Climbing back out of the canyon

We got up at 6am this morning to try and maximise our day. It was a much warmer night tonight than last night, still below 0 though. We packed up our tents and had breakfast. We were walking by about 7:30am, well before the majority of people had ventured out of their tents. We had been told that the walk out of the canyon was about a 6-8 hour hike. We were setting a pretty mean pace, but not supper fast. We managed to get out of the canyon in just less than 4 hours!! We were pretty wrecked by the end of it, but we were pretty proud of ourselves. We took the Bright Angel track out of the canyon. The walk out was not as steep as the way in, but longer. The views also weren’t as good, but it was still a really nice walk.

It was such a great experience to be able to walk in and sleep in the canyon. We then headed out of the park and to a Burger King on the way. We well a truly deserved a nice greasy lunch after that effort, plus we all wanted some Wi-Fi to reconnect with the world. We had about a 3.5-hour drive ahead of us to Zion National Park. We made a stop along the way at horseshoe bend. This is one of the most photographed rivers in the USA. There were so many people there. It was nice, but definitely not the most spectacular thing I have seen in the USA in the last few days.


We then continued onto Zion National Park. We got there in the dark, so there wasn’t a whole lot to see when we got there. We had planned to spend the night in the campsite in the National Park, however, when we got there it was completely full. We were very surprised by this as everywhere else we had been, the campsites had been pretty quiet, as it is the low season. There were not too many affordable campsites around the park. We managed to find a little campsite that is on public land. It isn’t a designated campground, however anyone is allowed to camp there for free. It was getting quite late by now, and we still had to cook dinner. By the time we had cooked dinner, and set up tents it was after 9pm. Straight after dinner we went to bed. It was a very long day, but also a very rewarding day!!