On Monday during our trip we were able to secure 7A<M shuttle bus tickets for Zion. They sold out in less than a minute, Clint and I had both been posed, him with the plan to try for 8AM tickets, me trying to get the 7AM ones. I scored with the 7AM ones and so we were set to go early Monday morning. We got everyone up and loaded in the car from our cabin by 5:45 and watched as the sun came up as we drove towards Zion. We did 3 hikes in Zion that day, for a total of 11 miles. Our first hike though and by far the hardest was Angel’s Landing. First off though was the shuttles and the kids were all super excited about the shuttles, I almost think at least for a couple of them the shuttle busses were their favorite part. It was quite cool as we started out and even though we were hiking we kept our facemasks on to keep our faces warm. There are some seriously steep parts of the Angel’s Landing hike, and a number of switchbacks. It was kind of funny because all sorts of people would pass us along the flat parts of the hikes because they kids were going slow and exploring all along the way, but then we’d hit the super big switchbacks going up and they would literally run up them and pass everyone and it was all Clint and I could do to stay up with them. (It did prove that the nearly 900 km of running I’ve done so far this year has been paying off). The views were amazing though and almost made me forget how hard my legs were working. We did not do the last 1/2 mile of the hike because it goes out on a skinny ledge with 1000+foot drops on either side. And I did not feel like loosing a child or two or even myself off one of those ledges. On the way back down there is a small canyon that the hike goes through and the kids found a great little cave with a window looking out that they all enjoyed exploring. The hike down was far easier than the hike up and when we got to the bottom we stopped and played along side the Virgin River. We ended up doing the hike in way less time than I had planned or assumed we would and it was only 10AM so we headed to the shuttle to go on a couple more hikes.
Hiking Mommy 