The End: Zion to Vegas

Today is the most glorious day! I'm sitting on my own couch, drinking fresh-brewed coffee in my PJ's. Football's on TV and Atticus is lounging on the window sill. And we have no intentions of doing anything more strenuous than laundry all day! It's good to be home!

Now I present to you the final installment of our Epic Road Trip Extravaganza! (If you haven't figured it out yet, all of the photos here and on previous posts do absolutely zero justice to the cool stuff we saw. So just imagine everything to be 10 times cooler and bigger than how they seem here!)

This is the Virgin River at Zion National Park. It's a big part of what made the park look so dang amazing. Pretty impressive for such a small river!

The rocks/mountains at Zion were formed millions of years ago. The area used to be a desert with sand dunes up to 3,000 feet high! An ancient sea deposited minerals into the sand that eventually turned it into the sandstone mountains that are there now. Amazing!

Starting our hike up to the Emerald Pools.

On our way to the first pool! Aaron loves climbing on top of rocks. (Who am I kidding? I do, too!)

Almost to the lower pool. You can see how the water just trickles down the rock.

(Try clicking on the photo to see it larger.) This was taken from the path just past the lower pool, so we're up a little higher. You can see the drops of water coming right down the center of the photo, and the rail/path on the lower right side gives you an idea of how huge this rock is.

On our way to the next pool! This was a harder (much harder!) hike than up to the lower pool. We somehow skipped past the middle pool and went right on to the upper one. (We saw the middle pool on our way back down.)

The Upper Emerald Pool. The rocks go up much higher than what my chintzy little camera can capture! That's Aaron by the water, and some random chick getting in the way of my shot!

Not a bad view on the way back down!

Our second hike was supposed to be a short walk to the Grotto. Unfortunately, nature had other plans! A thunder storm passed through Zion when we got about halfway there, despite the shuttle driver's claim that there was a 0% chance of rain! We found a handy rock to hide under while we waited for the worst of the storm to pass, and got to listen to the thunder echoing off the rocks for about 10 minutes.

Here's a pic we took from our rock shelter. It rained hard! In the lower left there is the path we were on... now muddy and riddled with huge puddles. Not the best hiking weather, especially since I was wearing Converse! Once the heaviest rain passed we climbed down to the street and walked back to the lodge. We decided to head on to Vegas at that point since we were both wet and I certainly wasn't wearing the best shoes for hiking in the mud. We'll just have to go back some day!

Now, we've been to Vegas MANY times, but we drive out from the opposite direction of course, which is the most boring, ugly drive known to man. So we had no idea that just an hour or so on the other side of the city was this cool drive through the mountains!

The "beautiful" Vegas skyline! Once we got there we almost felt like we were already home, being only one short 5 hour drive away. We didn't do a whole lot, just had a nice dinner at a restaurant in our hotel, and did a little gambling and drinking. It was a fun, relaxing way to end our trip.

Thanks for following along!!