zion national park

 Friends, my randomness knows no bounds. Months ago, I saw a photo of a hotel in an email about great road trips across the country, and I made it a goal for us to stay in that hotel. And now here were are with a long weekend, some surprisingly affordable airfare, and a whole ton of hotel points later, staying just outside Zion National Park in Springdale, Utah.

We had modest and not-so-modest goals for this trip. Mike wanted to see a roadrunner. Max and Henry wanted to hike Angels Landing with Mike. I wanted to see some cool animals and rock formations and go for a bike ride (even if it's cold). And on this first day, we made a huge dent in our list. 

That's Angels Landing on Max's side.

The thing about hiking Angels Landing is that because of overcrowding and land management needs, you have to have a permit to do it. And there are two ways to get a permit: months in advance, or the day before. We completely missed the advance permit window, so our best hope was for Mike and Max (because he's 18 now!) to enter the day-before permit lottery each day and hope they got lucky one of the days. That kind of made planning anything else impossible because we had no idea which day we would have to drop everything so they could do this hours-long hike. Happily, they ended up getting permits for our first day. 

The next issue was the snow. They had warm enough clothes, and we had one set of spikes that go on shoes to give extra traction, but at the last minute we decided that everyone really should have spikes, which we ended up finding at the park visitors center. While we were there, we spotted a roadrunner, which was nice enough to stick around and pose with Mike. After that, I dropped the intrepid explorers off at the trailhead and spent a few hours on my own exploring Springdale and the visitor center and some other areas. 

Eventually, we all met back up at the base of the trail for Angels Landing. They made it! I can't give you all the details, but they climbed 1,488 feet, clinging to chains at some points, slipping on ice at others. And when they got back down, they were tired and exhilarated. So obviously, it was time for pizza and pasta to celebrate their incredible feat. We're off to a fantastic start!