Zion National Park
National Park

Zion National Park

Welcome to Zion! When we had our Galapagos plans fall through, we decided to meet up with the family in Utah for a National park trip - starting with Zion National park. We only spent 3 days here, but we did get a good taste of the park through some canyoneering and biking. Zion is known for Canyoneering - which is where you climb up/down steep walled canyons often by walking through/in the water. We rented gear (big waders & felt soled boots) and took the bus up to the start of the narrows. There were a lot of people for the first 1-2 miles (note the first picture below) but it thinned out as we kept going.

  • Tom Woodard
Hiking the Wonderland Trail
Spring

Hiking the Wonderland Trail

The Wonderland Trail! This was the most amazing backpacking trip that I’ve ever had (so far) and while it’s several years later as I write this, many of my memories of the trip are still very vivid. This is my first post of an adventure from before I started this blog - hopefully one of several to come. To start, I thought some background on the wonderland trail would be useful. The trail is anywhere from 93 miles to 102 miles (depending on route choice and detours) and a cumulative 22,000 feet (6,700 m) of elevation gain. It was first built/hiked by the mountaineers in 1915 and was considerably longer (130-140 miles) but took hikers an average of 3-4 weeks to hike it. For us, it took a total of 10 days and our final distance was a little over 100 miles.

  • Tom Woodard