With another hiking day ahead of us, we got up early and headed to Zion. You want to get there early because parking in the park that is free is limited. Parking outside the park is roughly $40 and you have to take the bus to get to the park. Knowing this, we left around 7 am to make the hour drive there. As we drove, we noticed that the mountain in the distance had snow on it. That meant it had to have snowed over night.

It’s hard to see with all of the clouds.

We made it to the park and there were actually a handful of empty parking spots. We definitely scored! We got our stuff around and headed to the shuttle. It was a chilly day so we had layers until it heated up.

We made it to stop 6, The Grotto, and got off as this was our trail head starting point. The path was paved which was nice. I wore my shoes vs boots because of this fact. Though being paved made the hike a bit easier, the elevation gain was pretty in tense.

The view on the way up and on top of Scout’s Lookout was just stunning. I even made some little friends while we were taking a rest.

The trail we were on came to a fork- Scout’s Lookout and Angel’s Landing. Angel’s Landing requires a permit to hike it due to how dangerous the hike is. Neither Jess nor myself cared to hike it due to the amount of people, how narrow and dangerous it is. Hence the permit requirement.

Then assent to the top, you have to hold onto a chain so you don’t fall.
If you look at the very top where the mountain dips on the right center, there are people at the very top.

We ventured a bit further up the West Rim and it was a very pretty view!

I would say yes, the effort was hard with a 1,256 ft elevation gain!

Once we finished our hike, we headed to the car to eat our sack lunch. Remember me saying how the free parking fills up? We had multiple people ask if we were leaving, which were not. The parking lot was packed and people were just driving around hoping to find someone who might be leaving. As we were eating our lunch, a Tahoe was waiting for a Jeep to leave and started backing up to make room. The car behind him was honking at him frantically. Low and behold, the guy backed right into the other dude. What a mess!

Once we were done with our lunch, we walked out of the park to catch the shuttle into town so we could find a place to work. We went to a coffee shop where I bought coffee but there wasn’t any seating inside so we continued on. We ended up at a bakery called Bonrue. Jess bought a pastry and we found a table to set up shop. We worked for a few hours and had to leave due to the bakery closing at 3 pm so we headed back to the car.

Since we were still in the park, we decided to do a hike that Jess and Carolina tried to do. They had to bail due to on coming rain which you don’t mess with possible flash flood. We headed to the Mini Pools which was another butt buster from an elevation to distance ratio.

This is an unmarked trail so be mindful that if you are wanting to do this hike, make sure to download the map to find our way back. You are probably wondering where the pools are. They were mostly dry and the ones that had water were pretty dirty.

Having hiked almost 8 miles, we were starving. We decided to go to a place that Jess and Carolina went to called Wild Thyme Cafe. The place was super cute and right next door to a tree ranch. I don’t know how you ranch trees but they do. The food was so good!

I had bison stroganoff with garlic bread and Jess had bison bacon wrapped meatloaf with broccoli

Fat, happy and plain pooped, we made the hour trip home. Jess had to finish up some things for work so I unpacked our lunch cooler, washed the dishes and jumped in the shower. Once out of the shower, I prepped our lunch for our hike the next day – sandwiches for both with some chips/crackers and fruit.