Angels Landing is a one-half mile (0.5-mile) chained trail beginning at Scout Lookout and is a highly sought after hike at ZION with more than 300,000 visitors making the ascent in 2019. Growth has continued rapidly in 2021 and increasing park popularity has led to intense crowding and congestion along the Angels Landing trail. Crowding continues to raise safety and visitor experience concerns.
To implement and staff the day-use permit lottery system, two new park-use fees would be introduced. First, a six-dollar ($6) application fee would be used to cover the cost for recreation.gov to build and operate an online, lottery platform. Second, a three-dollar ($3) per person fee would be charged to successful lottery applicants and would cover the cost to implement and manage the permit program in the field at ZION. Permits would allow for groups of up to six (6) people and would be connected to the email of one person from each group.
Permit authentication would be required starting March 1, 2022.
Permits would be made available in two lottery formats: 1) advance and 2) day-before. Same day reservations would not be available.
The advance-lottery would be held quarterly with the first lottery opening January 1, 2022
The crowds at Angels Landing are nuts. We got about 2/3 up the chains before somebody farther ahead freaked out and everything stopped. After a while we decided it wasn't worth waiting any longer, and even bailing out took forever. And that was on a supposedly low-traffic day.
big_load wrote:The crowds at Angels Landing are nuts. We got about 2/3 up the chains before somebody farther ahead freaked out and everything stopped.
Agree and I too experienced a freak out that lead to having to traverse around said freak out. Thankfully after spending some time on top....WITH a ton of people the freak show was gone on the way down. I always wondered what happened to that poor lady. She had a death grip on the chain and there was a gap in the chains by about 15ish feet.....she kept repeating "the chain, the chain". I never could imagine being that scared.
Out of all the things I've lost I miss my mind the most.....
@big_load
I can't bring myself to go there. Moab was bad enough when I lived there. Looking forward to my winter in the Mojave, a vast bunch of nothingness! Solitude is better than scenery.
There is a point of no return unremarked at the time in most lives. Graham Greene The Comedians
A clean house is a sign of a misspent life.
azbackpackr wrote:Solitude is better than scenery.
Damn straight. (BOTH is better of course)
"The censorship method ... is that of handing the job over to some frail and erring mortal man, and making him omnipotent on the assumption that his official status will make him infallible and omniscient."
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