Hi Readers,
I have not written a blog post in a long time, because...I forgot. So here's a short post about my President's Day Weekend, when I embarked on what was probably the best trip that I've had in America. This happened almost 2 months ago (and I started a blog post about it 2 months ago..) but I'm just getting around to it now.
Starting a year ago, after seeing a New York Times travel article about it, I began planning for a trip to The Wave in Arizona. To go to the Wave, one must obtain a permit, which are given out in a monthly online lottery process. 10 permits are granted per day, and in the lottery process you can choose 3 days in a month to try your luck. For an entire year, I tried my luck every month, and failed every single month. In October, I received the prized email that I had been waiting for, which gave me 4 permits for the day of February 17th, 2012. I had applied for the date blindly, and by sheer luck it turned out to be the President Day's long weekend. So excitedly, I gathered 3 other people (GA, NO, and AZ), and began planning an epic trip. And an epic trip it was.
Because my hiking permits were for Friday the 17th, that meant that we had to arrive in the area by Thursday night. Therefore, we planned on flying to Las Vegas on Thursday night, renting a car and driving to Kanab, UT, and staying the night there. Potential problems began emerging very early on. We almost missed out flight to Las Vegas, we were delayed an hour in getting our rental car, and by the time we had arrived to Kanab it was 5am. I was worried a lot that first night. Worried that the others wouldn't be able to wake up in the morning in time for us to drive an hour to the Wave and to do the 6-mile roundtrip hike, or just worried in general that something would go wrong and we wouldn't be able to go to the Wave.
But, it turned out to be amazing! We woke up around 9am, and got to the Waves around noon (after an intense 8-mile bumpy dirt road). We hiked for 3 miles to get to the Wave, and it was very worth it! The weather was fantastic this time of year, around 80 degrees and sun-drenched. The Waves themselves were smaller than I had imagined, but it was just so awesome to see what I had dreamed about for so long. We took loads of pictures there and then headed back, in the midst of the tall shadows cast from the sun's rays on all the weird rock formations.
The next day we hit up Bryce Canyon. Bryce is quite indescribable, almost like a fairyland. There are loads of rock formations called Hoodoos, and the sheer extent of them are quite incredible. We spent the majority of the day driving around to all of the viewpoints and taking pictures. We did manage to get in a hike around the rim of the Bryce Amphitheater, and we saw the sunset. The scenery was really beautiful. If it weren't so cold and covered in snow and ice there, we might have been able to do more hiking. Oh well, save it for the next time!
The day after, we hit up both Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park and Zion National Park. The sand dunes were not bad to look at, but the snow covering them definitely made it a lot less exciting. They essentially just looked like giant snowdrifts. However, we spent 2-3 hours there just having fun in the snow. We rolled down the sand dunes, had snowball fights, and built a snowman. It was a really fun time! By the time we left the dunes, there was not much time to fully enjoy Zion (not that we could have done much with only a day there anyways), but we still got to see the amazing scenery there. It reminds me of Yosemite quite a bit. As we left Zion all exhausted, we stopped by an awesome burger place, courtesy of Yelp, before continuing our way to Las Vegas for the night. We had intended to celebrate GA's birthday that night in LV, but we were all so tired that we crashed soon after reaching LV.
On the last day of the trip, we took a detour from the "boring" way back to SF, and decided to take the highway through Death Valley National Park. It turned out to be a very nice and meandering route through the desolate wilderness, one where GA suffered from car sickness (there were a lot of windy turns) and we almost didn't make it back to SF in time to return our car.
The trip was tremendously fun! Here are some pictures. Cheers!
-FCDH
I have not written a blog post in a long time, because...I forgot. So here's a short post about my President's Day Weekend, when I embarked on what was probably the best trip that I've had in America. This happened almost 2 months ago (and I started a blog post about it 2 months ago..) but I'm just getting around to it now.
Starting a year ago, after seeing a New York Times travel article about it, I began planning for a trip to The Wave in Arizona. To go to the Wave, one must obtain a permit, which are given out in a monthly online lottery process. 10 permits are granted per day, and in the lottery process you can choose 3 days in a month to try your luck. For an entire year, I tried my luck every month, and failed every single month. In October, I received the prized email that I had been waiting for, which gave me 4 permits for the day of February 17th, 2012. I had applied for the date blindly, and by sheer luck it turned out to be the President Day's long weekend. So excitedly, I gathered 3 other people (GA, NO, and AZ), and began planning an epic trip. And an epic trip it was.
Because my hiking permits were for Friday the 17th, that meant that we had to arrive in the area by Thursday night. Therefore, we planned on flying to Las Vegas on Thursday night, renting a car and driving to Kanab, UT, and staying the night there. Potential problems began emerging very early on. We almost missed out flight to Las Vegas, we were delayed an hour in getting our rental car, and by the time we had arrived to Kanab it was 5am. I was worried a lot that first night. Worried that the others wouldn't be able to wake up in the morning in time for us to drive an hour to the Wave and to do the 6-mile roundtrip hike, or just worried in general that something would go wrong and we wouldn't be able to go to the Wave.
But, it turned out to be amazing! We woke up around 9am, and got to the Waves around noon (after an intense 8-mile bumpy dirt road). We hiked for 3 miles to get to the Wave, and it was very worth it! The weather was fantastic this time of year, around 80 degrees and sun-drenched. The Waves themselves were smaller than I had imagined, but it was just so awesome to see what I had dreamed about for so long. We took loads of pictures there and then headed back, in the midst of the tall shadows cast from the sun's rays on all the weird rock formations.
The next day we hit up Bryce Canyon. Bryce is quite indescribable, almost like a fairyland. There are loads of rock formations called Hoodoos, and the sheer extent of them are quite incredible. We spent the majority of the day driving around to all of the viewpoints and taking pictures. We did manage to get in a hike around the rim of the Bryce Amphitheater, and we saw the sunset. The scenery was really beautiful. If it weren't so cold and covered in snow and ice there, we might have been able to do more hiking. Oh well, save it for the next time!
The day after, we hit up both Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park and Zion National Park. The sand dunes were not bad to look at, but the snow covering them definitely made it a lot less exciting. They essentially just looked like giant snowdrifts. However, we spent 2-3 hours there just having fun in the snow. We rolled down the sand dunes, had snowball fights, and built a snowman. It was a really fun time! By the time we left the dunes, there was not much time to fully enjoy Zion (not that we could have done much with only a day there anyways), but we still got to see the amazing scenery there. It reminds me of Yosemite quite a bit. As we left Zion all exhausted, we stopped by an awesome burger place, courtesy of Yelp, before continuing our way to Las Vegas for the night. We had intended to celebrate GA's birthday that night in LV, but we were all so tired that we crashed soon after reaching LV.
On the last day of the trip, we took a detour from the "boring" way back to SF, and decided to take the highway through Death Valley National Park. It turned out to be a very nice and meandering route through the desolate wilderness, one where GA suffered from car sickness (there were a lot of windy turns) and we almost didn't make it back to SF in time to return our car.
The trip was tremendously fun! Here are some pictures. Cheers!
 |
| At the Wave! |
 |
| Bryce Amphitheater in Bryce Canyon |
 |
| Our awesome snowman! |
 |
| Overlooking Zion Valley |
 |
| Me and NO |
Posts
覺得那張wave的照片還蠻棒的!
ReplyDelete謝謝! 我也很喜歡那張照片!!
ReplyDelete