Oct. 2016
This wonderful hike will take you through some of deepest and tightest canyon in the world...well maybe not in the world but yea its pretty neat.
Description of route
Length- 16 miles
Time- approx 10 hrs
Trips and Tricks
Hire a shuttle service
Wets suits and socks for the spring and fall
Know the bus shuttle inside the park, more specifically the last bus stop time pick up time form your ending location (Temple of Sinawava). Otherwise you'll be walking a extra 4 miles to the visitor center.
Neoprene socks, will save your life or just make your trip much more enjoyable
For this trip we arrived in Zion late in the evening a day prior to winning the permit and started to work out details. cough cough* just like any other great adventure planning is every thing. :-) (Plan ahead, business aren’t open late)
I ended up in Zion the day prior and making it to the permit office about 30 mins before closing, then scrambling to figure out a shuttle service that was open and still had availability.
righttttt
1 year prior some friends and I won a permit for this hike. The Narrows top down. Little did we know that the TH (trail head) was a 1.5 hr drive up some narrow and bumpy dirt roads. Well we got to the back country office and upon receiving our permit we were told that he wouldn't have enough daylight to get through the hike and would miss the last bus out of the valley and would be hiking in the cold darkness. So we opted for another canyon. Plan ahead.
This time around we were prepared...or so we thought. I was advised to find a shuttle service that would take us to the trail head early in the AM so we could avoid the 1.5hr shuttle up in the morning and then the 1.5hr shuttle back after a very long and cold day then 1.5hr back to camp. I found a couple of options online and was able to secure a 6am departure shuttle. BOOSH
Next up was to find a camp site for the evening, lucky for me I knew of a BLM land camp site. The camp was located about 20 mins from the west entrance from Zion NP, pretty ideal. The camp site was empty and I was stoked. Waiting on my buddy to Steve to show up I made some dinner. He ended up showing up around 1am, set up his tent, quickly discussed plans then attempted to get some sleeep. My alarm was set for 5am.
The morning came and so did the near freezing temperatures. We grabbed our wet suits and packs for the day and proceed to the shuttle pick up location. We jumped in a van well before sunrise. I made an attempt at sleeping in the van but I couldn't get comfortable along the bumpy gravel road.
We arrived at the trail head with frost on the ground. Perfect. Its a good mile or so before we started working down the icy creek into the Narrows.
