On Sunday, April 29th, we headed back into Zion for our final full day in the park.  Below is a shot looking back at the quaint little bungalow village we stayed in on our trip.

We couldn’t decide which trails to visit as we felt that most that were left were easy.  However, after some debate, we decided to try Hidden Canyon.

The way up was mostly made of steep and wide switchbacks.

Below I’m pretending to boulder up one of the steep canyon walls on the switchbacks.

And below I’m holding a loose boulder from falling on the tourists below. If only they knew…

There were many cottonwood trees on the path.  The leaves of the tree feel like soft cotton (which is why I’m assuming they have the name).

At the end of the switchbacks is a staircase in stone.

At the top of the stairs starts the harrowing chained path blasted out of the side of the mountain that wraps around to the actual entrance to Hidden Canyon.  We saw a few other hikers turn back when faced with this, but after conquering Angel’s Landing this was a piece of cake for us.

This video sort of describes the experience:

After going up and around the corner one comes to a pool of water that empties out of the canyon.  This is the real trailhead for the canyon part of the Hidden Canyon hike.  The hike begins with some scrambling up boulders, but after that is mostly just walking through a pleasant shaded valley of sand between two high canyon walls.

We had heard that the canyon keeps going for a long time, gets more perilous and eventually ends at a steep cliff drop off.  However, we turned around at the half mile point when we saw the famous green arch.

Below are more shots of us coming back down the chained bend.  It’s always less scary going down, so we got slightly more foolish and posed for photos out on the cliffs.

In the below photo looking out from the switchbacks you can see the “big bend” and Angel’s Landing to the left.

After finishing the hike we agreed to go back into town and shower up before getting some dinner and ice cream.  Later Sam and I came back in to try and catch the sunset on the trail up from the Grotto.  We didn’t make the sunset but we found a curious fox while we waited for dark.

We both tried to take some night shots after the sun went down, but due to the twilight lingering and the moon being so bright, neither of us got anything usable before we had to scuttle back down the trial to catch the last bus out of the park.  Back in the Zion parking lot I tried to get a few more night shots.