Angels Landing, Zion National Park - May 2014

This post is a little late, but I wanted to include the description of the hike since it's an amazing one. We did this hike on our 2014 cross country trip.

 The trail starts out tame enough. We cross over the scenic river by bridge.

Follow the pathway along the river.

Some of the walkway is paved.

Random flowers along the way. 

Not far along, the paved path starts to go up the mountain. They carved out the side of the cliff to put in this path. This must have been an incredible amount of work.

Not far up the trail, you can already see distant views.

 

This photo shows the view of the crazy twisting path. We were thankful to get out of the sun after a while.

 

Another view of the paved pathway up to the top.

Once you get to the first level section, you can look behind you and see a view. The first walkway leads up to a canyon.

 

 Bridge in the canyon.

 

 This is a view of the rock formations. This must have formed long ago when water was up this high carving around the rock.

View of people climbing up the next (and more difficult) section of trail.

The squirrels at the top of the mountain are so tame and used to people (and used to being fed) that they'll practically climb up right into your backpack if you aren't looking.

Once you get to the plateau, you can stop here and enjoy the view (like many people do) or you can continue on the ridiculously hard part of the trail.

This guy didn't seem to get the hint that he wasn't supposed to pose for the picture. Nonetheless, this sign warns of all the dangers of Angel's landing. We watched one guy get impatient waiting for the 

 Much of the trail is these fairly slick rocks. You have to climb by way of the metal chains most of the way.

This is actually a view of the trail. The trail climbs the spine of this rock tower.

 Most of the photos of the trip are of me for a change. I don't know why, but husband decided he should hold the camera instead of me. I spent a large amount of time crawling on my hands and knees not to fall off a 1000 foot cliff. Him holding the camera was okay by me!

Don't look over the edge if you have vertigo!

This was one of those points where there was a drop on both sides of the trail. Thankfully they included a handrail to hold onto. They carved foot steps in the rock.

Another view of the trail with the view the whole way.

View from the trail.

Another view of the spine of the mountain.

Husband and the trail. (Apparently I got at least one chance to take a photo! Must have been pretty flat there.)

Trail goes that way. 

Another view from the trail of the valley below. You could practically see the whole park from the trail.

View of my butt.

A rest spot along the way.

I think the trail is pretty steep at this point and you have to crawl up and down the trail on hands and knees.

Close to the end of the trail. 

View from the end of the trail. 

This chippie was at the top of the mountain at the end of the trail. He knew where the people would be. This chippie practically crawled into Frank's backpack.

 

 Hard to even get a seat at the top of the trail. There were enough people at the top that it was hard to find a spot. And it's such work to get there, nobody wants to leave. Everybody hogged the best spots.

Frank feeding the hungry chippie who climbed into his lap. 

 Walking back down to the start of the trail. This is a view looking down on the switchbacks that are near the end of the paved trail. They are all built into the mountain. Sure beats climbing gear.

Walking back down to the start of the trail. 

Along the way back, another hiker alerted us to an owl that was in a small nook in the rocks. He was too far away to get a good photo. We also saw a fox (or a coyote) that was carrying some sort of dinner (squirrel or rabbit). I only got a couple long-distance quick shots. He was walking in the canyon below the main trail.

Mongaup Pond Campground New York

We realized as the leaves were turning, we were going to need to dump the camper before we could winterize it. Unfortunately, there are no easy dump stations around so we headed upstate New York to the Catskills for a quick weekend away and a final camping weekend for our camper. We chose Mongaup Pond.

We barely backed the camper into site #112 when the locals came to visit. Apparently we are on a daily visitation route since they came back at the same time both nights.

They stayed for maybe about half an hour, especially when we started feeding them. We just gave them one slice of bread just to thank them for visiting. I'm sure the regular visitors feed them constantly. They were fat!!

Kay with her band of quackers.

There was a male duck in the group who was the dominant male. When we fed one of his group members instead of him, he angrily bit their tail feathers, even though it was our fault that we fed that duck. We often threw a piece to the member who was farthest away just to make sure they got their share. The dominant male would take food right out of your hand if you let him. The bravest I got was to drop a piece an inch or two from the air and have him catch it.

Random pretty leaf.

A nice view of our camper and camp site with the fall trees in nice color.

Our little friends eventually got tired of us and flew back into the pond and swam away. They disappeared in seconds.

 A nice roaring fire.

The sun shed a little bit more evening light on the trees across the lake giving them an electric glow of orange.

Electric glow of last rays of sunlight while a random canoe passes by.

Last rays of sun.

Moonlight reflecting on the water. Play with the aperture, speed and ISO and you get all kinds of different results.

 I turned down the ISO and sped up the shutter and you can see more accurately how dark it is on the lake. I still could not get the details of the moon in the photo. It shows up as a "dark sun" when it's really a bright moon.

 

 

View of the trees over our camper:

Trees at our campsite.

Trees at our campsite.

Another view of the camper and the campsite. We could not see or hear any other camper at this time of year, but even with the campground full, we would expect this site to be pretty quiet and private.

View of our campsite from between ours and the next campsite.

This is a view of the lake from our campsite. You can barely see into the campsite next door because there is so much vegetation in the way.

View of the bathrooms from the site next to us. This would have also been a good site but we didn't need to be so close to the neighbors. I thought the bathrooms would be pit toilets but they are regular flush toilets. They don't have hot water or paper towels though so it's cold. The campground had to close soon after we were there because the temperature starts dropping below 32 degrees and these bathrooms need to be winterized.

This is a shot of the campsite next door (site #111 or 110?). It also would have been nice but 

A view of our campsite from the camp road. While the main campground roads are paved, the sites are not and they are pretty warn in. Also, there are a lot of trees so you may have trouble backing a big rig in to one of these sites. A fifth wheel parked a couple sites down from us and I think it took them an hour to back in to the spot. I wasn't sure they were going to make it but somehow they did. We had trouble just getting our relatively small rig in this campsite.

View of our campground loop. The spot straight ahead is where the fifth wheel parked later in the day.

Random trees overhead.

Random other campsite on our loop. Some of the sites had steep driveways and trees preventing long rigs from getting in them.

Random campsites in the neighborhood. Some campsites especially along the lake edge were very nice but other sites were just plain yucky or odd. There was a huge variation. This site does not look well used because you couldn't even see a "driveway" where somebody parked. Sometimes the spaces weren't even flat enough that you could figure out where to put a tent. Perhaps a backpacker or a cross-country bike might use a spot like this, but certainly not an RV, 2 cars or a large tent.

Site #98 doesn't look too bad either.

Another site.

Another campsite.

There was a handicap access fishing deck along the lake. This time of year, we had it all to ourselves.

A walk along the road near loops A, B and C and the campground entrance.

Walking to the other side of the campground to loops A, B and C.

The campsites on loops A, B and C were closer together, less used, and less desirable in general. The only plus was that there was nobody around so you could be as noisy as you wanted. There were 2 people camping in this area.

Site #92 would show on a map as being near the water, but it's quite a hike to the water and you can't entirely see it from your campsite. As a bonus, the people on the opposite side of the lake where we were are not going to see tent after tent on the other side of the lake.

Some red trees on fire across the lake. The sky was overcast and came out completely washed out white. I'm not sure why other photographers claim they love cloudy and overcast skies.

Furry caterpillar.

The bottle caps stuck to this table gave us an indication of what this campground may be like during the busy season.

Sites at this loop were very close together. You can see about 6 or more sites from this spot. If it was a busy weekend, there would probably be wall to wall tents in site. Many of these sites were too small for RVs and meant mostly for small tents. Barely enough room for a car and a tent. Most sites were covered with grass and no tire tracks indicating that they were not well used.

There were some brightly colored leaves in the forest. I don't know what kind of tree this is.