We hurried into the park to get a campsite before our morning ranger-guided hike. After the campground was completely full yesterday, several campers were gone by early morning and we easily found a spot. Our 3-mile hike took us up 500 feet while in the shadow of the Watchman, one of the park’s tallest mountains. Our ranger, Ranger Mike, has been with the park for 20+ years and he is very knowledgeable about Zion! He taught us about different plants, animals, and geological formations along the trail. There were only 6 of us on the hike so it was nice to be able to ask questions and get to know our fellow hikers. We were warned about the high frequency of rattlesnake sightings on this hike, but thankfully we saw none. We did learn about a new creature though: the tarantula moth. This large moth has long legs that dangle when it flies and its wings are the reddish color of a tarantula. It is the tarantula’s enemy because (prepare yourself mom, this is really going to gross you out!) it embeds itself in the tarantula and lays its eggs inside of the spider’s body. When the eggs hatch, the baby moths feed on the tarantula. Isn’t that disgusting?! After finishing our hike around noon, we had some lunch at the local café. Again, we were amazed at how many non-English speaking tourists were visiting the park. Today must’ve been the Italian Tours day because nearly everyone around us was speaking Italian – how do so many foreigners know about these beautiful places that we’ve never been to?! After lunch, we headed up into the park via the park shuttle. Because Zion only has one two-lane road, they’ve incorporated an amazing shuttle system. No cars are allowed past a certain point and the shuttles run every 7 minutes. It’s so convenient and apparently it has greatly reduced traffic congestion and impact on the park’s environment. This park is very concerned with lowering our impact on the environment; they don’t even sell plastic water bottles anywhere in the park. We learned that Americans use 50 billion plastic water bottles each year, 167 for each person. 38 billion of these end up in landfills and end-to-end these wasted bottles would circle the equator 217 times! Every time you fill your reusable bottle (which you could do all over Zion using local spring water), you keep a disposable bottle out of the landfill. You can refill an average reusable bottle with tap water once a day for 10.5 years before it would cost as much as one quart of bottled water. Just a little plug to keep those reusable bottles handy! Anyway, we took the shuttle to the very last stop (about a 40 minute ride; each shuttle stops at every stop and there is a narrated tour while you’re driving) and worked our way back to camp. We did another 2-mile hike along the river and headed towards a well-known trail called The Narrows. Along this 8-mile trail, you hike through and across the river and the canyon narrows to only a few feet in parts. It is suggested that hikers wear certain shoes and use a walking stick to cross the river. We had neither and weren’t planning on hiking it, but wanted to walk a little ways up the river to get a good look of what was around the corner. We made our way across the swiftly-moving, rocky river bed in bare feet (that really hurt!) until a storm started rolling in. This hike is very dangerous during rainstorms due to flash floods that can raise the river nearly 9 feet in parts of this hike. Needless to say, we turned around and headed back to the shuttle. We stopped at a few more stops along the way and braved the weather to walk short hikes to various lookout points. We toured the museum and eventually made our way back to camp for an early dinner. After a long day of hiking and being in the sun, I fell asleep early (around 8:00) while Deven cleaned up camp. I was pretty worn out from the day, but I think I went to bed early because I was so excited/nervous about the morning – we were planning to hike Angel’s Landing, a 5-mile hike that ascends 1500 feet and has parts on the trail that are only 3 feet wide with an 800 foot cliff on one side and a 1200 foot cliff on the other…yikes!
