Pando
On the drive from Fort Collins to Hurricane, we stopped at one of the world’s biggest organisms, a grove of aspen trees! Pando is also known as the trembling giant, and has about 47 000 quaking aspen trees all made from one single root system. It’s at least 80 000 years old, and it’s the heaviest organism, weighing 6 000 000 kilograms! But it’s dying…none of the seedlings are surviving, so ecologists are trying to find ways to preserve it. Anyway, we just missed the fall leaves, but it was still incredible! There were so many aspens
Hurricane
Rampage: The main reason we stayed in Hurricane is because it’s right next to Virgin, where Red Bull Rampage was happening. What is Red Bull Rampage might you ask? It’s a big bike event (of course) where the gnarliest riders come from all over the world to compete on this downhill race. Each rider gets to make their own trail down the steep virgin mountain. Most of it involves 50 foot cliffs or drops, and jumps where riders do crazy tricks! We got tickets to this event because Blake and my dad are obsessed with it. So there I was waking up at 6:30 to leave so we could get a good parking spot. There was a 6 km bike ride or walk to get to the event once you’re parked. I was hoping to walk, but we ended up biking. Not my favourite thing to do at 8 in the morning.
Once we got there, we picked a nice spot at the bottom of the mountain, so we could see all the riders come down. When the event started, I remembered how into this people get. To start off the day a base jumper came flying out of a plane, 1500 feet above the ground, with a wing suit, and flew down leading a contrail behind him. Crazy!!! The rest of the event went by pretty quickly once the riders started.
Zion National Park: We spent a day at Zion national park, and it was amazing! It’s similar to Arches national park, but with lots of lush greenery and beautiful fall colours. We did three hikes in our few hours there. The first one was called angels landing, and it consists of steep uphills and switch backs on the way there. Then to get to the angels landing, you have to hike along this steep narrow rock with 1000 feet drops on either side. We almost made it to the end, but just being up there was amazing! Hike number 2 was a smaller hike to the emerald pools. This wasn’t as cool as angels landing, I wasn’t super impressed with the pools, but again the scenery made it worth it! Last hike was doing the riverside walk to the narrows. I had really wanted to hike the narrows, but we didn’t have the proper gear to do it, but we hiked to the entrance of where people start walking through the water. Zion is, so far, my favourite national park I’ve been to!
Las Vegas
Wow! So Las Vegas is pretty much exactly how I pictured it. Lots of Casinos, people drinking and smoking, it’s expensive, there’s cool buildings and different parts of the world all around. It’s a total party city. I see the appeal if you want to have a fun weekend but as a kid there’s not as much to do! My parents wanted to teach us that when you gamble you normally loose your money, so they picked one that was right next to the hall. We watched them put a dollar in a slot machine, but we got in trouble for watching even though we were still on the main pathway. So then Blake and I went to stare at the wall while my dad finished up. He came back with $1.50, then my mom went to put it in a slot machine, and she came out with $2.50! Then my dad took another turn and came back with $10!! So much for that lesson!
But despite all of that, Vegas is actually really interesting. I found it cool that they have put different parts of the world into buildings. Like how there’s the Eiffel tower and inside it, they’ve made it look like Paris. We were in Vegas for 2 nights, which was enough for me. Since it was the end of our trip we all really wanted to have a healthy salad, but there’s not much healthy food unless you want to pay a lot at a fancy restaurant.