The Hottest of Messes - Part II (Or, Acrophobia)

It's probably been made clear at this point that our planning skills were not exactly stellar during this trip. Friday night we made our plans to go to Zion's after Kevin suggested we do the Narrows. Thankfully we didn't just leave it at that and actually looked up the Narrows to see exactly what that entailed.

Turns out, it entails wading some 16 miles through the Virgin River; a task we obviously weren't prepared for. So we decided to tackle Angel's Landing, a hike Kevin had done twice before.

As the shuttle bus drove us through the park, the automated tour guide described the beauty of each hike as we approached the trailhead. When he began describing Angel's Landing, he began to use words like "treacherous", "steep", and "reconsider".

No really. He said, "Reconsider if anyone in your party feels uncomfortable."

As any group of twenty-somethings would do, we laughed about it and headed up anyway.

For those of you who haven't done Angel's Landing, the last third of the hike has chains welded into the rock for you to use as you basically scale the mountain to the summit.

Kevin had mentioned this to us but hadn't really explained what we were signing up for. After endless switchbacks we saw a chain and used to to climb up to a flat area, which I will forever refer to as "Fake Angel's Landing". I looked over the side and was met with the sight of an extremely high and steep cliff.

"Holy crap," I said. Andrew was right behind me. I said, "check this out."

Andrew then proceded to lay flat on the rock and edge himself slowly to the side. He peeked over, said, "oh," and then sat in the middle.

"Wait," I said, "are you afraid of heights?"

"You didn't know that?"

I considered the irony of him making us wait in the desert while he attempted to climb the rock in Snow Canyon that he called "The Cliffs of Insanity", but I let it go.

After sitting there for a few minutes, I noticed people walking around on the much-higher cliff next to the one where we were perched. I pointed this out to the rest of the group, wondering how they even got up there.

"That's where we're going," Kevin said.

"What?"

"That's Angel's Landing."

Andrew didn't like this revelation. "Tell me you're kidding, Kevin."

So we proceeded to finish the hike we though we had already finished. Andrew went first, then Kevin, then Alex, then me. While we climbed we kept hearing Kevin laugh.

"What are you laughing at?" Alex asked.

"Andrew keeps swearing under his breath."

It didn't take us too long to get to the real Angel's Landing. The view was incredible.

The view from "Fake Angel's Landing"

Once we arrived back at the trailhead, we decided to go check out the Narrows. We waded around in the river for a while, talked about coming back some other weekend to complete this hike, and then headed back to the house.

It was a really awesome day, at least I think so, and we had a chill evening enjoying what we thought would be our last night in St. George.