Zion Backcountry 3/5/11

Mr. Mamie and I went to Zion yesterday for some relaxation. We needed to buy our new annual pass, as ours expired at the end of February, and Mr. Mamie wanted to get that done before the budgeted money got reallocated to something else.

We picked up some sandwiches from the deli at the Village Market and headed out.  It was warm-ish, mostly sunny, with a spread of thin clouds that kept the sky from being super-blue.  We messed around for a bit at the Visitors' Center, and checked at the ranger desk to see if the Riverside Walk was still closed 3/4 of the way toward the Narrows. The ranger said it was, and that it was still pretty icy up there.  Since I was wearing my new red Keens, not hiking boots (and certainly not YaxTrax), and we had inadvertently left our climbing poles at home, we decided to avoid anything too icy/snowy/muddy. We wandered up to the lodge and at our lunch in the sun, enjoying the day. At that point Mr. Mamie decided he wasn't up to much, as his right knee was bothering him again.

We headed out of the lower canyon and back through Springdale, and then decided to take the Kolob Terrace road up toward the reservoir. There was still quite a lot of snow up there, and the road was closed before the reservoir. We poked around a little at the Left Fork trailhead of the Subway and fantasized about hiking it this summer.  Not a lot of hiking to be done, but a beautiful drive and a relaxing day!

These photos were all taken with the iPhone camera (not my DSLR), so they're not the greatest. You can still see the beauty of the Zion Backcountry, though! I am so lucky that all this is practically right outside my front door.

  So much for getting to the Kolob Reservoir...

My feet, in the new red Keens, propped up at the end of the day!

~Mamie "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro!" (Hunter S. Thompson)