Zion to Vegas

We left Alexis's parents place early to go hiking at Red Canyon.  We hiked through snow and mud for a couple of hours before deciding that it was not yet quite spring and headed towards the hopefully warmer and drier Zion.  Both Alexis and I separately remember some free camping just outside of the park, after searching around a bit I realized that my, somewhat sleep deprived at the time, memory was wrong and the site Alexis was thinking of had been wiped out by a recent flood.  As it was rapidly getting dark we called around to campgrounds, no luck thanks to all the springbreakers, then headed for the hills.  We drove up Kolob Terrace and found a great spot in a patch of BLM land surrounded by park.  The next day we were going to drive to the end of the road but winter got in our way again.  Not far along we ran into a road closed sign and a snowmobile trailer... so we retreated a bit and went for a hike in Hop Valley.  Was a gorgeous hike with hardly anyone around, an area we want to return to for a backpacking trip.  We then drove to the north of the park and checked out the Kolob Canyons road and took a hike up the South Fork of Taylor Creek (again ran into snow). 





After all the snow and cold we decided that we should head to warmer climes so we made towards Vegas by way of Valley of Fire.  Spent a very windy night at the valley and went for several hikes including Mouse's Tank where we found some great petroglyphs.  Over the years we have built up a pretty extensive photo library of petroglyphs; we stopped at a museum in Overland and looked through a book of petroglyphs and realized that we had seen almost half the sites and glyphs in the book!  We had some exciting drunk neighbors in the campground who were blasting Mexi-pop and oscillating between having a blast and yelling at each other.  It was like a really entertaining soap opera that kept us entertained until the ranger showed up.



Headed into Vegas to visit with Alexis's brother Garrett.  He graciously allowed us to cleanup and get a bit organized at his place for the next leg.  We decided that we had enough of cold weather (it snowed on us on out way out of Vegas) and made a break for Death Valley.