Zion National Park

This post is a continuance of my last one. 

We rolled in Springdale, Utah around 4:30pm, Utah time. The first thing we did was check into our hotel, and then got dinner at a local restaurant known as Wilde Willie's, which wasn't very good, but pretty expensive (damn tourist town).

After that, we went to Zion National Park and had an evening tour with a ranger named Carolyn Flaherty. She explained a ton of the history and geological formations that created this national park, including the recurring 15 disasters that take out roads and buildings. My favorite story was when a man who had never been on time to work at Zion for the 5 years of his working there, magically gets up on time for work. As he's leaving, a huge boulder crashes through his house and lands right where he would have been sleeping, if he had hit the snooze button that day. He was never late to work again.

Then, we went back to our hotel (this is the 30th), and go to bed to have a bright and early day tomorrow. We decided that we would hike a river hike if the weather permitted (bad weather= high chance of flash floods). Guess what happens on the 31st? A massive rainstorm sweeps in to the north, creating flash flooding in the Virgin River (When I first learned that the river on my road trip was called the Virgin River, I immediately thought of a perverted sloth meme saying: "Virgin River? Not after I'm done with it."), so no river hike for us!

Instead, we hiked three different trails. We first hiked the river walk, which was a 2.4 mile roundtrip easy hike that took us through beautiful gardens. Second, we hiked the Emerald Pools trail, which was a 1.8 mile hike that was super intense. Afterwards, we ate our delicious salad and sandwich lunches, and got ice cream for dessert. Finally, on our way out, we hiked our third trail, the over pass trail. Here we got to see an overview of the entire valley where Zion National Park was located.

Anyways, have some pictures:

A flower alongside the path of our first hike, the River Walk. 

Menu Falls, where our ranger Carolyn told us that many people get married.
 

Pretty rock formations

An overview of the Valley from our Emerald Pools hike.

Another gorgeous rock formation. 

The overview of Zion National Park from our final hike, the Canyon Overview.