Why, Oh Why, Did We Try To Tent Camp In Utah In August?
You might ask yourself, what were they thinking? Camping...during Utah's hottest season? Well, to this nature-loving mother and daughter, it seemed like a wonderful idea, in advance. We love National Parks (we were going to visit three of them in Utah), we love to camp, and in preparation of this trip I purchased a battery operated tent fan. What could go wrong?
It was indeed a fabulous trip that I will write about it in a different blog post. (However, the sleeping arrangements didn't go quite as planned.) We flew into Vegas and rented an awesome red Jeep. We got our first taste of Utah's summer heat in St. George. I remember snapping a photo at our hotel on that first day of the digital sign that read 108 degrees. It was a stifling heat! We were glad that we had this one night booked at a hotel, with air conditioning. Our plan was to get a very early start the next morning to enter Zion National Park and catch the first shuttle of the day to our epic, "Angel's Landing" hike. We thought it would be easier if we didn't have to tear down a tent first.
Flash forward to the next evening. We had enjoyed an amazing day in Zion and we were ready to relax at our campsite in the park. But, Wowsa, it was SO hot and not very relaxing. I'm embarrassed to say that we spent an hour or so sitting in the Jeep with the air-conditioning on, watching "Big Brother" on my daughter's phone. We thought that when the sun would set that it would cool down, but I'm pretty sure it was still 96 degrees when we zipped up the tent and tried to fall asleep for the night.
The tent fan did a subpar job at cooling us down. I managed to catch a few zzz's, but my daughter was not so lucky. At one point in the middle of the night she got on her smartphone and made the executive decision to book us a room at the Zion Park Lodge for the next night. She said that she just couldn't do another night like that again!
We both thoroughly enjoyed our stay at the Lodge. Our meal at the Lodge's roof-top patio, overlooking Zion's red cliffs is one of my favorite memories of the trip! After our night there, we were ready to pitch our tent again, this time at a campground in Springdale. The temperatures had gotten much cooler, and we had a beautiful little campsite along the Virgin River. We were sure this was going to be a much better camping experience.
What we didn't count on was the thunderstorm that happened that evening. Suddenly our ideal riverfront campsite turned into a perch next to a roaring rapids, and that roaring rapids seemed to be inching closer and closer to our tent throughout the night. There also was an issue with our rainfly. The raindrops kept ricocheting off of the ground and hitting us inside the tent. To make matters worse, every half hour an alarm on my phone would go off, loudly announcing flash flood warnings for our area. Needless to say, there was no sleep for me this night. My mind kept replaying the news video that I had watched before our trip showing how a previous storm had caused a terrible mudslide here in Springdale. This time it was me, on my phone, in the middle of the night, changing the rest of our camping reservations into hotel reservations. I guess, this Wisconsin girl just wasn't meant to camp in Utah!