Utah Mighty 5 road trip - Day 1 - Zion National Park
Last Spring I decided to take my 3 kids on a whirlwind adventure across southern Utah during their Spring Break.
Day 1 - Zion National Park
Angel's Landing on the left
After driving down to Zion late Sunday night, I set up camp around 1 AM, we woke up early around 6 AM to break down camp, eat breakfast, and get to the trail before the crowds hit (it was spring break after all). We arrived to the Main entrance around 8 AM and were on the trail by around 9 AM. We had quite a bit of traffic at the entrance but we were still pretty fortunate we got in fairly early.
Campsite
Our main objective was to hike Angel's Landing, since we had attempted it two years prior but it was just too much for my kids, being only 6, 7, and 10 at the time. This time they conquered it with only minimal whining, and lots of breaks and climbing around on all the rocks.
If you didn't hike to Angel's Landing in a rainbow tutu, did you even hike Angel's Landing??
No we didn't go all the way out to the landing because it was way too crowded, also my wife would have killed me. We stopped and had a snack and played around at Scout Lookout.
On the hike out we saw tons of people coming up but here's a photo of just the kids as we were coming out of the canyon at the top.
By the time we got back to the shuttle it was around noon, and we were all hungry so we planned on going back to the car, eating lunch, then heading back up the canyon to hike around some more. But when we got back to the car the line for the shuttle was literally all the way back to our car, and was an estimated 2 hour wait. HARD PASS. We decided to head to the east side of the park, over near Checkerboard Mesa, and run around on the rocks over there. It was far less crowded over there and we climbed around for an hour or so.
Beautiful area to spend some time with the kids. Looks like you had a great time there.
Congratulations! Your high-quality travel content was selected by @travelfeed curator @for91days and earned you a reward, in form of a 100% upvote and a resteem. Your work really stands out! Your article now has a chance to get featured under the appropriate daily topic on our TravelFeed blog.
Thank you for being part of the TravelFeed community!
Learn more about our travel project on Steemit by clicking on the banner above and join our community on Discord
Pack up the kids and go hiking in nature! AWESOME! Especially in such beautiful landscape!
This post was shared in the Curation Collective Discord community for curators, and upvoted and resteemed by the @c-squared community account after manual review.
@c-squared runs a community witness. Please consider using one of your witness votes on us here
Please join the community and become a photomag curator in the @c-squared discord server and vote for the @c-squared witness here .
Your photos are beautiful! Too bad it is so crowed there. Yellowstone was too when I was there a few years ago.
Thanks Melinda!
National parks are always crowded, the trick is to get up early and stay out late. I've found the crowds are very much from 9am-5pm. Also going off season is much better, especially in Yellowstone. I went in Late April and saw far more animals than when I've gone in the summer, and there were no crowds at all. We even had Old Faithful all to ourselves one evening, granted it was snowing sideways and 20ºF, but still cool to be there all alone.
My first trip to Yellowstone was in the late 70s and several times during the early 80s and it felt like pure Wilderness to me. A few years ago when I went it was in September, and I actually had to stand in line to take pictures. I did see a grizzly bear though. That was pretty special.