Zion National Park

After leaving Arches National Park, we drove to the south-western side of Utah and stopped at Zion National Park. I had seen some pictures of the park and wanted to see it first hand. If you come in to the park from the eastern side as we did, you can hit a pretty big traffic jam. The tunnel (with no lights) is small and everyone is trying to bring in huge campers, which requires an escort while no one else is in the tunnel. So, it can take a while. But once you get through the tunnel you're immediately blown away because you're looking at a huge canyon valley. From the car you cant see down to the bottom but you're driving right along the edge of it. You work your way down and most of your time is spent in the valley area.

Zion National Park uses a natural gas bus system to get you around from trail to trail. At first I was sceptical because I always imagined going on trails as something you do on your own. Just you and the great outdoors! Well, that's fine when you're out in remote areas that no one ever travels to but at some of these National Parks there are so many visitors that it would be a nightmare navigating through all their cars and trying to find parking at each trail head. So the bus system, while confusing at first, once you got the hang of it was just great. It got you where you needed to go in just a couple minutes and there was always one coming up the road in 5 to 10 minutes in case you get off at the wrong stop. And as you can see, Kelli thought the buses were AOK:

One of the more interesting trails we went on was called the hidden canyon. This is where you hiked up a very steep graded trail. It seemed like it went up forever, and when you go to the top, you could see so far down it was breathtaking. But this was just the beginning because once you reached the top of the trail now before you was a canyon that went back forever. We walked through that canyon for as far as we could go before realizing that the sun was going down, very quickly. We had no lights and we did not want to be in this canyon when it got to dark to see because you could trip on anything. So we actually ran the whole way back out of the canyon and oddly enough that was one of the more fun things that we did. Very exciting. Here is shot looking in to the beginning of the canyon and some other pictures: