I’m sipping “Frambozen”, a Raspberry Brown Ale produced by the New Belgium Brewing Co. in Fort Collins, CO. They’re best known for Fat Tire, a long time favourite of mine. Normally we haven’t been buying things like beer, trying to live off as little money as possible, but we decided to splurge after viewing the extensive beer selection at the Bashas’ grocery in Page, AZ. This beer is quite good, I’ve not had anything like it. For those of you who have had Lindeman’s Frambose Lambic, a sweet raspberry beer, this is not anywhere near as sweet but just as raspberry. It tastes very much like beer with a strong, fruity, raspberry flavor. Joanna and I both like it.

We spent a long time dawdling yesterday, it seems. We slept in a bit, showered, and ended up getting out of the RV park around 10am. Then we drove backwards 10 miles to Page and stopped at the Walmart where we purchased film and some flannel pants for me to sleep in. We looked for some snow chains, but they didn’t have any. We then went to the grocery store and got supplies. We’ve been eating Cambell’s Select soups when we can build a fire, and cheese, crackers, summer sausage or salami when we can’t. We’ve also got some bread and peanut butter to add variety. (Either peanut butter crackers or salami sandwiches.) Fitting any amount of food in this car with the gear we’ve already got is difficult, but we’ve been managing so far.

We left Page and got to Zion NP in Utah a few hours later. After setting up the tent, we set off to go hike a trail that started near the campground and pay for the campsite. It turns out that it costs $16/night to camp here, which is stupid expensive for a campsite. Campsites are usually around $5/night, $10 in expensive national parks. Zion is expensive– the entrance fee is $20. Fortunately for us it was free, since the Kaspryzak family gave us a National Park Pass. (At $50, it’s paid for itself by now…) I think that part of the reason it’s so expensive is because of the shuttle system here. In the summer, there are only about 450 parking spaces for about 5,000 per day. As a solution they’ve set up a shuttle system. It costs nothing to ride and stops at all the trails and apparently runs often. I suspect that this is an expensive system. It sounds like it works well, but it only runs from April-October. In the winter, the park is relatively quiet. Even so, there have been more people here than anywhere we’ve been so far, except perhaps Big Bend in the middle of the weekend.

After deciding to go ahead and pay for two nights, we set off for the Watchman Trail. It was 2.7 miles round trip and climbed about 400 feet. It was a nice little trail, and we were back around sunset.

The weather forecast in the visitor center indicated that the lows last night would be in the low 20s, and boy was it cold. We had the presence of mind to put the remaining beers inside the tent so they wouldn’t freeze. Last night was the first night I was at all cold, mostly because I wasn’t wearing any socks, and a t-shirt instead of a long sleeve shirt. I wasn’t very cold, just a little bit, and only near morning. Joanna says she wasn’t cold at all, which is good, but then she sleeps in long underwear, pants, three shirts and a sweatshirt.

But, it was quite cold. If we encounter weather much colder, I don’t think we’ll be happy. Our bottle of water froze quite solidly, and there was a fair amount of frost inside the tent even though the moisture vent was open.

This morning, we drove down to the end of the canyon and followed the 2 mile path by the river into the narrower part of the canyon. If it’s warm, or you’ve got the right gear, you can hike much farther provided you don’t mind walking in up to 4 feet of water. Since Joanna picked that trail, I got to pick the next one. There are quite a few trails, and after reading the description of all of them, I decided on one that was listed as “Strenuous,” and “Not for people afraid of heights,” and so on. It’s supposedly 5 miles round trip but climbs 1500ft.

It was beautiful and exhausting. My feet and ankles are especially tender. The first mile or so was easy, but the further we went, the steeper the climb. The trail is a fairly impressive bit of engineering itself, since it appears to have been carved into a relatively unyielding rock face. It’s roughly paved which made footing easy. As we got higher, though, we worked our way around to the shaded side of the mountain and encountered what had been snow but was now hard packed ice. The first little bit was easy enough, there were clean rocks to climb on or snow that wasn’t yet fully packed. As we got further though, it started looking like a bad idea. When a slip in the wrong place could mean literally falling off the mountain, I told Joanna I thought we ought to go back. She didn’t want to and eventually convinced me to go on ahead. The climb up involved carefully planting each foot, testing it and applying weight slowly. I fell twice, fortunately not badly. Some areas were okay, others seemed entirely devoid of appropriate footing. After finally reaching what looked like the top, we realized that the trail we were on continued another half mile up a trail only recognizable by the fact that there was a chain installed. The trail looked as though it would be extremely difficult in the summer and impossible in the winter. No one else appeared crazy enough, either. We sat at the edge of a thousand foot cliff and ate lunch, then started back down. Getting down the iced sections was more difficult. In some places, the only way we managed was to slide on our butts. While actually rather fun to go sliding down the switchbacks, our bottoms got rather cold and and wet.

On the way down, we passed all sorts of people who appeared far more adept at such things than us. An older man, who looked to be well over 60, wearing spandex passed us going up as we were heading down. Shortly thereafter, he passed us going down, apparently turning around where the ice got bad. Not too long after that, he passed us AGAIN, this time headed back up the hill. He said he was doing some sort of fitness training. I think he was crazy. And he wasn’t the only one. We spotted another guy heading back up the hill who had passed us coming down on our way up. Hiking is fun and all, but this masochistic yo-yo routine is beyond me.

We probably had enough time to hike another trail, but there was no way we could manage. We also could have packed up the tent and gone to the next park, but since we already paid for 2 nights, the obvious choice of sitting and doing nothing has been a much needed change.