Vacation part 8, in Which the Boy Goes Hiking

Sunday afternoon is usually perfect for a nap... except this time I had not led the service and I wasn't feeling particularly wiped out (ah, the wonders of being on vacation), and there was still a lot of Zion to be hiked...

One place I wanted to visit was Kolob Canyon, the northwest part of Zion (outside the main park). Tara found a good sounding hike and she, Jonathan, and I headed out for a hike. We chose to hike the Taylor Creek Trail (the referenced site has a good description of the trail). It is a 5 mile roundtrip, but we figured that we could turn around any time and if we needed to, we could take turns carrying Jonathan.

The trail followed along Taylor Creek, and it soon became evident that creek crossings would be the order of the day. We were glad to be wearing Keens. (Aw, shucks, Blogger will only let me upload 5 pics per post. I'll post more with some creek-crossing pictures). Jonathan loved it! Did I mention how convenient it was that he had his own Camelbak hydration pack? Not only did he get to be a "real hiker" but he got to carry his own water as well.

He also loved climbing on (and over) the rocks.

One highlight for me was that we would get to see some old log cabins built by frontiersmen. Turns out we completely missed the first one on the way up, but we found the second one.

We were getting rather tired and figured that this would be a good place to turn around, so we stopped and ate some food. But then another hiker came by from up the trail, telling us that we were only 10-15 minutes from the end of the trail. We figured we could handle that.