The Race to Zion- Day 13

I'm going to go ahead and apologize in advance for the lack of pictures in this post. Yesterday was a long day of driving from Yosemite National Park in California to Zion National Park in Utah. We had to make it to the park office to get our backcountry wilderness passes for today's hike before 7:30pm and then to the rental place before 8:00pm to get our gear. It was a race!

We did drove through Las Vegas yesterday. When people say it's in the middle of the desert, they aren't kidding. It's literally in the middle of no where.

There were a lot of shiny hotels and casinos.

And something that looks like the Empire State Building. Clearly I've never been to Las Vegas so I'm not really sure what I was looking at!

After driving trough Las Vegas, we finally made it to Arizona.

And then to Utah.

Things were starting to look pretty.

We ended up getting to the visitor center around 6:30 to pick up our hiking permit, perfect timing. We had an hour to spare! But it was the wrong visitor center....the visitor center we arrived at was already closed. We had to drive 40 minutes to the other side of the park! Once we got there it was still confusing as to exactly where the visitor center was at! Once we found it, it was 7:25 (the center closes at 7:30). Matt hopped out of the car and ran to the visitor center. He was able to get the permit, enabling us to do the hike! After getting the permit, we took off to the adventure store to rent our gear. We got into the store around 7:45 so we were able to be fitted for our shoes and watch the required video! It was a close call! But everything got taken care of!

Today we are doing the Top to Bottoms hike at the narrows at Zion. It should be a tough, long one!