November 9, 2009
Roads, running and red rocks
Just got back from a very nice weekend in southern Utah. Lindsay and I went down to St. George for the Snow Canyon Half Marathon, in which Lindsay was running and I absolutely was not. We stayed outside town on Friday with our friends Eddie and Eli. In the morning we went to St. George and got the girls on the bus to the start. Eddie and I passed the time drinking coffee at Jazzy Java, which is a coffee shop which apparently doubles as a concert venue some nights. Lindsay and Eli both finished the race in about two and one-quarter hours, which I was surely impressed by. After the race, Eddie and Eli headed back to Salt Lake and we met up with Melinda, another of our friends from the Tribune, and after lunch at a local Mexican place we headed for Zion Canyon and checked into the Zion Lodge. We took a short hike while we still had light and then went for a very nice dinner. The next morning we hiked up Angels Landing, a 1,400-foot climb that offers a nice view of the canyon.
View from Angels Landing.
Lindsay navigates one of the scary parts on the way up.
Grafton, a ghost town near Zion where the bicycle scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was shot.
Once down from the top, we took another short hike up to Weeping Rock, which, as you might imagine, is a rock with water pouring out of it, and Melinda started her journey back to SLC. Lindsay and I were going to camp for another night at Zion, but decided why not see another rugged Utah landmark and make the run over to Bryce Canyon. So we hit the road, spent the night outside the park, woke up before the sun to get to the rim and spend the morning looking at sights like this before making our trip home:
That tree in the foreground is almost 100 years old. As the canyon erodes away, the roots become more exposed.