Two years ago, Jen and I got married just outside Zion National Park. While it was undoubtably one of the best days of my life, we were both bummed that we didn’t get to bike or climb. So, last year on our anniversary, we came back down and rode some great trails. This year, we decided to make the tradition official and come back for more fun in the desert.
Unfortunately, things don’t always go as planned, and on Saturday we hiked to our climbing objective to find a slow-moving party on the first pitch and another gearing up at the base. Guess that’ll teach us to sleep in. So, we went to plan B instead. We cragged a few pitches and I taught Jen how to clean tension traverses so she’ll be ready for another objective that we’ve been thinking about.
On Sunday, we planned to ride a couple awesome trails in St George, but once again things didn’t quite work out. We woke up to pouring rain, and after what we though was a reasonable time for the trails to dry found our bikes covered in peanut butter within 100 yards. After some more drying time and a lot of aggressive cleaning we were on another trail much better suited to the weather conditions. This time everything went well and we finally got to cut loose on some classic desert single track.
Even with the issues, I think both of us agree that any weekend in the desert is better than a night in a way-too-fancy hotel somewhere.
Happy anniversary Jen.
