This weekend i went down to Zion National Park with a group of friends. Since we don't get a spring break, we kinda made our own. We had everything planned out perfectly. The hike was going to be about an 18 mile hike down the mountain and through the canyons at Zion, but as we were driving up to the trail head at the peak we soon discovered that there was tons of snow! And it was way to much to drive through. We didn't know exactly how much further it was until the trail head, so we decided just to walk the rest of the way up the road to where the trail started. Bad idea....The road was super steep and it wasn't until about 3 miles later that we actually found the trail head. Things were going well and we were still feeling pretty optimistic, considering that we still had the entire trail left to hike. But sadly, the snow didn't go away like we were hoping it would. It was everywhere still! Most places it was a couple feet deep at least. And with every step we sank two or three inches into it. Needless to say, there was so much snow that we couldn't really tell where the trail went. We did the best we could and guessed where it was going, but several miles later we discovered that we were way off. We were also following a couple sets of footprints, and when they vanished off into the thick parts of the woods we knew we were lost. It was about 4:30 at this point and we needed to decide what to do. We had just hiked 8 miles through the snow and the last thing we wanted to do was hike all the way back. But we all agreed that it was the right thing to do. So as tired as we all were, we hiked all the way back up to where the trail started, got a hold of our friend who dropped us off, and then hiked back down past the snow line so she could pick us up. All in all we hiked 16 miles through the snow, uphill both ways. It was an adventure I will never forget. We didn't even get close to where we were trying to go and none of us were expecting any amount of snow. I didn't think Zion could be full of so many surprises. :D
