This year in Zion I returned to the West Rim trail, this time with a different hiking partner. For the second year, we camped on our arrival night in Watchman campground and had a nice (windy!) night under the trees and stars. This makes permits a little easier and good for the budget too. The West Rim trailhead is a long shuttle to Lava Point, and a couple thousand feet up from the valley. This makes the hike "downhill", though there are at least a couple of pretty good climbs especially with a pack in higher altitude, 100+ degree heat.
The views are unique and worth it though, and this year we stayed on the west side allowing us an evening hike back to one of the primo viewpoints.
Every Zion trip has some sort of weekend warrior story, it seems. So this one was about nearly (?) heat-stroking. Well, it was quite hot as we climbed up out of Potato Hollow to the ridge in the heat of the day. We had finished our first liters of water and went to refill from my 3L MSR water bag. That's when we discovered that the bag wasn't exactly clean inside or something, it had this horrible plasticy taste. Hmmm. There's no water from that point on until Day 2 since we're staying on the west side of the ridge. I couldn't drink very much as it was hot and taste not good at all. Chris had some drink mix packets, so we dumped some of that in, but I guess put a bit too much in. Then we had hot, super intense berry flavored plasticy water and I couldn't do more than sip it, ha. The walk along the exposed ridge in the heat of the day without much water got to me pretty quickly, started getting light headed when I stood up after resting, dehydrated no doubt, and not feeling good. So we just started marching for camp and hopefully some shade and once there I basically collapsed feeling like crap. At camp a bit later, we discovered that filtering the water in the bag (which was "clean") got rid of most of the bad taste, so we were able to drink up the rest of the water and like magic an hour later we were off on an evening backtrack to the good westerly viewpoints.
Also, we left the tent behind on this one, rolling the dice... and almost paid the price. A pretty decent storm rolled in despite the general forecast and gave us a lot of wind and thunder, but not really any rain to speak of. We were lucky!
Day 1
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| Notice the change in lighting. Here begins our evening hike back to the viewpoints, post-near-heat stroke. Because of that little episode, a couple of hours passed without photos. Felt too bad to take pictures, so that's saying something! |
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| Big Dipper, but you knew that |
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Day 2
 
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| Ahhhh, sweet cold water |
 
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