Zion National Park- Hop Valley Trail part. 2
Day three on the Trans-Zion trail.
By our afternoon break and snack we had made it through the Hop Valley and assumed we would be climbing out of the valley and get to the trailhead. We did climb out, and found ourselves on what appeared to be an old jeep trail that just continued to climb at a steady tolerable rate, for an hour. We happily emerged through a gate out of a pasture to the trailhead sign, yay! Though we didn’t see the car the other hikers said they parked at the trailhead and the road wasn’t where it should be according to our map- they don’t just go and move roads so we must not be as far along as we thought. Bummer. In fact we still had a good bit of the connector trail to get to the formal trailhead, but it was worth it as we found a vault toilet and garbage cans. Super extra bonus was that I had cell phone reception for the first time- I was able to call and discover all of my children (and my hubby) were still alive and well.
In the shadow of this surprising bit of civilization we ate tuna sandwiches (it is amazing out good a tuna packet spooned out onto slightly stale bread can taste!) and assessed our situation. Several things were clear:
A second quick call to my husband to check the weather conditions encouraged us to keep going. Ok, so my husband told me we were silly and the tent would be fine. Done, and done. Off we went. (Knowing in the worst case scenario that there was another vault toilet at the Wildcat Canyon Trailhead.) On we marched with A.J. taking the lead and totally pulling me through the next few miles, thank you friend! One change that occurred at this point is that we had wandered into the land of the park rather than the wilderness. Again we had easy to follow trails and beautiful views. The one disappointment was that we found tons of deer scat but even though we passed through some wonderful open field areas, at dusk, we didn’t get to see any. This section was rather flat and enjoyable; however, once we got closer to the Wildcat Canyon the terrain changed to going over the rock formations we had been viewing from a distance all along. I was disheartened that the light was starting to go and we now had to scramble up and over rocks being guided only by stacked rock trail markers. The disheartening part is that earlier in the day I would have squealed with delight to clamor over such a fun feature, but now I was just tired and this was another obstacle between me and camp. We pushed hard and were thrilled when we made it to Wildcat Canyon around 8 o’clock. The wind was crazy sounding up high in the trees but it was relatively calm down on the canyon floor. We hunted around as much as we dared in the fading light for a site that didn’t include a host of dead trees to shed their limbs on our heads in the night, and set up camp in record time. We did take the extra precautions of staking the tent everywhere and tying the rain cover to a tree trunk. (The crazy wind had entered my psyche and I had wild visions of headlamp lights flashing in the night while we raced to catch a rain cover billowing away in the night.)
Heading into our bags for the night (did we even eat anything?) we soon discovered that the wind was having fun sneaking along us in the tent and sucking warm air from our sleeping bags. We experimented with layers of clothing and jackets draped over our bags but ended up spending a pretty cold night. It was so cold that we both agreed that the next day we wouldn’t roll out of bed until we could see some sunlight in the camp. But we can talk about that on day 4. Good night.
tamingthemilemonster 