s Landing is a 5.2 mile round trip with the last half mile being insane. Myk has a bit of the acrophobia and was a champion beyond description. We came to “Scout Lookout” the point from which, “children and scared adults should not be allowed to proceed further.” The last .5 mile to the summit is split into two sections where the path is narrow, surrounded by steep drop-offs, and only made possible because there are chains mounted for the hiker on to which hikers can (have to) hang. The catch here was that while we were aware that the chains were hung to make the hike possible we were initially unaware of it being split. This led to us braving the first section with gusto, believing that this would be the end. We got very excited as what appeared to be the end came into view. Myk was very nervous leading up to the hike due to repeated signs warning us that we should not allow children (or scared adults) to make the attempt nor should anyone if the wind is blowing. This was compounded by a particularly terrifying stretch pictured here.

Angel's Landing up the middle.

            As we neared what we perceived to be the end of our trail I was being supportive and lauding Myk’s bravery. This was soon silenced as we finished that stretch only to have what was obviously the real final stretch come into view.

This is me offering to call it a day, that is
the rest of the crazy path up the left side.

We both sat down entirely dejected and though I offered to turn back and call it a success, Myk ultimately made the call to forge ahead. It was certainly neither physically nor cognitively easy but making it to the top was incredible. I snapped just one picture with the phone I managed to scrump up with us. As you can see this odd rock formation jutting up into the middle of the canyon provides a view down the length of the valley. Just awesome.  The trip down the chains was not easy mostly due to the fact that looking down required, well, looking down. We made it however and as a reward

Clearly this was on the way down when
Myk decided to stop hating me.

we were able to actually enjoy the remarkable view as we took the switchback path down. That night we found a nice lakeside campsite for the night and spent the night relishing our victory. With more hotdogs and beer. To Be Continued...

The view. Worth it.