We drove under a mountain. Once in a while we glimpsed a sight of the blue sky through a thick arched window, but mostly it was dark.  This was the Zion-Mount Carmel Tunnel—a modern marvel in it’s time—winding 1.1 miles into the rock. The walls looked as if they were chiseled out with a screwdriver or carved with a giant fingernail into the clay. It made me wonder how they constructed it in the 1920’s, and so I did a bit of research and found this:

How can you support an entire mountain with a wooden beam? Oh, the things we take for granted.  We drove slowly through the dark. Emmy whined beside me. Once we saw the light from the other side, we opened our window and this is what we saw:

I imagine the site looked much the same ninety some years ago. We drove the switchbacks down, down, down into the park, to a little trail along the campground where we walked Bubba.

We hiked the Upper and Lower Emerald Pools trail first. The waterfalls trickled down like rain, slicking the path, and Mikey stopped to tilt his head and drink.

We wanted to be isolated, to take it all in on our own, so we hiked Hidden Canyon next. The landscape was beyond words—the Virgin River has carved a gorge so deep that sunlight rarely reaches the bottom. The canyon is wide and breathtaking with sheer cliffs dropping some 3,000 feet. My brain grasped at anything to make sense of it; it felt like we were in Jurrasic Park—I looked up expecting to see a pterodactyl swooping over; our ant-like figures squinting in it’s shadow.

The path curved around the bend and started a gentle switchback, and it gradually became steeper and steeper until it became clear to us: we were going to the top. We noticed another hiker across the canyon—this is where we were headed.

We held onto chains as the trail narrowed, scooting our way along the cliff, our stomachs in our throats (little did we know that this was nothing compared to the hike we would do in the coming days). At the top, we could see our little truck in the parking lot below:

I was in love with this day. When we had tucked into our covers for the night (in the Zion parking lot—we had seen people do it all the time at Arches and thought we would gamble) my heart welled up with gratitude. I closed my eyes, and said “thank you, thank you, thank you.”

One thing we really haven’t done on this trip is keep track of time. We go to bed when we’re tired, get up when we’re awake. This night, though, after we’d been asleep for what seems like hours, there was a knock at the door. We finally pulled up the phone to see the time—9:10pm.  We must’ve gone to bed at 7.

It was the Zion patrol guy. He couldn’t have been more accommodating and affable, gently reminding us that we could not camp overnight. He chatted with Mike about the make and model of our Scamp, said his goodbyes, and then we went into auto-mode, getting everything packed up. Emmylou was like a bag of sand. A strange man can walk up to our camper with a bright light and knock loudly, and all she will do is slowly raise her head as if she was trying to remember a dream. She’s getting bomb-proof. We hoisted her over our shoulder and drove off into the dark, looking for a place to boondock.

When the free campground fifteen miles away was closed, and after some choice words, we headed back into Springdale (right outside of Zion) and parked on the street. We slept in fits in between noisy Halloweeners and loud cars. Even so, I couldn’t have been happier.