Cameron and Meghan's BIG adventure!: Zion and Bryce

We arrived in Utah with an intent to spend as much time as we could hiking..and hiking we did! The national parks in Utah are absolutely fantastically wonderful, and we thoroughly enjoyed the last three weeks of our trip.

Zion National Park was a great time. It's one of Utah's most popular parks, and the main highlight is the large canyon that the park runs up. The cutesy little town of Springdale is at the heart of the park, and this is where we camped...with the park being so popular we learned that you can't just show up and expect to get a spot in the national park campgrounds; we were in a "nice" little RV park.

There is a shuttle system that takes you to all of the trailheads in the park and gives you an audio tour of the main sights. We spent four days within Zion, doing everything from the most popular Angel's Landing to a long day through high alpine down into the canyon, to an overnight hike in the northwest section of the park.

An overview of Zion Canyon. You can see the road snaking along the river below...this is where the shuttle runs.

The first big hike we did was on the West Rim Trail. We were dropped off at the trailhead and hiked one way, back to the south part of the part.

The combination of high alpine with the canyons in the background was just so cool!

At the end of the West Rim trail you could shoot off and do Angel's Landing. This is a view of the ridge that you hike along. There are chains along the route but that didn't make me feel any better. I waited for Cam while he hiked to the end.

This is the very reason I didn't go with Cam along the Angel's Landing ridge. Both sides were a hhhhhhuuuuuuuuggggge drop off, and there was only feet of trail on either side of you. Even as I'm writing this my hands are sweating!

After lots of day hiking we decided to do an overnight trip in Kolob Canyon. We had great weather, total seclusion, and a perfect couple days.

A view of Kolob Canyon, in the northwest section of the park. This is the view from the top of the overnight trail we hiked.

The trail had so many beautiful dessert flowers

These guys were everywhere!

Our tenting site was in the middle of nowhere-big canyons all around us, with a river just down the bank.

We hiked to the end of the trail to see one the world's biggest arches. Thank goodness this kind person gave us a clue of where to look (The little instructions say "ARCH ^ (look up)"), otherwise we might have missed...

THIS!!

We were sad to leave Zion but already have our next trip planned. Originally, we went to Zion to hike the popular Narrows hike. This is a two day, one night backpacking trip through a slot canyon made by the Virgin River. You do most (nearly all) of the hiking in the river and as you go deeper the canyon becomes more and more narrow, until finally barely any light can get in. Unfortunately the Virgin River was running too high while we were there, which makes hiking in it unsafe. Oh well, next time!

Bryce Canyon National Park was our next stop and very different from Zion. Where Zion had huge canyon walls, Bryce had "fairy chimneys". There was another shuttle system here and again, many trailheads to explore various areas of the park. This time, we were able to get into one of the lovely park campgrounds. We spent another four days exploring Bryce, covering many of the parks highlights on a few day hikes and then spending two nights in the Canyon bottom on a backpacking trip.