Subway, Again. This time with Jamie. She has never hiked it so I snagged a
permit and we drove in Friday night with the intention of getting an early start.That did not happen as the alarm was set for 6pm instead of 6am. That was OK because I was wide awake at 6:32. Jamie said I "flew" out of bed. We prepared our gear the night before so we were on the road in no time. It was about a 35 minute drive to the trailhead. My goal for this hike is always to be hiking by 8am. It is a one way hike and there is a problem of retrieving the car if we leave it at the upper trailhead.
Jamie asked how we were going to get the car shuttled since it was a one way hike,
I answered, "It will be provided!". And it was. A couple of fisherman gave us a
lift... from the lower trailhead to the upper trailhead. After they dropped us
off we noticed the black clouds all around. In fact, one group of guys bailed on
the hike as they were worried about the weather, particularly, flash flooding.
We hit the trail hoping for the best. I could not belive how cool the temperature
was. August in Zion, it was supposed to be 100 degrees. We overcame a group of 3 hikers who had never done the hike before, but they had they weather forecast. More rain, they said. Jamie and I picked up the pace and they sort of shadowed us. They let us do the route finding for them.
We made it down Russell Gulch and up past the sandstone "boob" before it started raining. We hustled toward the cleft chute where I knew we could find shelter but it started pouring before that and out came the raingear. We went down the chute and into the canyon of the Left Fork. We cleared the first obstacle in the usual fashion,
"that sure could have gone better". We no longer worried about the rain for we
would be swimming soon. At the first water obstacle we changed socks to neoprene
booties. Our dry bag kept our water out of food and dry clothes--pretty well. It
was actually a little chilly so we kept moving, rock hopping, wading, and
swimming. At Keyhole Falls, I went first and then Jamie I saw something shiny on
the bottom as we were standing in waist deep water. My camera. Jamie dove down
and retrieved it. It is waterproof, thank goodness. After our last rope descent
I put the rope away(laden with water by now) and we did the hike out staying
mostly in the watercourse. We saw beautiful cascading waterfalls and ever walked through them. The exit was pretty well marked and we began a long
climb up out of the canyon. Thank goodness for the cool weather and no flash
floods.
