The Subway

Over the past weekend we went down to Zions to hike "The Subway" with our favorite family David and Janelle Phipps and their darling little girl Hazel. This was Ben's 3rd time so he knew what we were in for and had loved it both times before. Subway is the upper part of The Narrows and takes about 8 hours.

We spent the night in Cedar City at Janelle's mom's place and then friday morning, we left Hazel behind with her Grandma and took off for the Subway. It was the most amazing hike I've ever been on in my life! Everything was perfect, the weather, the scenery, the company, the canyons and water.
We lost sight of the trail a couple of times which added some time to our hike but the second time we kind of came to a dead end at the edge of a cliff and we knew we had to get down to the bottom of the canyon somehow. We could hear and see the water down below, but we were on a cliff that was too steep to descend. David and Janelle were hanging on to a steep ledge, trying to decide if they could use the rope and go for it while Ben was off looking for a better way to get down. He started to slip on some lose rocks and caught himself with a cactus! Poor man, he had hundreds of stickers in his palm and somehow on his bum! I meanwhile was trying everything not to wet my pants waiting for them to decide what to do. We were in quite a predicament. After much thought, we finally decided to go back (which wasn't easy at all) and find another route. Which was great because we found a much easier way down. Finally, we were off the hot sandstone out in the open and we were down in the slot canyons.
This part was so cool. We had to swim and tred with our bags above our heads in the freezing water! But it felt SO good and was so refreshing to get wet.
A couple of times we had to repel with some rope we brought. This one was pretty scary I don't know why but it descended pretty gradually and then all of a sudden got so steep you couldn't see over the edge. It was all arm strength!
Ben and Dave went down this waterfall on their bums. It was so funny. It was quite a drop at the beginning as you can see, and their faces instantly changed from joy to "OUCH!" as they zoomed all the way down. SO funny.This part was one of the funniest of the whole hikes. We had finished a swimming part and I was carrying Dave's bag. It was shallow, only up to our thighs and Ben said "I think we're done with the swimming part for now" and suddenly my next step, I was GONE! I went completely under water! Dave said he saw it and as soon as I disappeared my left hand shot right up with the bag and I was totally underwater. I couldn't even touch! I was treading and threw the bag at Ben and found my footing again. It was hilarious. Sweet save!!Janelle and I had to keep switching shoes because we had such big blisters. It was horrible. Especially at the end when it was switchbacks uphill after 9 hours of hiking. We were so pooped. We went to Subway and each ate a footlong and some fries. So good.
We hiked until about 8:30 that night and we were toast for the rest of the weekend. We had planned on camping that night and hiking Angel's Landing the next day, but our muscles were shot and our feet were covered in blisters, so we went back to Janelle's mom's and did nothing all day Saturday but eat junk food, play Settler's and watch movies in the most amazing theatre room ever. It was a fantastic weekend.