Zion and recent projects

Yet again, time seems to be flying by and I haven't written as soon as I'd hoped. So I'll jump right in to what I left off with last time, which was the trip I took to Zion National Park in Springdale, Utah with my roommates and a few other people from NCC 2 weeks ago. It was sort of a last minute plan and at first I wasn't going to go because after our 8-day project all I wanted to do was stay home and relax, but visiting Zion was on my "Vegas bucket list" so I decided to go. And I'm so glad I did! I'm pretty sure Zion is the most beautiful place I've ever been. Or at least it was the most breathtaking. Don't get me wrong, the east coast has many beautiful places as well, but since I grew up there I'm much more accustomed to the landscape, so whenever I go somewhere new in the Nevada area it's amazing to me because it's so new and different. We got to Zion around midday on Friday and left around midday on Saturday, and in that time we did 3 hikes. The first was called Hidden Canyon, which was a mile up a developed trail and then you could continue onto the area that was not maintained and required scrambling over rocks and through tight spots. We went about another mile or two past the maintained part of the trail and then turned around when we coudln't figure out how to get past a certain area. Here are some pictures of that hike.

This picture is not from that hike, but I took it as we were first entering the park.

The view that greeted us when we got off the bus at the place where the Hidden Canyon trail starts. This picture doesn't do it justice. 

The view from the top of the mile-long developed trail. So beautiful!

The scrambling begins

Stone arch around the area where we turned around. 

After that we hiked the Watchman trail, which started near the visitor center, and one of the rangers had recommended it for sunset because of the nice views. It was a pretty easy hike, I think about 2 or 3 miles roundtrip, and the view from the top was great. It was hard to get pictures of the sunset but here are a few that I did take.

View from the top

When we got back from that hike, it was time to find somewhere to camp for the night. This was harder than we had anticipated because we hadn't gotten to the park earlier enough to get one of the campsites there because they fill up really fast, so we were going by one guy Jeff's recollection of campsites from when he'd been there before and internet searches on people's phones to find somewhere that would be nearby and open. One place turned out not to exist anymore and we couldn't find the other one, so we just went by information found online to try to find a place that wasn't an official campsite but was public land so we would be allowed to camp there. It involved driving up a rutted dirt road on the side of a cliff in the dark, and we weren't convinced at first that we were going the right way because it kept feeling like we were going to end up in someone's driveway. But we kept driving and eventually passed through a gate with a sign saying we were entering public land, so we knew that as long as we found a good place to stop, we would be able to spend the nigh there. We eventually found a turn off area that served as a good place to park and set up our tents. It was a beautiful night, so I slept with the rain fly off my tent for the first time, and it was awesome when I woke up in the middle of the night and all I could see out the top of my tent was stars. I really wanted to stay awake to stargaze but I almost immediately fell back to sleep. We had all decided that we should wake up to watch the sunrise, and it was probably the best sunrise I'd ever seen (not that I've seen very many because I'm usually not awake at the time of day by choice haha). It was especially cool because since we had gotten to the campsite in the dark, we had no idea what to expect when we woke up, and it ended up being an awesome place. I got some pictures, but again, pictures just don't do things like this justice. Here are some anyway, you get the general idea.

Our plan for that day was to hike Angels Landing, which is one of the most challenging hikes at the park and they say it's not recommended for people who are very afraid of heights. I was a little scared before we started, but like everything else at the park, it was amazing! The first few miles were a pretty average hike, but with some more steep parts than the hikes the day before, but then the last half mile was the hardest and most time consuming part. There were many parts where you could see down the cliff on the side of the trail, and sometimes it was so narrow that there were cliffs on both sides. For most of this portion of the hike there were chains on the sides to hold onto because if you didn't it would be very easy to fall off. It was probably coolest hike I've ever been on, and even though it was scary at parts, it was really fun. Here are some of the pictures I took.

View of the peak of Angels Landing

On the way up

View on the way up

You can't see it that well from this picture, but this is a series of switchbacks built into the side of the mountain

View as we started the hard part of the hike

The peak where we hiked to

So high up!

This part of the trail was really narrow

This is not where we hiked to, but it's a part that juts out from the peak

Same as the last picture, from a different angle

View from the top!

We made it!

There were cute little chipmunks all over the place that would come pretty close because they wanted food. 

So pretty!

The whole experience at Zion was amazing, and I hope I get to do many more trips like this during my time in Nevada. There are so many places I want to explore in the Southwest, and I want to get to as many of them as possible in the next year. I'm hoping next weekend to go to the Grand Canyon, which is on the top of my Vegas bucket list.

Since Zion, my crew has worked at the same site for 2 weeks, which was Wetlands Park in Henderson, NV. Henderson is the city right next to Las Vegas, so we didn't have to go very far and it didn't even feel like we had left Vegas. We also weren't camping during these projects, we just went home each night and met at the office each morning. That was sort of nice because it meant I got to do errands and get other "real life" things done each day after work. The park we worked in was cool, it used to just be a deserted patch of desert that was used a dumping ground, but the county decided to restore it and turn it into a park. Water runs through it which means things can grow more easily than in other parts of the desert, and it has many nice walking paths that people can explore. The main projects we worked on here were clearing views of the water to help them prepare for their school education events, remove invasive tamarisk plants, and clear cattails from a channel so water could flow more easily.

During the weekend between those two weeks, my liking for the city decreased slightly when my phone got stolen while I was at a concert. Someone opened my purse and took my phone out without me noticing, although they didn't take my wallet or my passport, which were both in my purse too. They did the same thing to my roommate Kaitlyn, and then a few hours later my roommate Jake's phone was taken out of his pocket, I assume by the same person. I've never had any issues like that anywhere else I've been, but I guess since there is so much money being spent all the time in Vegas, thieves see it as the perfect place to get lucky, which unfortunately they did with us. This makes me much more wary of going out to clubs and other crowded situations like that, and I'm definitely going to keep a closer eye on my stuff if I do go to those places from now on.

Something interesting that I've noticed since I've been here is that I've actually started to get used to the heat, which I didn't think was possible. There was one day the first week that I was at Wetlands Park that it was over 100 degrees, and I got so hot that I could barely do anything without feeling like I was going to pass out or throw up so I had to take breaks every few minutes, and I felt like I drank my weight in water trying to stay hydrated. After that day though, none of the weather I've worked in has made me feel very hot, even when it's in the 90s. So once it started cooling down this past week, it's felt really weird to me. Yesterday evening I was outside and it was 75 degrees, and I felt cold! I've definitely lost all the toughness from living through a New England winter last year. I guess I imagined that it would just feel like summer all year here haha. I'm sure I'll get used to the colder weather again, and it's nice that we got to turn the air conditioning off the other day, so we'll save money on that. I guess I'm in for a big shock when I go home for Christmas.

Our project next week is also somewhere close to the city, but not as close as the past two weeks, so we're actually going to be camping, which I'm excited about. After being in the city for two weeks I'm starting to feel hemmed in and getting some fresh air again is going to be great. I'll post another blog post as soon as I get a chance, although unfortunately until January when I can upgrade to a new iPhone, there probably won't be as many pictures with the posts because my phone was also my only camera. Each crew has a camera for documenting our projects though, so I'll try to get pictures from that camera if there are any good ones I want to share.