South Utah Road Trip
Angel's Landing ridge approachAfter the mayhem of the return journey from Hilo I had only two days to prepare for my next trip - two days to deal with all the data from the run and finish up a number of other work responsibilities, pack for what could potentially be six weeks away from home, and attempt to rotate my schedule from night to day. Fortunately, I was somehow able to actually accomplish all of that - and on Friday morning I got in the car and headed out of town to begin my first solo interstate road trip!
The occasion/excuse for the trip was an upcoming scientific conference in Aspen, Colorado (where there is a physics center that holds year-round meetings and workshops - more on this in a future entry, I suppose). Of course the fastest way to get there would be to fly, but flights to Aspen are obscenely expensive, and if I wanted to do anything fun in Aspen I anticipated that I would have to rent a car, which would be even more expensive. Alternatively, however, I could drive it out - and since the route from LA to Aspen happens to be one of the most scenic long drives in the country and was dotted with national parks and monuments, this had some intrinsic appeal on its own!
View from Angel's Landing
So I set out on Friday, starting the trip with a relatively uneventful day: passing through Barstow and Las Vegas and a small corner of Arizona before reaching St. George, Utah in time for dinner and to check into a hotel for the evening, going to bed early in preparation for an early start the next day, in which I'd planned to visit nearby Zion National Park.
I woke up very early (around 5:30), packed things up, and got dressed in my hiking gear. I then went over to my computer to look into reserving a hotel for the next night - and was horrified to discover that it wouldn't boot. This was potentially catastrophic - while I didn't need the computer for the weekend and had fortunately had the foresight to run a complete backup of the hard drive the previous day, without a functioning computer I would be able to get almost nothing done during the upcoming conference (or any further travel afterwards). I seriously considered returning to Pasadena (it was "only" 6 or 7 hours) to retrieve a backup laptop I have sitting at home (a newer machine I bought but never really liked and generally don't use) but felt already psychologically committed to the Zion trip and wasn't in the mood to make a snap decision that entailed another 10+ hours of extra driving - so I packed everything up and continued on as planned, deciding to think it over while hiking and return home later in the day if I decided that was what I needed to do.
The main objective in Zion was to hike to the top of Angel's Landing, a narrow knife-edge like ridge rising about 1800 feet above a bend in the valley in the middle of the park. The trail was extremely crowded but not difficult as it wound its way up the mountain on a paved, concrete path, then ascended along the ridge towards the summit. This last part was marked by steep slopes and narrow dropoffs (with guard rails to hang onto for safety) but was not difficult and I summited around noon, capturing some awesome views of the valley below.
After I got back to the trailhead the computer issue unfortunately came back to the fore - I still had time to return to Pasadena that night and then take the interstate route out to Colorado, instead of continuing the road-trip mini-vacation as planned. Before doing that, though, I poked a hardware-savvy friend for advice on the issue, who pointed out that the problems could in principle just be the result of a problematic battery. And, after a quick test in the park visitor center the computer was suddenly working fine, so - flush with that good news - I headed back into the park for some more hiking.
Bryce Canyon
There wasn't actually much left to do in Zion that was suitable for the couple hours I had left in the day before I had to head east, but I did take the shuttle all the way to the end of the road and hike up the river to the Narrows (where the canyon closes into a narrow slot around the river) and back, and briefly stopped at a few other locations. After that, it was time to continue the roadtrip; east through the tunnel and onto Kanab, where I found a motel and crashed for the night in preparation for another early morning.
The first stop for Sunday was Bryce Canyon, a long eroded mesa rim that has formed into thousands of strangely-shaped "hoodoos" that form an alien sort of landscape. Since I had a long drive set out for that day I didn't do a huge amount of hiking (or even see the entirety of the park), though I did a quick 3-mile trip down from the rim and back up again. After that followed a long, scenic drive through some of the more remote streches of southern Utah, with a few brief stops to examine the gorgeous views and an only slightly longer stop at Capitol Reef National Park late in the afternoon for a brief hike to a natural arch.
Eventually I reached I-70, and a few hours of uneventful driving followed before I finally pulled into Aspen around midnight. With the computer still functioning, time to get back to work! Well, sort of...