We spent our usual week on the North Rim.  Got locked out of the cabin, because those 1928 locks are garbage.  Hiked to Redwall Bridge twice and Woodforis twice.    No water fight this year because the pipeline broke again, and the storage tanks were low.  Just a parade.  North Rim is a lot smaller than south, and the rangers all know each other...and me.  Amanda says I make the rangers nervous when I come to the programs.

What a crew of weirdos.  Haley is the only sane one in the bunch.
Ranger Kim, Cathy and Paul Davis, Moi, Rachel, and Haley.

Cabin 305 has a defective lock. Our last morning they had to break in through the window. 

Then since we were so far north, we figured we might as well keep migrating, so we went to Zion.  Hiked the Emerald Pools trail with 1000 of our closest friends.  All the signs say not to get in the water, and I gave up remonstrating everyone.  Sign? What sign? Then we climbed to Observation Point and part of the East Rim trail.  There we met a group of four young men dangling with climbing gear who asked us where Echo Canyon was.  Um, if you are going to canyoneer a canyon, should you not know where it is?  They then decided to follow us because "you look like you know what you are doing".

Trail to Observation Point.  Narrow and exposed.  

It was hot in Zion, so we repaired to Bryce.  There we did the Wall Street - Queen's garden loop with another 1000 of our close personal friends.  We knocked down a bunch of ego cairns in Wall Street, and a father, whom I assume had just built one with his kid, remonstrated.  Brad said the area does not need adornment,  I said, there are ten now, what about when there are one thousand?

Ran into a PSR ranger and asked what he says to these guys. He said, "I am law enforcement. I pull out my badge".  We hiked 8.4 mile loop at Fairyland and only met a handful of people.  Also no ego cairns.  

Had a lot of questions about the geology, and the second geology program we went to was led by the man who was the park geologist for four years.  Score!  He told us all about the Claron formation, and told us the white conglomerate we saw was Boat Mesa conglomerate, and it only occurs there.  Not enough to be an actual formation, even.

Fairyland