| Zion from the airplane as we approach Las Vegas. Everything is blue up there so I filtered it some to pull out a bit more detail.
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| Joe and I are ready to head out
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| Very early on we see a cougar tracks along the trail
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| Lots of birdlife and lizards and small mammals in the first few miles of trail. The terrain has fairly dense brush and a good number of trees to support them. Makes it hard to get any good photos.
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| The first view of the western canyon
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| The view east is kinda plain but will improve
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| Lizards rule this place
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| Plenty of fire damage, presumably largely from last year, but I'm sure this area gets lightning struck often
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| A view into the western range of Zion
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| Blue sky, the setting moon, and the former trees of the West Rim
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| The trail starts through a forest but drops out into meadows as we walk south paralleling the ridge.
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| Some very large trees were lost to fire, probably last year. This one at least a hundred years old.
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| A ghostly forest passage, but not nearly spooky on a sunny summer day like this one.
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| Another large fallen tree provides a look into to the canyon to the east
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| At our first scenic overlook, we plopped down right next to some cougar scat.
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| The outlandish formations of the western range
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| This formation is called Inclined Temple. We decided for next year's trip we should hire a helicopter to just drop us on top of this thing and we'll hang out for two days.
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| "Plumber's Crack"
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| Starting to make our way around a bend to the east to head towards the main canyon
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| Interesting formation/weathering near the trail
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| This year I remembered to bring my MTG cards, and so we played for a couple hours. We got an early start that put us into camp around 3pm I think. It was nice to have some time chill out, take a nap, play some cards, pump some water from the "spring" nearby.
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| Sunrise from campsite 1
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| This is a 10mm lens people! This sheer face is absolutely colossal, I couldn't capture it even with multiple photos.
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| Crossing a ravine on I think the only bridge on the trail.
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| You DONT need a polarizer to capture blue skies!
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| Uh-oh. Our first view of Angel's Landing. Looking closely at the bottom of the photo you can see the "wiggles" - a switchbacked part of the trail ahead.
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| Joe enjoying his shakedown cruise for this new Canon.
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| As we approach Angel's Landing, we are surrounded on all sides by thousand foot drops.
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| OK, so now do you understand? This thing is way scary. Yes people hike to the top along the knife edge. No, not us.
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| Joe with the north face of Angel's Landing in background.
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| This is where the Angel's Landing trail diverges, and where we meet up with day hikers coming from the other end. It's about 45 minutes each way we're told. That's if you don't fall to your death first. The sign reads "Warning! Falls from cliffs on this trail have resulted in death." blah, blah, blah. We decided we had to at least do a little bit. We went up about as far as you can see here, and then came back down. Like pretty much everyone else there. It's extremely scary, what you can't reproduce is what you see is all there is, there's nothing else below this, it's straight down on both sides and gets narrower as you go from the previous view.
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| Looking down into Refrigerator Canyon, before entering the wiggles.
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| Walter Wiggles. Walter was park superintendent I believe when these were constructed.
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| Refrigerator Canyon is naturally cool, of course.
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| The trail leading down to the Grotto.
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| The river valley.
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| The hikers
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| Our shuttle driver told us this is a high-speed testing facility on top of this massive mesa. I'm pretty sure I saw this from the airplane, a big long straight track (12000 ft long) on top. Hurricane Mesa it says on Google Maps.
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