Not Fooled in Many Pools on April Fool's

I gave Matt a call to see what he was up to. Eventually we got a hold of each other and decided to do a hike together. I was working at the school in the morning, so Matt came down to Springdale. We met at my house a little after noon. I went over my plan with him and he agreed. So I had heard that in the canyon that some call Many Pools, you could access the East Rim. This sounded like a fun experiment, so we set out. I had been in Many Pools a couple of years previously with Dave, a retired preacher working for the Zion Lodge with a bunch of enthusiasm. It looked plausible when we were there, so I believed it could work. Matt and I tried to stay high as much as possible. That seemed to be a waste of time. It was easy hiking, but eventually we were lead to a choice. If we stayed high, there looked to be a treacherous scramble with an impassable wall to attempt. Thus we finally agreed to drop into the canyon and continue up that way. There were places where it got narrow and others where we were cliffed out. But in all of those places there were other options to continue on our way. Some those involved gambel oak and manzanita, which gave us a bit of a beating, but never stopped our progress. At one point we ran into what we thought could be a petroglyph, but also it looked too real to be true and we both assumed it was fake. As we continued, we started to realize that we were going to make it. The most difficult spot was a steep slope to the left that lead us through the cliff that is the thickest section before reaching the East Rim. After we made it past this point, we knew that we were going to make it. Other signs throughout the day were a couple with backpacks on coming down about halfway through when we were up high and they were down low. Also, there seemed to be a sort of use trail that gave us something to follow. Matt and I were both happy to gain the East Rim. Then the thought of what should we do next came to us. We started going over to Deertrap, but after seeing all the snow still up on the East Rim, I did not feel like bothering with it. Then we headed down with the idea that we could hike to Weeping Rock and have Jacqueline pick us up there. Not having worked out this plan ahead of time and knowing that without cellphone service, hitchhiking was likely, we finally agreed that we would hike the East Rim to the East Entrance and then take Clear Creek down. That was what the plan was until we hit the only other canyon that I had taken to the East Rim before. Dave and I on a separate trip, had hiked this canyon thinking that at some point we would turn around. That never happened. We made it all the way to the East Rim and then hiked down the trail. On this occasion, I thought of my past experience and knew this was the canyon that Dave and I had taken to access the East Rim. I talked it over with Matt and we agreed that it would work. It did and honestly this was a more difficult canyon to navigate than the Many Pools canyon; causing us to go up and around on a couple of occasions and do some downclimbing. I was impressed by Dave's skills to make it up that in his sixties and I was impressed that Matt and I had done two canyons in one day, up and down off the East Rim. We just used Clear Creek to get back to my truck until we got sick of hiking in sand, then we just followed the road. It was an hour from where we came out of that canyon which is the last one before the east rim trail. We continued down to the house after a little over a five hour hike. I intended to ask Matt over for dinner, but when I saw Jacqueline, I knew we had other things to worry about. She was crying and that could only mean that her mom was getting much worse. Jacqueline's mom had been living with ovarian cancer since nearly the time that Jacqueline and I began dating almost three years ago. Her dad was telling her she needed to go home. We left a few days later and were able to spend a week with Ginny before she passed away April 14th. Ginny was someone who was very loved by her daughter and son-in-law and we will miss her greatly. She will always be a part of our family and we will make sure that her grandkids know her just as much as they will know their other grandparents. She will be in our lives and in our thoughts daily.