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6:26 am PST we left a Yosemite NP. The drive to Park City will take 12 hours, not including the several stops for gas and food.

The South Fork Merced Is over runs so loudly that it almost sounds like heavy wind or rain but it’s a lovely white noise. The nights have been cool, cold even. This is our morning view:

We had lunch at the Wawona Hotel

We hiked Mariposa Grove trail and saw the giant sequoias.

We started out on night one with sites 30 and 32, but ended up with both cars on 32. Today we were. Supposed to move for two nights to 36 and 12 but elected to move both cars to 11, right on the river. The Half Dome hike hit obstacles and we all ended up accidentally hiking over 2 miles to the visitor center.

It’s wicked hot in Vegas. On the road to Yosemite

Per Rocco’s request, In and Out Burger, Fresno, about an hour and a half from Yosemite.

Made it to Yosemite around 9pm. We can hear the Merced River running behind our camp site.

We had two nights booked at Zion NP but the national heat wave did us in. Last night we stayed in a hotel at St George and tonight in Las Vegas, giving us a head start to Yosemite tomorrow. We did make it to Zion, saw our camping sites and did two short hikes: Weeping Rock and Riverside Walk. Lastly, we made it into Las Vegas around 9pm.

Hilton Grand Vacations Club, Las Vegas, NV

We’re all feeling a little beat and heading to Zion in over 100 degrees is something we needed to prepare for. With a hotel. Detour here to St. George, UT

We all had a rough night and didn’t get to sleep until after 3am. We woke up kind of late and dragged but by 11am we were packed up. We stopped for groceries and left for Point Sublime about 4 hours to North Rim and another 3 off road to Point Sublime. We got here and had just caught the tail of the sunset.

Morning view…

It was after 2pm before we finally saw the Grand Canyon

We hiked to Ooh Aah Point, which was around 2 miles and 2 hours, in a heat advisory. Sam did a full hike to the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

Our morning looked like this:

White Sands NP. It was wicked hot. And the sleds didn’t slide as well as we hoped.

So, we get to Mather Campground at Grand Canyon NP around 11:45pm and do our best to set up as quietly as possible. It’s shockingly quiet here. No dogs, no generators, no late night revealers. Sam is in his Bivy and we hear a ruckus and lots of talking and Sam said it was stinky pigs, right outside his Bivy, at least 3 of them. So now he’s in the tent and now we know what a javelina is.

Good morning from Guadalupe Mountains

Carlsbad Caverns- we hiked in from from the natural entrance and also did the Big Room hike, for a total of about 2.7 miles. We couldn’t stay to watch the thousands of bats leave the cave but we sure wished we could have.