The Utah Redemption Tour: Chaos and Disrespect at Zion

We had made it to our 5th national park in Utah, and with bated breath waited to see if we had saved the best for last. Zion National Park captures the hearts of millions of visitors each year, and it claims the spot as an all-time favorite of many national park enthusiasts. We wondered how it would rank for us, not just as the final of the Mighty 5, but as our 33rd national park.

A park full of pressure

Even from the planning stages, Zion felt different. There is a pressure to make the most of our visit that we don't typically feel at other parks. We wanted to camp at Watchman Campground inside the park, which is notoriously difficult. Grabbing a site required top tier finesse as I sprang into action the second the availabilities released for our dates. This is pressure enough, but then we have remarks coming at us from all angles. Before booking, one mention of Zion and we'd hear, "Oh, you have to stay at Watchman." After booking, "Oh, you're so lucky! It's my favorite campground." Plus hundreds of articles and videos that talk about Watchman being the must-stay campground.

If we want to do one or both of the "must-do" hikes, extra prep is needed. Angels Landing requires a permit, which hikers apply for the day before, and, if accepted, are given a certain time to hike and need to be ready to show their permit and ID at any point. The Narrows doesn't require a permit, but does require renting extra gear, a process that's surprisingly convoluted.

Want to take a scenic drive in Zion? Your best choices are Route 9 on the Zion-Mount Carmel Highway or Zion Canyon Road. Only, there are restrictions for vehicle length and height on Zion-Mt Carmel Highway due to a tunnel, and even better, those restrictions changed this year! Before, larger vehicles could apply for a permit to halt traffic and go through the tunnel, but this year, they've done away with it for safety and traffic flow measures. As for Zion Canyon Road? From March through November and select off-season holidays, private vehicles are not allowed on the road, and instead, the road is shuttle-only to cut down on traffic.

How about that shuttle? While it's mostly convenient and efficient, don't forget to check if any stops are shut down, because sometimes rockfalls, construction, or weathering might close down a stop. Coming from outside the national park in nearby Springdale? Chances are you won't easily be able to drive into Zion and find a place to park, because the lots fill up. Instead, your option is to find paid parking in town and take the Springdale shuttle to the visitor center, then switch and get on the Zion shuttle.

These are just a few of the obstacles to navigate when planning your trip, and all the while you'll be faced with numerous well-meaning people exclaiming "Oh, Zion! You HAVE to do Angels Landing!" "Oh, Zion! You HAVE to do The Narrows!" "Oh, Zion! You HAVE to hike emerald pools!" "Oh, Zion! You HAVE to drive the Zion-Mt Carmel Highway and you HAVE to stop at the overlook just after the tunnel!"

The overwhelm is real, and we needed to do our best to figure out all the operations applicable to us, but then just wait until we got to the park to orient ourselves. We've noticed in other park visits that sometimes just getting there helps us figure out where things are and how everything is run. We did the best we could ahead of time, sitting down a few days before our visit to write a list of what we wanted to do. This is pretty standard for our national parks planning, but what was different was then following our list up with steps to 1, make sure we could actually do the thing, and 2, checking what prep we needed to do to make it happen, whether that be a gear rental or timing and mapping our shuttle ride.

We opted out of Angels Landing, much to the dismay of everyone who recommended the hike, and when we said "no" followed it up with "Oh, but you'd be FINE!!!" We don't care, and here's why. Do you remember last year when we did our Nashville hot chicken quest, and we determined that getting a slightly milder heat helped us enjoy all the flavors, instead of just being bombarded with spice? Angels Landing is like spicy chicken. We could hike it just fine, but we'd be so consumed by the danger that we wouldn't fully enjoy its flavor. For those who don't know, Angels Landing is a knife's edge trail with huge drop-offs on either side, and there are chains that you grab onto on the steep sections. We've done trails on steep cliffs before, and they're hardly ever worth the anxiety for us.

However, we did decide to tackle The Narrows, a rather open-ended hiking trail that is not actually a trail and instead traverses the Virgin River Gorge right through the Virgin River itself. There are literal stages to this hike:

1. Prepare by researching the weather and river flow and renting the appropriate gear
2. Time your shuttle boarding and ride it to the very last stop
3. Hike an easy mile-long dry trail along the riverbank
4. Submerge yourself into the river and wade to your heart's content, up to 4.5 miles before you need to turn around (beyond this point you would need a permit)

The Hiking Guy has the most detailed article we've seen, and finding detailed information on this hike was surprisingly difficult. Note that he shares total miles out-and-back in his distance estimates. Unfortunately, we didn't find this article until after our hike, but we pieced together enough information to feel adequately prepared.

Gear rentals are recommended for staying dry, warm, and on your feet during the hike. A few outfitters in Springdale offer rentals and recommend gear kits depending on the time of year. We decided to rent our gear from Zion Outfitters right outside the visitor center because it was the closest to our campground. We didn't know that gear rental reservations were even a thing until I perused their website and found a booking page. Perfect! So after deciding on our day to hike (aka which day had less chance of rain, decent temperatures, and fit our schedule), we booked our gear. Their recommended kit for April included a bib that would waterproof us from ankle to armpit, plus neoprene socks and canyoneering shoes. The neoprene socks keep feet warmer and less susceptible to blisters, and the canyoneering shoes have good grip on the slippery wet rocks. To complete the ensemble, we'd get a walking stick to help keep our footing on the rocks. Each of our gear rentals came to a whopping $55 each, and we also added on a dry bag for $12. This was turning out to be an expensive hike, but we wanted to be sensible. Some people attempt to wade the river without proper gear, and we've read many reviews of regret. You get cold, fall more easily, and can't go as far.

We made our gear reservation 3 days before our arrival to Zion. At the same time, we finalized all the planning we felt we could do before getting to the park. We left Bryce Canyon on Tuesday April 15 and made the 3-hour drive to Watchman Campground. It's important to note here that, on Monday April 14, I came down with a stomach bug that, while short-lived, took me out of commission for that day. Thankfully we had reserved that day for work and chores, so I didn't miss any Bryce adventures. By Tuesday, I was feeling well enough to endure our travel day followed by two work meetings, but I was battling periodic nausea and migraines from my virus-induced dehydration.

The Crowds

Leaving Zion to the last of the Mighty 5 meant we'd already be quite snobby in terms of mesmerizing beauty. We still appreciate the beauty of all the parks' landscapes, of course, but very few views were able to make our reactions go from "Beautiful!" to "Holy moly!" Coming into Springdale and seeing Zion's cliffs in the distance, we thought we might get there. The sheer cliffs and height were dramatic in ways that can only be fully registered in person. Then, all the trees were budding green leaves in the spring, making a colorful contrast against the dark reddish brown rocks.

Unfortunately, our buzzkill came as soon as we reached downtown and were overwhelmed by all the people. Cars parked along the road with no empty spots in sight. Thousands of people walking, shopping, and eating. Crowds are one thing, but crowds that aren't paying attention to vehicles are quite another. We needed to stay extremely focused to get into the park safely.

The good news is, because all Zion parking lots were full, the line at the entrance gate was comparatively short. They had multiple lanes open, and we were through the gate in about 10 minutes.

We couldn't breathe a sigh of relief just yet. We entered our campground and took our loop around to our campsite. The loop road is narrow, and we needed to contend with tons of people walking and riding their bikes as we tried to get by. Mostly children who haven't learned to watch out for cars, especially RVs, but even the adults did not seem to care. Instead of hanging back so we could maneuver our rig, they'd speed past us, forcing us to stop until we could get a visual on them. When we began backing into our site, a group of girls kept running past our rig, sometimes stopping right next to it for their friends to catch up. Every time we thought we had the clear to back into our site, they'd come by again, paying no mind to the fact that we were trying to move a big, heavy vehicle two feet from where they kept running.

Our site was okay. We'll take the win that it was large enough to fit both truck and trailer, considering we've had issues with that this year, but when I booked this site, I hadn't noticed that we back right up to the back of the site next to us.

Normally not an issue because we wouldn't be using that area anyways, but this positioning made those same girls think it was acceptable to run through our site as a shortcut to the area behind theirs.

It was then that we realized, we were dealing with more than just crowds. While it's true that we've been extremely lucky with avoiding crowds at national parks, we're used to full campgrounds. However, we aren't as used to full campgrounds where people either don't know or blatantly ignore campground etiquette. We found this interesting, because in many of the All Trail reviews for Zion hikes, people said something similar. There's an expectation for the trails to be busy, but when the people ignore trail etiquette (people walking off trail, screaming, and parents letting their kids have a free-for-all), the hike becomes unpleasant and dangerous to people and the environment. We thought about Watchman, a campground that some RVers have said is one of their favorites ever, and one that lies in unmistakable beauty. At what point does all that appeal dissipate? Now, we're the first to admit that we enjoy a quieter campground, but we also love seeing families making memories and kids getting fresh air. However, if we don't all respect our own spaces and neighbors, things turn to chaos. And unfortunately, this can create a domino effect, where if one person sees someone pushing the boundaries of etiquette, they will feel free to as well.

From crowds to discourtesy

Booking Watchman in April is like willfully facing a hoard of monsters. Our reservation dates alone included multiple school spring breaks, Good Friday, Easter, and National Park Week's free admission day. There was nothing we could do about this if we wanted to make our Utah Redemption Tour plans work, and so we braced ourselves for Zion to be our most crowded national park, definitely of the Mighty 5, but possibly ever. We have our methods of still enjoying a national park when it's crowded. We do the popular trails and overlooks really early or in the evenings. We stay close to or inside the campground so we can observe the ebb and flow of people and jump outside when a wave seems to be dying down. We don't cram in tons of activities and don't hold ourselves to doing literally everything on our list, instead fitting in what we can. But this line that gets crossed between crowdedness and discourtesy is where we feel like we lose any control over our camping experience.

We've lost count of how many places we've stayed in our RV. 200 give or take? And we have left campgrounds due to discourteous people twice. We've experienced rude/loud people only a handful of times. What we experienced at Watchman was without a doubt the worst display of obnoxiousness we have ever seen at a campground.

We would have been thrilled if those girls only ran past our rig and through our campsite, but things got worse very quickly. We soon realized that those girls were part of a massive group of campers who had reserved multiple sites, at least the site next to/abutting us at the back, and the site in the middle of our loop, right outside our business side window. The group included at least 15 people, with about twice as many tween-aged kids as adults. I've chosen to conceal their faces since most of them were minors.

Evidently they were celebrating one of the girls' birthdays. How do we know this? I heard them scream it. One sentence of many, many screams, hollers, and cheers, as their celebration turned into the girls' multi-hour-long performance of popular Tik Tok dances. Cue the blasting music, the girls loudly singing along to the songs, and the parental audience clapping and cheering along.

We don't know an RV podcaster who hasn't asked people their #1 pet peeve at a campground, and one of the most common ones is loud music. To force your neighbors to listen to the music you choose is utterly disrespectful. Then, for this to happen on a drive day, while I was suffering from a migraine, was excruciating.

What could we have done? Unfortunately, not much. We didn't want to confront them because they looked like the type of people who would make our lives miserable in response. The worst of it started after all park staff had left for the day, and even if we could have told someone, we scoured the camping policies and found very few actual breaches. At Watchman, there is a rule that a maximum of 6 people can occupy a campsite. Otherwise, there are no policies against noise outside of quiet hours. They are simply behaviors that are frowned upon and considered poor camping etiquette. We'd need to wait until quiet hours started at 10pm to get more leverage, but then we'd be waiting until morning to make a complaint.

In the meantime, we took a short drive to compose ourselves, and the rest of the time, noise-cancelling headphones were my friend.

The worst part about all of this, though, is the disappointment of being lucky enough to snag a site at a highly coveted campground, just to have it ruined by rude neighbors. As you saw, planning and preparation for an enjoyable experience in Zion is a lot of work, but we can only control so much. Then, beyond the disrespect of their neighbors, is the disrespect of this place, considered sacred to so many. Zion is its name for a reason! Clearly, this family decided that, instead of paying extra money for a function hall or even a day-use area, that they'd get away with a big shebang for the mere cost of their campsites.

As expected, the party continued well into quiet hours. On a normal night this would be frustrating, but we had an early start the next day. Remember how I mentioned that we reserved a gear rental for The Narrows? Looking at our schedules and the weather, we decided the best day for the hike was Wednesday, the morning after we arrived.

Zion Outfitters' website says that we can pick up our gear either the morning of, or evening before, our hike. Our plan was to catch the first shuttle from the visitor center at 7am, to try and be in the first cohort of hikers, before the crowds flooded in. This meant we'd need to grab our gear the evening of our arrival. We drove to the outfitter... Actually, we drove to the visitor center and walked to the outfitter, because otherwise the outfitter charges $30 to park in their lot. It was around 6pm, the visitor center was closed, and yet most of the lot was filled by people exploring the nearby attractions in both the park and Springdale. When we arrived to the outfitter, we told the guy that we had reserved gear for tomorrow. He told us that they didn't have anymore gear available, as all the ones that got returned that day were still drying. We would need to come back the next morning when they open at 7am.

So much for our plan to hop the earliest shuttle. Also, did we have a misconstrued idea of what gear reservations meant? We suppose it was faster to pay ahead of time, plus we could sign waivers online, but if we reserve gear and are told the times we can pick it up, we kind of expect the gear to be there at that time. Did we have another Seinfeld situation?!

Herein, we realized our mistake. Zion Outfitters was the most convenient outfitter for us. It was also the most convenient outfitter for a lot of people. We don't know if any of the locations deeper into Springdale would have been better, but we did look at Zion Adventures' website, and they at least state that people can pick up gear the evening prior if enough gear kits are still available. Zion Outfitters said no such thing.

Nothing we could do about it now. We'd need to get to the outfitter at 7am, get our gear, make sure everything fit, then transfer all our necessary belongings from our normal hiking backpack to the dry bag. Then we'd need to catch the next shuttle. This was sure to set us back.

But what might set us back even more, and possibly completely derail us, was partying up a storm right outside our window. Even after they finally quieted down, my sleep was sporadic, as my mind chattered from the stress of the day and anticipation of the hike, and all the steps we'd need to take to even get to the trailhead. I continued battling my headaches, hoping that both they and our neighbors would be making their exit the next day. We could not let Zion fail us like this.