Camping in Zion

Carina collected walking sticks while we hiked around Zion. They doubled nicely as fire pokers, and even worked for roasting marshmallos.

Carina is shown here in front of our tent, where we spent three nights while in Zion Nation Park. The temperatures in Zion were thus:

At daybreak, the temp was around 80 degrees, and it cooled off a little more until about 8am, when it began its climb up the scale onece again. It hit 90 by 10am, and by 12 it was over 100 degrees. The high each day was between 110 and 113, and one day enjoyed an unusual pairing with 40% humidity. Bleh.

Just before the 9pm sunset, when we found ourselves preparing dinner, the weather had cooled down to the high 90s, and we went to bet at dark, around 10pm, to an outside temperature of 90+ degrees. Yech. We began the first night with our rain fly on, but that lasted for about 10 minutes. We tore that badboy off and finally began to enjoy a light breeze around midnight.

The wind cooled things off enough to sleep by then. And even thought the overnight temperatures seemed merciful by comparison, our nights were the most unpleasant part of the trip. During the days, we kept cool by playing in the water, drinking cold water, etc, and we were plenty distracted with lots of neat stuff to look at and climb and wonder at. But lying on top of the nylon sleeping bag, fairly stuck to it anywhere skin was bare, was pure misery.

If you've never seen Zion canyon, we encourage you to add it to your list of places to see before you die. But we would strongly discourage camping there in July.

And this deer was in our campsite a few times daily. Pretty tame dude. We could get within ten feet of her before she'd start to show any sign of being worried what we were doing.