Back from Zion!

Wow!!! What a fantastic place. We took around 400 pictures on our trip to Zion and I won't be posting them all on the net but I'll post a couple here and some more on my web album. If you haven't been to Zion, I'd highly recommend it as a high priority destination if you like the outdoors and like to hike. Once you have a campsite, and reservations are the way to go, there are shuttles that take you just about everywhere you want to go. The road going up the canyon is closed to private vehicles past a certain point and the shuttles are the only way to get there unless you walk or ride a bike. Since the shuttles are free, they are really the best way to go anyway. The bus drivers will give you information as you drive up the canyon and we found them to be very interesting.

Most of the trails are very well maintained like this one in the first picture going up the river walk. One of the main attractions in the park is at the end of the river walk going into the "Narrows." Unfortunately when we were there the Narrows were closed because of the high volume of snow melt and the Virgin River being much too deep and fast to allow access. At the trails end you have to end up walking in the river itself as it takes up all the space between the canyon walls, but since the flow was too much, we couldn't go there. We saw quite a few pictures at the visitors center and the Human History Museum of the Narrows and I was sorry we didn't get to see it since it looks very cool. We are planning another trip down there in October so hopefully we can get up there then.

The canyon walls are made from sandstone and the layering makes some very interesting patterns and I took many pictures of them for some strange reason. I guess I thought the angles of the layers looked pretty cool and I had to consider how they were formed.

Karen and I did this one hike up to a place called Angels Landing. It was marked "strenuous" in the park guide and I think she was dreading it until the day we did it. As it turned out she did great and made it all the way to the top with the greatest of ease as far as I was concerned. It was a good thing she isn't afraid of heights like some of her other family members are since the trail in places is very narrow and has chains to hold onto for safety as you can see in this picture. Both sides of this trail had sheer cliffs and you can see the road way down there to get a perspective of the heights involved.

I'll be posting some more pictures on my web album so if you want to see them, click here.

So Zion turned out to be a wonderful place to go and with the warm weather we had down there (temps in the high 80's) the week was very memorable. Being that this was also the first time I have ever "camped" in an RV, it was even more special in that respect and spending the week away with Karen made it the absolute BEST!