The Subway

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These pictures (above and below) are the type of pictures you can get in the Subway when the lighting is right. The lighting wasn't right when we were hiking, so I found these online to show how amazing this hike really is. Our pictures are going to look pretty lame now.
 

The subway is probably the most popular hike in Zion. It's about 10 miles and requires swimming through certain sections and some small repels.  A permit is required and they let only 80 people into the canyon a day. For June this year, there were 20,000 applications for permits.

Jason and Regan have done this hike before, but it was a first for me.  We also took a boy from the ward and Jason's friend and his daughter. We went at the first of May and the weather wasn't great.  Here we are about to drop into the canyon and it was raining.  It's not the place you want to be if there's any chance of flash flood, but the weather was mostly just drizzly rain and there weren't any flash flood warnings.  I was still a little bit nervous, though.  I kept wondering where the other 73 people were.  We were the only ones to hike it from the top down that day.  We saw a few hiking up a little ways from the bottom when we got near the end.

Cute little frogs that are all over the canyon.

Thank goodness for dry suits.  A customer at the cart hooked us up with some for half price.  That water was COLD!  Even in the middle of summer it can be frigid.  We stayed nice and warm in our dry suits, though.  All but our hands. 

Here on the "natural waterslide" is where our camera died.  Otherwise we would have had some darn funny video of ourselves.  I really haven't laughed that hard in a long time.  It was faster...and bumpier than it looked. 























Towards the end of the hike, that seems to go on and on and on because the best part was over, is the part where you have to hike like straight up a cliff to get out of the canyon. And the part where I find out I'm really not in shape.  Not that I thought I was.  But WOW.  That was bad. I was suddenly grateful for the rain.  I can't imagine hiking up that in the heat of the day. Even so, It's a great hike and hopefully we'll be able to take the younger kids through some day.