Hiking Overnight in The Narrows, Zion

The Narrows is a part of Zion National Park where the the North Fork of the Virgin River has carved down through the sandstone to create a uniquely narrow and deep canyon — in places 30 ft / 9 m wide and 1,000 ft / 305 m deep. Hiking overnight in The Narrows takes you down the length of the river and gives you an unparalleled and unique experience without needing any technical skills. I’m not sure there’s an equivalent to The Narrows, certainly not in the US. The drama of the sandstone & river, the experience of hiking in the river, the evolution of a small lazy creek to a river that cut through a hundred stories of rock — all this makes it a trip of a lifetime.

Essential Facts

• Distance: 16.0 mi / 25.7 km
• Elevation: -1,300 ft / -396 m, all pretty gradual
• Difficulty: moderately difficult backpack
• Time: for us, 11 1/2 hours total over 2 days
• Permit & Reservation: Yes and yes: National Park Wilderness Permit and a shuttle to Chamberlain Ranch

Why Go

Just scroll down and look at the photos. It’s a world-class canyon, even if it were dry and dusty. But there’s a real river still carving its way down. You have to walk, and sometimes wade, through this river — there’s no path beside it for most of the way. It’s a singular experience.

How To Go

You can explore to The Narrows from either the bottom-up or from the top-down.

The bottom-up is a day hike, requires no permit, and gets you to “Wall Street,” the most dramatic part. But you’ll be sharing this with dozens of folks and you’ll only experience a short section of the canyon. The top-down gets you less people and you get to see the whole progress of the canyon, but it does require advance planning for hiking permits, campground reservations, and trailhead shuttle. You can do the top-down in a day, but we didn’t want to feel pressed for time, so we reserved a campsite inside the canyon.

We also rented canyoneering boots and hiking poles from Zion Adventure Company. Trust me, you’ll need these. We also took their shuttle to the top-down dropoff point of Chamberlain Ranch, the park shuttle does not go there.

When To Go

Since you’ll be hiking right in the Virgin River, its conditions say when you go. It’s best when the flow rate is less than 70 cubic feet per second (CFS); and the Park closes The Narrows when it’s over 120 CFS, which usually happens with the snow melting in the spring. Check the current conditions at the USGS. As with all canyons, in the summer you have to worry flash flooding from thunderstorms. And in the winter, you’ll need a hefty wetsuit to keep warm.

September & October are the best months: no spring runoff, no summer thunderstorms, no winter cold. We went in September and had a 35 CFS. We had tried to go in May a few years earlier, but the snowmelt had brought the flow rate over the limit.

Map & Route

Details

Reservations

First off, you’re gonna need a permit whether you’re overnighting or not. Three ways to do that: 1) Advanced Reservations (available 2 months in advance), 2) Last Minute Drawing (7 to 2 days in advance), and 3) Walk-in Permits for the day before you start. Half of the permits can be reserved, half cannot. Read more here: Permits for the Narrows. I like to plan, so we went with the advanced reservations.

Gear

It’s a backpack, so you’ll have to do all that — tent, bag, stove — whatever your usual setup is.

If you’re not into canyoneering, you’re going to need some items specific to deal with the water. Being that we were not doing more canyoneering, we rented the gear we needed. You could do without any of these, but you could also regret it.

• Canyoneering boots with neoprene socks: We just rented these from Zion Adventures. The canyoneering boots lets the water out and the socks keep you feet warm. Bring other socks for the overnight.
• A large stick: I usually scoff at hikers with big-ass walking sticks, but that water is going to push you around and you’ll want something that can take your full weight. I am suspicious of trekking poles in this situation. Also rented.
• Trash bags: Face it, you might slip and fall into the water. It won’t hurt, but everything in your bag will be wet. Just put everything in a trash compactor bag before shoving it into you pack.
• Dry bag(s): See above. But if it’s electronics, even moreso.
• Dry Pants / Suits: We got the dry pants, didn’t regret. In cooler weather, the dry suit would be needed. Also rented.

Camping

There are 12 campsites (see descriptions here). We stayed at campsite #5. No campfires, btw — but you can fire up that lil stove for dinner. The river was super clear for us, so we filtered water both at the campsite and at Big Springs. Important: Check with the website and the rangers as to the status of the water in The Narrows with regards to the presence of harmful cyanobacteria which may produce cyanotoxins, which are bad.

And you gotta pack out that poop. The ranger gave us both very nice WAG bags, which although awkward was not all that gross in actual use.

Trip Report

We hiked overnight in The Narrows on 10 & 11 Sept 2015.

Chamberlain Ranch to the Narrows – Day 1

After the hour & a half ride from Springdale, the van dropped us at Chamberlain Ranch. For the first hour hiking, we wondered if the van dropped us off on the right creek. We started at 11:30 walking on a dirt road in a wide valley with the North Fork of the Virgin River far to the other side of cattle pastures — looking utterly nothing like Zion Canyon. It was hot at 90°F with nothing in the sky to hide the sun. We were a dozen in the van, but six of us decided we’d stay together: (Christy & Thad, Jo & Kylie, and H & myself).

As we walked the valley narrowed and the river got closer but it still didn’t feel like Zion. Then an hour into it, we touch our first sandstone outcrop. The canyon begins. It felt good to finally get some shade and get our neoprene boots wet.

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This first part of the canyon, although beautiful, is not unique. Like others in Utah, the canyon walls narrow then widen, always rising. The first difference this has with other canyons is the flowing water. In most Utah canyons you walk in the dry creek bed with little to no sign that water ever flowed. Although for this canyon sometimes we walked in the stream, other times we walked on the sand — water was always present. At 13:30 we ducked into a small side canyon for lunch.

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The second difference between the North Fork of the Virgin River and other canyons is that the Virgin just keeps getting deeper. At 14:50 we felt the sun for the last time. The hot day had moderated into a good walking temperature.

We reached the waterfall at 16:20 — a path goes through the rock around the waterfall, so you don’t have to worry about dealing with the 12 foot drop. And after the waterfall the canyon started to get remarkably deep.

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At this point, however, the river is still just a stream. Even when the walls narrow, the water is just comes up to your ankles and doesn’t seem to be in too much of a hurry.

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Deep Creek

The river receives a big boost with the water from Deep Creek. We got to the confluence at 17:15 and we could sense a change: the water ran deeper, swifter, and louder. And while the canyon walls widened and large trees grew on the rocky sand banks where Deep Creek flowed in, soon it again narrowed and the close walls amplified the sound of river’s rush.

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Campsite #5

We reached our campsite (#5, Ringtail) around 18:00. It’s just an incline of sand and trees perched between the river and the vertical canyon wall, but it was home for the night.

The deepest and most remarkable part of the canyon lay in front of us for tomorrow. You can do The Narrows as a day trip up from the bottom, but when doing the overnight from the top (like we were), you only encounter a handful of hikers while in the canyon. And late in the day everyone eventually peels off into their own campsite. So you greet the dusk with only your little campsite group, and feel like you have the whole canyon to yourself.

The Heart of the Narrows – Day 2

When dawn comes you can see the strip of sky above the canyon brighten, and eventually the far up trees & the tops of the sandstone cliffs begin to glow. But the river remains in shadow.

Our camp was back in its bags and on our backs by 07:30. We passed by the remainder of the campsites perched on the high ground. For most of the stretch before Big Springs we followed the easy path on the banks — only once did we have to make a thigh-deep crossing.

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Big Springs

You can’t really miss Big Springs, it’s just that big. It bursts out of the west wall of the canyon, dramatically cascading down rocks before entering the river.

We got there at 09:00 and filled up on water and posed for a couple of photos. And you should take a break here, although maybe not amid the roaring river. Big Springs marks a change on the river and canyon. Upstream it’s a canyon hike (albeit longer and soggier). Downstream it’s canyoneering. You’ll put those fancy shoes and big walking stick to use (more of this below). Christy & Thad had caught up with us by now, so we finished the rest of the way along with them

The Narrows

The canyon shortly closes in and for the next two miles there’s no high ground. Often there aren’t even banks, just flowing river between the canyon walls. This is officially The Narrows. And it proved substantially more difficult than what we’d accomplished up to now. Today the water was deeper and stronger than before.

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I’m not a trekking pole guy. Mainly because I’m a camera guy and I’m not coordinated enough to do both at once without consequence. But you gotta take a stick. I was skeptical all the way until the river started to push me over with a knee-deep flow. I shifted and placed a good part of my weight on the stick and righted myself. Which is why trekking poles would not work: there’re good for stabilizing nudges to keep on balance, too skinny for 185 pound leverage preventing a dunk.

And those rented canyoneering shoes come in handy right about now, too. In The Narrows it’s mostly rounded cobbles: precisely the kind that roll your ankle. Even when wet, the sticky bottoms of the shoes give a good grip on the rocks both in and out of the water.

It was still dim at the bottom, but as the canyon twisted and turned the sun would light up whole sides of the cliff wall, and the reflected light would brighten a stretch. Take another turn, however, and the river darkened.

Walking through the calf to thigh-deep sections is exhausting. Even though we were going with the current, we still had to fight with the water.

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Orderville Canyon

We passed the entrance of Orderville Canyon at 11:30. It comes in on the left but we kept straight, saving it for a bottom-up hike later in our lives.

After Big Spring, the river starts to populate. First it’s a trickle — one or two hardy early-starters from the Temple of Sinawava trailhead that you stop and talk with. Then it becomes a more steady stream of enthusiasts, too many to chat but you wave and keep walking. And finally after Orderville it’s a flood of ill-prepared idiots in flip-flops, yelling to hear their echoes, and dropping their cameras in the river.

But by then we were tired and not paying much attention to anything but the end of the trail and the shuttle bus that would take us to lunch.

Once we hit the paved Riverside Walk we were back in the part of Zion we’d visited before. I remember looking at the hikers with backpacks in amazement. And now we were the the ones being stared at. We got on that shuttle bus at Temple of Sinawava around 12:30, dropped our rentals off at Zion Adventure Co, and had a beer in hand awaiting lunch at Oscar’s Cafe by 13:30.

So was it worth it? Oh yes, it really is a special place and I’ve strained for adjectives to describe just how stunning and unique it is. And overnighting in The Narrows was profoundly wonderful. Was it difficult? Yes, but not crazy hard. If we would have gone a bit slower and rested more frequently it would have made it significantly easier. How high was the river? At the gage just north of the Watchman Campground the North Fork Virgin River had a flow of 35 CFS and a height of 7.14 ft during our trip.

Stats

• 10 & 11 Sept 2015
• First day time: 6:30
• Second day time: 5:00
• Total time: 11:30