Zion National Park

After a long Football season, we were finally able to get out and spend some time outdoors. We left on Friday and headed down to Zion National Park. This was our first long-distance trip with Bailey, which was a little nerve-racking, but she actually did quite well. We only had to make two stops for her on the way down, one of which we would have stopped anyway (in Cedar City for food and gas).


Day 1


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We arrived at Zion around 3pm, which only gave us enough time to do one hike before it got too dark and too cold. We decided to do the 2 mile (rt) hike up from the Temple of Sinawava to the Virgin River narrows entrance. It was a nice little hike and afforded me some time to experiment with the slow shutter speed waterfall pictures on my new camera. I still don't know what I'm doing, but it was fun to pretend like I was a photographer.

Here are some of the pictures:

Us at the virgin river narrows entrance


Bailey is all ready to hike


We almost lost Caiden


The Narrows entrance


Slow shutter speed pictures of the Virgin River














Day 2


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Got up at 7am (well, Bailey told us to get up) and hung around the hotel for a bit. We arrived up at the Weaping Rock trailhead around 9am and got ready for the steep hike up the East Rim trail to check out the lower portion of Echo Canyon.

Echo Canyon itself is mostly a technical slot canyon, but you can see some nice things once you get up there. It was pretty cold and we had Bailey wrapped up quite well, but she was still pretty irritated by the time we got up there.

Here are some pictures from the hike up (and down). Click on the picture, then "all sizes" to see a larger, more detailed picture:

Caiden at the trailhead


Our family at the trailhead


The trail takes us up dead-center and to the left of this picture


The trail up is paved like this for the first 45 minutes, which was nice


Being that we were on the East side of the canyon, the sun still had not hit us yet, so it was cold




Looking down on our switch backs. Hidden Canyon trail leads off to the upper right


above and looking down lower Echo canyon just before it turns to dump over Weaping rock. There are some awesome slots in this canyon, but it's forbidden to go through by the park because you would have to rappel down over weaping rock to end your hike


Here is a view looking down on the lower echo slot. I imagine there are some pretty cool pictures in there


Looking down lower echo canyon. This is where you would enter if you were to attempt to go down lower Echo canyon


Small side slot (with pool) in the lower canyon (trail actually bypasses up on the right)


Looking up Echo canyon. The East Rim trail continues up on the left, while the Echo Slot is in the center of the picture (you can barely see it)


Alene standing with Bailey at the entrance (or exit, depending on which way you're coming from) of Echo Canyon


Standing at the exit (or entrance) to Echo Canyon. We couldn't go up the slot because there was a huge pool about 30' in


The pool


Caiden and I in the slot


Representin' near the pool


Above, looking up Echo Canyon. This must be such an amazing slot to go through.


Looking down Echo Canyon where the slot exits




Looking down on Zion and the virgin river


Looking across from the trailhead


There were still a lot of fall colors up here


The trip was a lot of fun. The next time we come back we want to attempt the Hidden Canyon trail. Bailey was actually really good on the hike, the only thing that was tough was how cold it was. We could have kept hiking up the East rim trail (which is another hike I want to do, possibly next time), but it was just too cold for her.

Went to take pictures at the Great Salt Lake today

It's been a while since I've written anything here, and even though I didn't really do anything hard-core outdoorsy, I still wanted to post about an hour trip I took with Bill and Clint out to the Great Salt Lake to take some pictures with my new camera. With how busy I've been with football and finishing the basement, it was really nice to be able to get out and just do something relaxing.

Here are some pictures I took (you can click on them to take you to the picture page where you can select a larger size from there):

















It was a ton of fun. I'll never consider myself a "photographer", but I like to take pictures and see if I can get lucky enough to capture something cool.

City Creek Canyon: Bailey's first hike

We decided to ditch church today and go for a hike. We've been so busy, we needed a break to just do something together at our own pace instead of everyone else's.

Today we just did a short little hike up above City Creek Canyon. We started at the entrance of city creek, then made our way up a trail that rises above the canyon on the East side. We were able to use the Baby Bjorn that April and Bill lent us, so that was nice. We've found that baby's don't always like to be in them, so we tried different things like turning her to face forward, which she seemed to like a lot. However, after a while, they just don't like being in there at all, so we had to stop to feed her.

Bailey and Mommy - Bailey still wasn't sure what we were doing, but she ended up having fun.


Bailey and Daddy - She was much happier after a feeding before heading back down.




A flower


I got really excited because we came upon this giant bike track that stretches a long way (I never made it to the beginning because we had to turn around). Some of these jumps are too big for me, but some of them I could have fun on.























This was a small hike, but it was nice to get out and see a bit more of the City Creek area, plus it's fun to find gold mines like this bike track. I definitely need to get back up here!