Zion National Park

The park

Zion means “sanctuary” in Hebrew has 60 000 hectares and is located south-west in Utah. It’s known for its red rocks and its 600m-high-cliffs. The mormons gave this name to this giant formations géantes like Court of the Patriachs, Angels Landing…

This park is divided into 3 different places. NO CAR IS ALLOWED IN THE PARK (except if you stay at Zion Lodge). There’s a parking lot close to the Visitor Center and you can take the free shuttles to discover the park. These shuttles stop by every hike or viewpoint the park can offer. You’ll have all the information at the Visitor Center with a map and time pick up.

In Utah, when we arrived from the west, we are in the Mountain Standard Time. 

15h – We arrived in the park around 3pm, so we avoided traffic jam and hiked by the river on a path called Par’us Trail (5km). 

Watchman Trail

17h – We went back to the Visitor Center to start the second hike of the day: Watchman Trail. This trail starts along the river but ends in a slope. Up there, we have a beautiful view on the park.

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Emerald Pools Trails

19h – We took the shuttle to go to Zion Lodge. There, we crosses elks which ate the grass. But we didn’t go there for this reason: a little hike were waiting for us. We took the Emerald Pools Trails. We arrived to the Lower Pool (the others pools were closed), a natural pool and the red mountains background. This hike is really cool during sunset time.

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Angels Landing hike

8h – The day after, we went to the beginning of a long hike: the famous Angels Landing. The name of this hike is awesome by the way! We huards about dangerous paths. Indeed, this hike is famous for its panoramic viewpoint on the valley and 10 people died since 2004…

This hike is 8.7km return but there are two parts: the first part is up to Scout Lookout, where a lot of hikers stop there, the view is already amazing. The second part, the most dangerous is 1.8km retour, at 420m from the ground with very narrow passages where we have to hold on to iron ropes. To tell you the truth, this climb is VERY impressive.

To tell the truth, we still hesitated to take this dangerous path. The sign indicating the difficulty and the tragic accidents that happened in the past … “Well come on, let’s go but we stay VERY careful. No camera taken out to take pictures, we close all our pockets, we drink a good drink before going up and off we go”! In fact, what is and can become very dangerous, even fatal, is when you stray from the intended paths. The park rangers installed iron chains for our safety and to show us the way.

This hike remains one of the most special that we do given to the particularity of the trails but the view was incredible!

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