the subway

Zion National Park is one of my favorite places. It’s home to spectacular hikes, including Angel’s Landing, the Zion Narrows, and the Subway. These three hikes form an amazing trilogy of hikes, a trilogy that for me was finally completed this weekend, almost exactly three years after first hiking the Narrows in 2010. I did this hike with my old high school buddy Tim, who also did the Narrows a few years back with me.

The hike to the Subway starts high above a steep river canyon.

First order of business is hiking down the steep slopes of the canyon walls.

Once you get to the bottom, there’s not really a trail– you spend most of the time finding your way along the river, sometimes walking right through the river.

At times scrambling over boulders.

Or squeezing between them.

Sometimes jumping off of them.

And sometimes walking underneath overhanging ledges.

Along the way there is some beautiful scenery, including these red rock steps.

The water carves some interesting features into the solid rock.

The most interesting and famous of course, is the Subway, the end goal of this hike.

It’s a quite popular spot for photographers.

There are two ways to hike the Subway– the bottom up approach that we did is apparently the easier way. It dead ends here. The top down approach starts several miles up on a higher part of the river, and requires several rappels, including this one right past the subway.

After taking a few pictures we started our hike out of the canyon. I felt pretty beat up after the hike, and my whole body was sore when I woke up the next morning. It was definitely a difficult hike, but definitely worth it. It’s hard to do justice to this hike with words and pictures, it really is an amazing hike, I think it definitely needs to be experienced in person, and I was glad to have finally gotten to experience it.