Discussion: Zion

Angel Landing's Hike.

If possible, go early - before the crowds.

I am so torn on Angel's Landing! I am not fantastic with heights, well, I'm okay but it takes me some time and steady movement to find my feet. So if we do it, we'll have to do it early, as you suggest.

Any other good trails around? We've previously hiked a bit of the Narrows (that will be too cold I assume) and we've gone to Emerald Pools.

Perhaps we should just suck it up and do Angel's Landing but I'm not certain about it!

I've heard there is a hike where the trailhead is on the top of the plateau & it's pretty flat until you come to a lookout into the valley...where everybody else has hiked up from the bottom. I can get the name if you want.

Angel's landing is stunning. But it is pretty rough on the heights. Two of our group didn't do the last bit. So, totally understand if it's not your thing.

The hidden canyon trail was also really great, but has similar height issues. We went to that viewpoint Zan mentioned from the bottom; it was definitely a climb but I don't remember it being awful. We also wandered around off trail on the slickrock in the eastern part of the map. I just found some description online and we went with it, plus we did have a topo map and the Google terrain map. Unfortunately neither of us seem to have gps tracks in our logs from Zion; not sure what happened there.

Observation Point is a good hike. it's not exposed like Angels Landing or Hidden Canyon. Lots of variety in rocks and views along the way. Weather wise you may have snow as you climb up.

One of my favorite roads is from the east Zion entrance to the tunnel. Make sure to stop on the east side of the tunnel for the short hike to the overlook into the valley. There are numerous parking pull outs along the way and just getting out and exploring on your own is a great way to get away from the crowds. In June we saw bighorn sheep along the east entrance road, some from the car and others while we were hiking.

I think Observation Point sounds like a good plan for me! At the moment temperatures seem warm during the day and aren't dropping below freezing at night, so hopefully ice/snow won't be too much of an issue. We'll be driving in and out from the east and was thinking we'd stop my checkerboard mesa and at least one of the overlooks.

Agree w/ Carol that just hiking around on slickrock can be super fun. It's (still) easy for me to forget that in that environment you can go offtrail pretty easily, even without a super good map, because you often have such crazy good visibility. Still - would recommend getting some sort of map for off-trail (USGS, or park service w/ contours).