Hiking in Zion National Park

After spending the night in St. George, Utah, we backtracked a tad to check out Zion National Park, a lesser known but incredibly beautiful natural wonder our friend Kathleen told us about. This park gets nearly 3 million visitors a year... it seems that East Coasters aren't very familiar with it, but it's just up the road from the Grand Canyon and worth a trip! The only downside to our visit? It was Memorial Day, so it was incredibly crowded. As luck would have it, though, we happened upon a (free!) parking spot right near the park entrance, so we avoided really dealing with the worst part of the congestion. Zion is big enough that within the park, it doesn't feel too crowded even when it's a busy day.

 Since we didn't have the entire day (or multiple days) to explore Zion, we were looking for the most payoff in the shortest times. Zion runs free shuttles throughout the park for quicker and easier access to various trail heads, so we started our exploration by taking one up to the Kayenta Trail. This a narrow and winding path that runs along above the Virgin River, the water source responsible for carving out the canyons here. It was a pretty easy hike up to the Emerald Pools (lower, middle, & upper trails). We had great views along the Kayenta, and we saw the upper and lower Emerald pools (basically waterfalls, small pools of water, and lots of rocks). It was quite beautiful.

Views from the Kayenta Trail:

Views from the Emerald Pools Trails (more about waterfalls than pools):

From these trails, we road the shuttle farther into the park to "hike" the Riverside Walk trail. This is a mostly flat, paved trail that runs right alongside the Virgin River and leads to some really cool trails (The Narrows where you actually hike through the river into caverns!) that were closed because of flooding risks. This was an easy 2-mile stroll with some nice views from the ground level.

Views from Riverside Walk (+ t00-friendly squirrels):

After Riverside Walk, we squeezed in one  last hike up to Weeping Rock. This is the shortest hike - half a mile - and is aptly named. When you reach the end, water is trickling down the face of a giant rock that doubles as an awning. Warning: you will get wet at the end of this trail. Tom and I stood underneath Weeping Rock for a bit and looked outward through the water.

Views from Weeping Rock (look closely... cameras don't capture the water well):

From here, we took the shuttle back to the welcome center, bought our token post card, and started the 3-hour drive to Las Vegas!

See more about Zion and it's various hiking trails here.

Up next: yep... Vegas!