Zion National Park

The view from our hotel room.

My wife and I have a thing where a few times a year, we get a babysitter for the kids for a few days and take a short trip somewhere kid-free. We love hanging out with our kids, but both of us think this is super important to stay sane, and plus it allows us to visit some interesting destinations that might not be appropriate (or as fun) with very young kids. Usually we do one of these trips in wintertime, as Seattle’s winters can be really dreary. For this year’s winter trip, we went to Zion National Park in Utah.

Amazingly enough, neither of us had ever been to any of the Utah National Parks. I know that’s some type of crime for a landscape photographer, but our paths just hadn’t made it there yet, so we sought to rectify that with this trip. We only had two days to spend in Zion proper, so we packed a lot of stuff in. Our schedule was aided by the smaller crowds this time of year in Zion. In fact, during the time we visited, you can drive your car anywhere in the park; the park’s shuttle system doesn’t start running until closer to springtime. Being able to drive everywhere made it a lot easier to see the park quickly, plus temperatures were much cooler too.

The first day, we started our morning early on the east side of Zion, driving through the Mt. Carmel tunnel and exploring the Clear Creek wash and Canyon Overlook. We started in the wash near the tunnel entrance, but were only able to go a short ways as we encountered standing water that we weren’t prepared for. Nonetheless, the wash was awesome and had a lot to offer photographically. The floor of the wash was frozen with interesting patterns formed in the ice and sand, and the walls of the canyon were really interesting too.

After we finished that hike, we walked across the street to do the Canyon Overlook trail. This short trail leads to an excellent view of Zion canyon from the east, and we reached the overlook just as the light was starting to get really good. Along the way, there are lots of interesting things to see, including a few neat caves you have to hike through in the sandstone. We had lunch on the overlook and just enjoyed the scenery. It was an excellent, easy hike and is highly recommended.

After lunch, we high-tailed it down into the valley to do Angel’s Landing. Our goal was actually not Angel’s Landing but rather Scout Lookout just below it, as my wife was a little sketched out by the exposure. Still, she gave it a try for at least part of the way, and we opted to turn around a short ways up. That said, the views we got were excellent and we made it to the really famous “step of faith” so I was pleased with that. Doing Angel’s Landing in the winter was awesome, since it wasn’t hot and there were very few people to share the trail with. I’ve seen pictures of it during the summer where it takes several hours to do the last half mile up to the top of the landing because of the traffic jams.

The next day, we took an all-day guided hike up the Narrows with Zion Adventure Company. Our guide Megan was excellent and we really had a good time. A lot of people do the bottom-up Narrows without a guide, but we opted to hire a guide both because neither of us have canyon/water hiking experience, and because we wanted to learn more about the canyon than we would on our own. It proved to be an excellent idea as we had a really fun, engaging day and were able to take lots of great pictures. Both of us had a blast!

Later that evening, we returned to the valley to do some night sky photography. I wanted to keep things simple and just opted to use the full moon to take some images of the cliffs and the stars. It turned out that a group of climbers were climbing the famed Moonlight Buttress at night under the moonlight so that made for an interesting subject. We also returned to Angel’s Landing to get some images of it at night.

In the end, two days is probably too short for Zion, but I think we made the most of it and filled our days with a lot of fun stuff. Zion is definitely a place I want to return to, since there are many things we didn’t get to do on this trip. Hopefully I’ll be back soon!