The Narrows

Carynn and I had the opportunity to have two days off in a row this last week; we decided to take full advantage of that.


Not long ago we decided that we wanted to hike the Narrows. After some planning, packing, and scrambling last minute, we were off to our two day adventure. Several people may be familiar with the Narrows hike in Zion. Most people that know of it however, have probablly not even seen half of it.


The full hike of the Narrows is a 16-mile hike that is one way. It starts at a place called Chamberlains Ranch that is 13-miles up the road from where we live which made accessing it very convenient. You hike along in through the virgin river the entire time. The water temperature when we hiked was about 52 degrees. If you are in the sun the entire time and only crossing the river occaisionally, the water would have been quite tolerable. When you are in the water for 75% of the time and see the sunlight for 15 minutes total throughout your day however, you need something a little more. We rented some dry pants, neoprine socks and some specially designed water hiking shoes.

Our hike started out as I mentioned at Chamberlains Ranch. We crossed beautiful meadows, thick forests and leaves that were so incredibly vibrant it would blow your mind! Taking short breaks here and there to take pictures and adjust our packs, we were able to really soak in the beauty of the area before the canyon.

Right before entering into Zion and exiting Chamberlains ranch, Carynn needed to staop to make a couple of adjustments to her pack. As we were adjusting it, we heard a gun shot way off in the woods (it was during hunting season) and no soon we heard a extremly loud crack no more than fifteen feet away from us. The bullet had escaped the woods and hit a large rock right by us. Had Carynn not stopped to adjust her pack, we would have been right in the line of fire. Thank goodness we said a prayer before left, someone had to have been watching out for us! That was our only heart racing part of our trip.

We stopped for lunch and dressed ourselves in our dry pant outfits. Not the easiest things to put on since it is a lot of rubber gaskets that squeeze your ankles but the proved to be very effective. We trudged on, walking stick in hand mile after mile. Time kept ticking and the light started to fade. Looking at our map we realized we were about two miles from our campsite, and if we kept with the pace we were going we were going to be setting up our camp in some pretty dark blackness of night. We decided to step it up and just bust through the next two miles. We covered that ground in fourty minutes, pretty good good for carrying 30 - 50 pound packs through rocky rivers with fast flowing water.

We arrived at campsite nine after covering 10 miles in 7 hours and 43 minutes. It was a welcome treat to get out of the dry pants and into some warm wool socks and eat some warm chili and soup. The night was a lot warmer than we were anticipating which made sleeping very easy; the morning however was a little more chilly than we would have liked.

We held off putting our wet dry-pants back on as long as we could as we packed up our camp. Once we got them on and got back in the cold river though, we warmed right up. We hiked for another 2 miles to the point where people that want to do just a day hike can go. This is where we saw the first person we had seen on the hike. We had been the only two that day to hike all the way through the Narrows and everyone wanted to talk to us asking us how it was and if it is any different on the upper portion. We felt like our own little hiking celebrities. We saw a lot of neat waterfalls, of course the cool narrow part of the Narrows amongst other things. Unfortunatley, the walls are so high that it doesn't let a lot of light in making it very difficult for our pictures to turn out. We didn't take many of the canyon because it just turned out to look like a rock wall. My advice, get a permit, pack your bag and take the adventure of doing all 16-miles of the Narrows.

By the time we got out of the canyon after hiking about 6-miles in 5 hours and 5 minutes, we accomplished all 16-miles in 12 hours and 49 minutes. That is of course excluding the overnight part and is just reffering to hiking specifically. All in all, a LOT of fun.






Our hike started at the top right of the map where the upper red line begins. Follow it all the way to the end of the red line and that is what we did. Ignore the second red line, that is a different canyon that connects to the Narrows.