Angels Landing in Zion makes your knees shake

I almost forgot the document our favorite hike in Zion here on the blog.  It was such a fun day.  Brian and I love to be outside.  We make it a priority during the workweek to spend time letting Samantha play outside and love to spend our weekends hiking beautiful Utah.  It's time for us to spend together and get away from the usual day to day routine.  Zion was right up our alley, and we purposely chose some of the more challenging hikes so that we could get some great pictures from high up in the mountains.

The hike starts out with this twisting, turning pathway straight up.  We stopped to look at a tarantula, take some pictures, talk to some people who were coming back down.  We kept passing the same people, then they would pass us, back and forth.  This part of the hike was actually better going up than going down.  On the way down it hurt my knees so bad and I kept having to walk backwards to make them feel better (Brian wanted to hold onto my arm when I did this so I wouldn't walk off the side of the mountain!). 

Brian wore his enormous mailman hat on the hike so of course I was obligated to make fun of him a couple of times :)

  The Angels Landing hike took us about 4 or 5 hours, I can't really remember but it seemed like a long time.  Everyone was warning us to take hats and tons of sunscreen, which we did, but this day was not super hot and we had some cloud cover while we were hiking most of the time.  We did make sure to drink tons of water/gatorade and we brought snacks for along the way.

Then we got to the part that I thought was the top

...Which turned out to not be the top at all, and the most treacherous part was still ahead.  It looks pretty scary before you start tackling it, but I saw some kids way off in the distance hiking the hardest part and then I knew I would probably be just fine.  Once you get going, you realize that it looks more difficult than it really is, but you really do need to be careful when doing this hike and hold onto the chains and rails that are built in to the rock.  We took it really slow during some parts just to be safe.  When we reached the top, I actually kind of felt sad that it was over because it was so exhilarating. 

 At the top, you are rewarded with the most beautiful view.

 Yep, this is the part that makes your legs shake.

 We did it!  Our plan was to reward ourselves with a huge dinner and lots of dessert when we got back down to the city.

The view from the top overlooking the entire canyon was well worth the hike.