Zion NP to Arches NP

Zion National Park was one of the parks I definitely did not want to miss. I had read a lot about it and found out that you could do the best day-hike of North America there. It was a hike called Angels Landing, because if you stand on top of the mountain it feels as if you can see angels landing there, touching you from the sky! It was a very hard and sometimes dangerous walk, because you were climbing up the mountain without any safety nets and the drop-off was enormous! They even had a sign saying that 6 people had died while taking the hike since 2004…who said hiking was good for you?!

After that walk, we decided to do the dumbest thing ever and do the other hike right after that. We had already walked for more than 4,5 hours and we went for another 2,5 hour walk into the canyon. It was however an amazing experience since we had to walk through the river the whole time we were in the canyon. The water was freezing cold, the current of the river was extreme and our shoes were very wet! We wouldn’t have want to missed it for the world, because both of them were extremely worth wile.

After Zion, the Grand Canyon felt a bit as a disappointment, but it was still breath taking to look at the wideness of the canyon. We have been so lucky with the weather this whole trip because we had cloudless days almost all the time we have been here and that makes for some real cool pictures of course.

The front picture of our map was a picture of Horse Shoe Bend and when we saw it, we said we wanted to see it for ourselves, so it became our next stop. We got there at nightfall and wanted to take some pictures with the river and the stars, but because the river was so far down, it was almost impossible to get both it and the stars on one picture. So, after some debate, we decided to stay the night there on the parking lot and go back to the bend the next day for some daylight pictures. It is just so amazing how awesomely big the United States are and how diverse the landscape can be at some places!

The drive through Monument Valley is also incredible!

Arches was one of the National Parks that was on my agenda since we first entered the Unites States. I saw some really cool pictures of it and I just wanted to go and see it for myself in real life. It was actually more beautiful than what I saw on the pictures. The park itself was so huge (even though it is one of the smaller ones in the US) and the mountains and arches were very impressive to look at. Even though it was a weekday, it was still fairly crowded, but by the time the sun was setting at the horizon, most of the people left, so we had the place almost all to ourselves.

I liked just sitting there, staring out over the vast emptiness and the combination with all these weird shapes just made it feel out of this world…