June 15: Kaibab National Forest, Arizona

We woke up the next morning in Vegas, not really fitting the description in the song “Waking up in Vegas,” which was slightly disappointing. Instead, we hopped right in the car and headed out of Nevada.

Our first stop was Zion National Park, where we took the shuttle bus through the canyon and stopped along the way to check out the sights. We took a hike along the river – and eventually in the river – at the end of the route.

Where the trail ended, we took off our hiking boots and walked through the Virgin River, stopping along its banks to eat the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches we had packed. After hiking around several more river bends, we turned around and headed back to dry land, where we walked back to the shuttle bus in our bare feet.

After Zion, we drove south into Arizona (and back an hour, since Arizona does not recognize daylight savings time), where we went to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. We took some pictures, trying to capture its vastness, but most we just walked around, staring down into it, trying to find the bottom.

We found some spots on the porch of the lodge, where we ate some pizza and waited for the sunset. Unfortunately, it was overcast, so while the sky changed color slightly, it wasn’t much of a sunset.

Before it got completely dark, we headed out of the park and into the Kaibab National Forest, where you can camp anywhere for free as long as you are ¼ of a mile off the road. It was unclear to us how this worked, since there was no parking but there were signs that said not to drive over the meadows, so it was dark by the time we found a road to a trailhead that we could drive up. About a mile up the road, we found a place to pull off. Once again, we decided to sleep in the car, as there was no even ground around, and it was too dark to set up the tent anyway.