Going Back

It was still dark when the rock formations starting rising up on either side of the freeway, shapes I could barely make out through the windshield. I’d been driving since 5am, quick coffee I made at the Airbnb in the cupholder, replaying directions I’d memorized for weeks. And then it hit me — actually hit me, tears and everything — I made it.

Months of saving, planning, lying awake running through everything that could go wrong, and here I was, alone, in a rental Nissan Sentra, driving straight into Zion like I knew exactly what I was doing.

I didn’t. Not even a little. But to understand why that didn’t matter, you’d have to go back to a Ford Windstar, a minivan they don’t even make anymore, packed with my dad, my mom, my sister , and me, somewhere on a backroad in the American West, probably wearing matching outfits my mom picked out.

My dad was the one who planned all of it. Every summer, an entire month on the road was nothing foreign to us. The four of us crammed into that van hitting national park after national park while he drove and navigated, one hand on the steering wheel, the other holding the Road Atlas. My sister and I contributed absolutely nothing useful from the back seat. We did a lot of things together as a family, but the road trips always stuck differently — longer, bigger, more ambitious than anything else. However, I did not give two shits about the outdoors back then. I maybe gave one. Red rocks were just red rocks. Sandstone was just sandstone. My dad would pull up to every visitor center like it was a sacred ritual, and I’d sit there counting the minutes until we could get back in the car after quickly browsing the gift shop.

Twenty years later, alone in a rental car with nobody to be bored at, I pulled into the Zion visitor center because that’s just what you do — except this time I actually wanted to be there. I asked for a map and a hike recommendation, playing the part of someone who knew nothing but also remembering this was what my dad used to do. All the time. I’d read about Angel’s Landing. I had opinions about gear. But something about walking to that desk and letting a stranger point me somewhere felt right — like honoring a ritual I’d inherited without fully understanding it yet. The ranger took one look at the crowd already lining up at the shuttle stop and asked if I wanted something less crowded with a bigger view instead. Observation Point, he said. It sits higher than Angel’s Landing. I hopped on the shuttle without a second thought.

Observation Point did not care that I hadn’t trained for this. The trail switchedbacked out of the canyon for what felt like forever, and somewhere around mile 3, my legs stopped feeling like legs and started feeling like jello that had decided to keep walking out of pure stubbornness. I marched on anyways. When I finally hit the top, the Zion Canyon opened up below me. Angel’s Landing looking small and far away, the Virgin River cutting through the bottom like a green thread — my heart was so full it almost hurt. Worth every wobbly step back down to the trailhead.

I’d built an itinerary ambitious enough to hit four national parks and a state park in less than 10 days, which in hindsight meant I barely let myself land anywhere before making a move. Shortly after departing Zion, I drove towards Bryce Canyon National Park. It was a blur of hoodoos and a single trail, then I was back in the car.

That night, I camped at Kodachrome Basin State Park and pitched a tent outside of Washington for the first time in my life, my campsite was wedged on a patch on bare dirt between two RVs that had clearly been doing this longer than I had. I’d like to say I rose to occasion but that’s a lie. Looking back at the photos now, the rainfly’s sitting crooked, the whole tent leans slightly to one side like it’s tired, and I definitely skipped a step or two on the staking. I woke up to condensation and the tent walls falling into me, which I now know means I did basically everything wrong. I guess that’s what happens when you’ve only pitched your tent twice in your life prior to a trip.

None of this was on my dad’s old route. Not in any itineraries he planned. I’d never set foot in a Kodachrome as a kid, never seen this exact stretch of striped rock from the back of a minivan. But something about the dirt, the heat, the way the layers stacked themselves in red and god, felt familiar.

The soaked tent, sitting in the back of my sedan, dried off by the time I made it to Grand Staircase-Escalante. The Zebra Canyon trail had other plans for me almost immediately. I was quite confident going into this hike but the slot narrowed down to barely shoulder-width in places, the sandstone walls so smooth and water-worn there was nothing to grab onto, just friction and hope. I wasn’t a climber back then, and looking up at a stretch with no real holds, just slab, I felt genuinely intimidated. Two women caught up behind me and we started spotting each other, bracing and boosting and talking each other through where to put our feet. Then an older man showed up — turned out he hiked the canyon often, knew exactly where the rock held and where it didn’t, and ended up helping all three of us through the worst of it.