Hiking/Camping Gone Wrong.

Our first hiking/camping weekend... and we failed miserably!! Our intentions were to hike the Palasades Lake but we got off to a slow start and ended up starting the hike at about 6:30- dusk. Not smart. I've done this hike before and nieve me thought, oh its ok, it's only a 1.5 miles or so. Not true. An hour into our hike we finally caught up to some other hikers (3 scouts and their leader) who were decked out with huge backpacks and tons of gear. We asked them about how much farther until the lake, I wasn't to thrilled with their response, "oh about 2 more miles". What the heck. Seriously? I underestimated the hike about 2 miles! Every bend in the mountain I thought "oh the lake is just right over there" And every time we approached that spot to find no lake, the idea of turning around and doing it another time got a little more appealing. After all we were ill prepared... no flashlight + not much water + telling scary stories of moose and bears = scared and looking straight down at the path walking as fast as my little legs could take me. Finally we got to yet another bend where I could have sworn it was where the lake would be and we decided it might be best for us to turn around since it was getting dark fast. Well, we turned around and headed back through the canyon as fast as we could! When we finally arrived back at our car it was now pitch black and we thought well.... do we still find a place to camp? We thought sure what the heck! We're already out here! I called my handy-dandy GPS (dad) and he quickly found a campground (FREE!) in which we could stay the night. 

We finally made it to our little spot where we would camp. By the look of the pictures it might appear that all was well in zion and we had a great time.. false. After we made a fire and roasted ourselves some hot dogs for dinner, we crawled into our tent for a good night sleep. I thought for sure I wouldn't have any troubles going to bed since we had such an eventful day. Well after 3 hours of sleeping... it being 1:30 by then, I woke up, and I mean wide awake. I laid there for what seemed like forever trying to go back to sleep, but as everyone can probably guess, I started playing mind games with myself... "whats that noise?! animal? bear? moose!?" Well I hesitantly woke Dayne up and proposed we sleep in the car. Did I mention that we only had one sleeping bag and forgot additional blankets? In the tent it wasn't too bad, we shared the sleeping bag and just cuddled. In the car is where it got tricky, we couldn't both sleep in it like in the tent, so we opened it wide and tried our best at staying warm... didn't work. We toughed it out and at 6:50 I thought well we might as well head home because neither of us are really able to sleep anyway. So we got out of the car to take down camp and head back home.

You would think our story ends here but it doesn't. Dayne was still tired from the lack of sleep so I drove us home. As we were driving I noticed a car that was driving the opposite direction was driving half in the tall grass and half on his shoulder- at 65mph. I honked and honked to get his attention, I thought maybe he had fallen asleep. Well I guess he woke up because he over-corrected his car, fishtailing into our lane head on (about 2 car lengths in front), just as we were going to hit he corrected again this time over into his ditch where he flipped and it landed on the top of the car. I quickly slowed to a stop on my shoulder... shaking...told Dayne what had happened. He called 911 as I got out to go to where his flipped vehicle was. There were now cars pulling over offering help. A guy who had pulled over was able to pull the guy from the car. He was conscious. However he was able to say he had bad neck, back, and left leg pain. He was bleeding a bit on his head but not bad. He was covered in dirt from the wreck. Dayne was on the phone with 911 for about 20 minutes, finally they came and put him on a stretcher while I filled out a witness statement.

Needless to say, it was an eventful first weekend!