Friday, June 15, 2012

Zion National Park--Anniversary #1 (Parte Dos)

No more school for 2 months! Yay! Took my final, finished my projects and now I am free to blog. Expect to see me a lot more around these parts. Just kidding, don't expect anything. Not so sure I can fulfill that promise.

Back to my lovey dovey wovey anniversary with my shweetiepie sugar plum lovey wovey dovey Dawin.

Sorry. I know you came back for hiking pictures, not to hear how I talk to my husband when we're all alone listening to Take My Breath Away with just enough light glittering from the candles for us to dreamily stare into each others eyes...

So let's get to it.

We got to the park right around 11am and it must have been our lucky day because June 9th just so happened to be National Park Day, so we got in for free. Suhhhhweeeet.

We decided to do our most intense hike first and headed straight over to Angel's Landing. If you haven't done this hike before, do it! It's great. It's also pretty steep and unnerving when you see the sign at the bottom of the hike that says that six people have died since 2004 while doing this hike. But we made it, and it was so worth it.

Destination: UP:


The first 1/4 to 1/3 of the hike is A LOT of pretty steep switch backs:


Then, when you feel like you are about to die, the hike levels out slightly and goes behind the mountain into the shade. That's where we saw this owl and her fuzzy lil baby (couldn't get a good pic of the baby, it blended in to well with the mountain).


Then we arrive to more steep switchbacks. I know it's hard to see in the pic, but look closely at the people and you'll get the idea.

Then we finally reached the last 1/2 mile, which easily took us 30 to 45 minutes to climb.

We got passed the first part of the chains and Darin looked at me thinking it was the end and said, well, that wasn't too bad. I turned around and pointed behind me and told him that we weren't finished yet and that we still had to climb this:



Darin wasn't as excited as I was.


But he pushed through it, and it was totally worth it. GORGEOUS. He might not have talked to me much while we were on top, haha, but he didn't regret doing it.




After sweating buckets on this hike we decided to cool off in the narrows. It was beautiful and very refreshing. We didn't go in really far, but far enough to have some fun and add to the soreness in our calves and thighs.









Then to finish off the day we pushed our little overworked legs on to one more hike. It was small and simple and we got to see weeping rock and a pretty large deer at the end. It was a good way to finish off the day.

It was a hot and pretty exhausting day but it was totally worth it. We had a lot of fun and I just love being outside!! We both wanted to crash on the shuttle ride to our car. Let me just tell you, we slept GOOD that night.

The End.



1 comment:

  1. Looks like you guys may have stopped at about the same place we did in 2002. You guys probably got there a lot faster though!

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