Still in Utah, and still on the Colorado Plateau. On our continued way west, we made the fairly short (~2 hrs) but scenic trip from Bryce Canyon to
Zion National Park. Coming in from the east the first thing you see is Checkerboard Mesa - a huge (900 ft) mountain of orange, brown, and white slickrock that has cross-hatched fissures all over it, hence the name "checkerboard". You soon after drive through the
Zion-Mt Carmel tunnel, a 1.1 mile tunnel burrowed through the mountain. It was started in the 1920s to connect the main part of Zion National Park with Bryce Canyon & the Grand Canyon, both to the east of Zion. The only road always open to private vehicles is this one connecting the west entrance to Zion at Springdale, UT with the east entrance at Mt Carmel. While there are definitely some scenic pull-overs worthy of a look, the main points of interest at Zion are only accessible by park shuttle busses from early March through the late November.
Factoid: The Zion-Mt Carmel tunnel was the longest tunnel of its kind in the world when completed in 1930.
The only available parking within the park having easy access to the shuttle busses is at the Visitor Center or the Museum (very limited). Otherwise, parking is available in the town of Springdale, just outside the west entrance, which has its own fleet of shuttle busses to ferry people to the park. The only exception is for those who are camping at one of the two campgrounds (both near the Visitors Center) or the Lodge which is midway up the shuttle route. We arrived around 12:30pm on the first day and were extremely fortunate to get a parking place in the Visitors Center lot where someone was leaving as we drove around (there were more than a dozen other cars driving around looking for a spot at the same time - we were lucky! On day two, we arrived at about 9:15am and had no trouble getting a parking spot but by 10am there was a long double-line of cars waiting to get into the park so I'm sure the spots filled quickly after our arrival.
We had great weather (mid-to-high 70s and sunny). The park, at mid-week in mid-March was crowded. While they were running all their shuttles, the shuttles were always full, often with people standing in the aisle. And all the easy-to-moderate trails were full of people (some looked like a trail of ants from a distance). I'm glad we decided to come here now rather than wait since from what I've been told it only gets much more crowded and hotter as the months pass.
Zion is definitely a very scenic place with it's majestic sandstone/slickrock peaks which tower over the valley floor. It's really hard to imagine that the canyon is the result of erosion by the Virgin River, mainly, I guess, because we can't really envision the passage of the millions of years it's taken to become what we see today. We got to see all the major points of interest in the short time we were at the park and even got a few short hikes in over the day-and-a-half we spent there.
Factoid: The Virgin River, which runs through Zion and which over the course of many millions of years carved out the canyon between these towering sandstone mountains, is estimated to carry an average of over 5,000 tons of rock (in the form of sandstone silt) through the canyon each and every day. You might be able to see in the few pictures of the river how cloudy the water is from all the silt it is carrying.
Like a lot of these national parks, the pictures below hardly do justice to what you see with your own eyes.
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| Three Prophets |
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Weeping Rock
(from inside the ledge)
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| White Throne |
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| Virgin River |
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| Beginning of The Narrows |
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| Virgin River |
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| Upper Emerald Falls |
Well, to be honest, we were running out of steam and weren't sure where we wanted to go next after Zion so we opted to take a little R&R. We headed to Las Vegas for the weekend to relax a bit (really, we did relax some) and figure out where we wanted to head over the next week. More on that later.
That's all for now! .....
Dan
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