Zion – The Narrows

We had neither had a long nor a good sleep. It was for sure fun to sleep in this tent-like upper bed of the van; but it was simply too cramped. I, as a small person, couldn’t even put my knees up. We kept trying to find a comfortable sleeping position and ended up turning all night. Now some noisy campers “helped” us get up early although we were both still so tired *yawn*

We started our hike IN the Virgin River around 9 am. We helped ourselves to natural walking sticks and water shoes that other hikers had left by the shore. The shoes turned out to be a little too thin. Alan:”That’s a too rough foot massage!” Our feet were soon sore from walking over (little) rocks. The first couple of hours were pretty crowded. So I didn’t get a chance to go pee *ooh*

One part of the river was chest-deep. I was soaking wet. Alan managed to climb over a giant rock in the river bed. So he was able to keep our backpack and fanny pack dry *amazing*

Further down, we were pretty much alone and rather glad when people approached us. A bus had dropped them off at a canyon upstream. Now they would just hike back. They told us it was still another 1-1.5 hrs to a spring and even farther to a slot canyon some guy had told us about yesterday. That didn’t sound too motivating. When a massive rock was blocking our way, we were about to give up. But we did manage to climb over it.

We finally had a very late lunch with bagels and marble cake at Big Spring (a small waterfall). This place was worth the 5 hrs of fun and torture.

It only took us 3 hrs to hike back. But we had yo make some sacrifices due to losing concentration. Once we chose the wrong way. I fell. Alan kept me from floating away, unlike my walking stick.

Unfortunately, Alan got wet once as well and with him all his money and both of our cameras. Even after drying, mine wasn’t working properly.

We took a refreshing shower, even including washing hair, at the campground faucet again.

Next problems: Supar has been biting, scratching, licking a small wound (bite?) that now looked inflamed. Alan had dropped the i-Pad in the morning. Now we found out that the internet wasn’t working anymore. On our way out of Zion, we stopped at the intersection where we had already refilled our propane tank. The guy who runs the restaurant there let us use his internet *nice*

We will go to Salt Lake City to replace the i-Pad at an Apple store. We will still try to continue our trip since we have an offline Utah map that also shows rest areas. Tonight, we stayed at the same rest area as before Zion *funny*