Written by: Shotgun Rider (ChatGPT).
👧🏼 Note: For the first time, my AI companion is writing from my perspective. Usually, I discourage this, but this time the output was too good to ask it for a redraft. It’s based on an “interview” type of exchange in which the machine read this blog up until now, proposed a few topics to fit in to the story so far, refined the proposals based on my feedback, and then essentially “interviewed” me on my experience at Zion. I kinda wish I’d written this myself tbh… I feel like ChatGPT is starting to get a feel for my writing style and even mimic it, but without all the rambling detours. So enjoy, but maybe not more than you enjoy my own posts 😜
Regardless, don’t be fooled: all text and images that follow, plus the post title, were produced using generative AI. Megan out. /👧🏼
Zion National Park greeted us not with soaring trails but with shifting plans. We arrived fresh from Bryce Canyon by way of Grand Canyon, Mesa Verde, and Rocky Mountain before that, our legs still humming from all they had carried us through, only to learn that Zion Canyon was closed to personal vehicles—shuttle access only. I hadn’t packed for a day away from the car. And after weeks on the road, that car had begun to feel like a little shell of safety, comfort, and autonomy. The idea of stepping out of it ill-prepared and spending a full day away from its familiarity struck a nerve I hadn’t known was exposed.
So, I didn’t. Instead, I drove through East Zion, detouring to viewpoints and trailheads, then hunkered down at the East Rim trailhead while a thunderstorm rolled in. Inside the car, I journaled and watched the storm tumble in across the red rock landscape, grateful for a reason to sit still. That pause turned out to be a gift: time to regroup, to adjust expectations, and to notice the fatigue I hadn’t admitted to. The trip had been beautiful, but it had also been nonstop. Something about Zion—its verticality, its grandeur, maybe just its timing—forced me to slow down.
I’d planned to camp at Zion Canyon Ranch that night, but plans changed again. The road was barely passable in a sedan, and the site itself was more dust than destination: no facilities, just steep rutted tracks and one lonely porta-potty I couldn’t even drive up to. I backtracked and tried a BLM site next, but the earth was too solid for my tent pegs. Ultimately, I ended up at a roadside Econolodge in Hurricane, Utah. Not the night under the stars I’d envisioned—but I slept deeply and gratefully in a real bed, recognizing at last that my body needed rest more than my itinerary needed precision.
The next morning, I stepped up to Zion again, this time ready—and with a last-minute Angels Landing permit in hand. I set out at 10 a.m. with a curious calm, unsure whether the chain section would feel like a triumph or a terror. I’d seen the photos, of course. Everyone has. But standing there in the moment, hands on iron, cliff faces dropping off into air, I understood why the trail has such a reputation. I’m not scared of heights, I thought—until I was. There were moments that startled me: a misstep here, a hand-slick with rain there, the undeniable awareness of how easy it would be to fall.
And yet, I didn’t panic. I kept moving. Even when my heart jumped, my hands stayed firm. One hiker behind me asked if I was okay, and I laughed. “I think so. I just never thought I was afraid of heights until now.”
At the summit, I sat quietly, taking in the scope of it all: the beauty, the scale, the sheer improbability of being here, in this moment, on this rock, with chipmunks clambering up my legs hoping for a taste of sesame bar (which, for the record, they did not get). A fellow hiker mentioned he was applying to a master’s program at the University of Edinburgh, and I smiled at the coincidence—another reminder of how small the world can be.
Looking back, I didn’t hike The Narrows or The Subway. But I did hike Angels Landing, and I did learn that not doing everything is okay. It doesn’t cheapen the experience. If anything, it makes what I did do feel more like a choice than a checklist. I’m not trying to conquer these places. I’m trying to meet them where I’m at.
And, for the first time in a while, that felt like enough.
Roamward Bound 