Dalton Adventures: Living Life to the Fullest: Zion trip: Day 3

I woke up the next morning feeling only slightly refreshed. My body hurt immensely, but after a couple miles of stretching it out, it was much better. It also is amazing the wonders advil and shot bloks can do for your pain and energy!

We again saw some amazing sights through out the day.

Big Springs

Big Boulders section

Getting narrower

Break for the kids!

Pressing on

In the "wall street" section

Getting into some sunlight

Nate is impressed

May I also say that since this was a river hike, you had to carry in and out everything with you, including your poop. Somehow Chloe and I were the only ones who "dropped the kiddies off at the pool" while we were on the hike. So I can now say that I married such a wonderful man who even carries my poop when he has to!

Family photo

Nearing the end

Tall trickle.. or waterfall

I wish I could remember all the super sweet things Nate said on this day. We tried to take advantage of the opportunity to teach him about how BIG and AWESOME our God is and how we know this through the things that we can see that He made. At one point, we were passing a section of a little waterfall and Nate said, "Look dad! God made ANOTHER waterfall!"

As we came closer and closer to the end of the hike, we saw more and more people. This is a very popular hike for tourists who hike it from the bottom up. (We did it from the top down in two days.) Most people only hike a small distance before turning around. Some make it a few miles up to "Wall Street". Nevertheless, after seeing almost nobody our first day and not very many people at all during the first part of the second day, it was crazy to see the masses of people attempting the hike near the end for us.

The last 1/2 mile or so of the hike was on a paved path next to the river. We checked out a bit of the wildlife of squirrels, deer and lizards.

Some random stranger snapped this photo of us from behind as we were walking to the end and then got our number and texted it to us. Joe and I were holding hands so Nate and Chloe started holding hands. So sweet.

Now we come to the most trying part of the day. We took the park shuttle from the end of the hike back to the visitor center where we had arranged for our friend, Kacee, to pick up our car from the trailhead and leave it in the visitor center parking lot. Kacee was one of Joe's summer staff from this past summer... an awesome girl who goes to school in Salt Lake City and was down at Zion for the weekend with some college friends. Well, we search that parking lot a few times from top to bottom but there was no "Smooter Junior" there. The other thing is that we left both our phones in our car and we did not have Kacee's number on us. We borrowed a phone from random lovely nice people at the visitor center and finally got Kacee's number from checking an old message left on our phone. Did you know you can check your phone messages by calling your voice mail from another line? (Unfortunately, we were unable to get the messages that Kacee had recently left on our phones saying she was unable to move the car because where our car was with the phones in it, did not have service.) Anyway... we left Kacee a message that we couldn't find our car and we were just hanging out at the visitor center not knowing what else to do. The next shuttle that was running to the trailhead which was about an hour and a half away by car was not until the next morning. After a couple hours of waiting, I was starting to freak out. Not Joe though. He is such a man a faith. Anyway, to end this long saga, praise God, we ran into Kacee and her friends at the visitor center as they were returning from a hike and had no cell service. As it turns out, they had gone to go move our car that day but none of the four of them could drive a stick shift! I had TOTALLY forgotten to mention that when I had asked her to move it for us so I felt really bad. I forget that most younger people cannot drive a standard these days. Anyway, all's well that ends well. The kids, Joe, and a couple of Kacee's friends hung out for the next few hours while we ran to go get the car. Here are some photos he took of the sun setting while we were gone.