Zion National Park: Day Two, Narrows Hikes

For our second day at the park we spent the whole day doing the Narrows canyon hike. It starts at the final stop on the shuttle and from there it's about a mile to the start of the actual hike where you get in the water. Once you're in the water it's entirely up to you how far you go, it's not a loop trail so as far as you go in is as far as you have to go out. We had an idea to stop at the waterfall we'd heard about but we didn't actually make it that far because there was a part where you had to swim across or climb over a rock and we didn't want to do either of those things. We still made it a good way in though, around 4 hours of walking in and then about 3 to get back out. When we were there it was advised that you hire gear because of an algae that was blooming in the water but it's not required and we saw plenty of people without it. We opted for it to be safe as apparently the algae is toxic to animals and we didn't want to risk bringing it back on our clothes to our dog Loki. It also meant we stayed relatively warm because we weren't actually submerging our skin in the water due to the waterproof gear. If you're in Zion and have a spare day definitely check out the Narrows!