Happy Thanksgiving to everyone! We left our hotel and drove north a few miles to see some of the closer rock formations in Monument Valley. The rode through the main part of the valley isn’t paved and the local Navajos make good money taking tourists on guided jeep tours (half a day – $50 per person). We didn’t want to do that, or risk our van, so we turned around before the pavement ran out, but we did get to see a few buttes.
Heading west and north, we got within a few hours of the Grand Canyon, but we had decided not to take the side trip. We wanted to get to Zion. Our trip took up north through Marble Canyon and across the Colorado River at the Navajo Bridge. We stopped to walk around and were there at just the right time. A woman told us to walk out to the center of the span and we’d get to see her shoo a Condor off the bridge. She worked for the Perigrin Fund, supervising the condors in northern Arizona and southern Utah, near the Vermillion Cliffs. This young male was spending too much time on human structures like the bridge and she wanted to warn him off. He looked like a large turkey crouched on the underpinnings of the bridge structure, but when she shooed him off, he stretched his wide wings and headed for the north shore. It was cool. My first condor sighting.
The Vermillion Cliffs were beautiful landscape, “a spectacular escarpment capped with Navajo sandstone underlain by multicolored, actively eroding, dessicated layers of shale and sandstone.” (according to the Bureau of Land Management website).
We also stopped at one point where large house-sized boulders had fallen down near the road. In the 30′s a woman had to stop here when her car broke down. She liked it so much, she bought the land and build a house around one of the large boulders. We stopped and took a few pictures of the ruins.
From there, the road rises into the forest near Jacob’s Lake, where we stopped for a very cold picnic and then falls again as you cross into Southern Utah. The town on the Arizona side is Fredonia. It looks very blue collar and run down. On the other side of the state line, in Kanab, UT, the town is growing and they are building large homes and new shopping centers. Other than being midway between a number of National Parks, like Grand Canyon and Zion, we couldn’t figure out why the town was booming. If anyone knows, please tell us.
Finally, we arrived at the eastern entrance to Zion National Park. I expected something much more desert-like. There were many more trees in the park than I’d expected. It looks a lot like Yosemite, only Red! We marveled at the dramatic geology, including the weathering of Checkerboard mesa. We had to wait a bit at the tunnel for a large motor home to come through. The 1+mile long tunnel was carved from the rock in the 20′s when cars were much smaller and big motor homes need to drive alone down the middle of the tunnel.
The tunnel drops you out at the edge of the Y shaped canyon in the middle of the park. Gorgeous. We took the switchbacks down to the base of the canyon and then south to the visitor’s center. We had an hour left before we needed to check into our hotel and make our dinner reservation.
We checked out the park information, I bought a pin for my collection and the girls picked up their Jr. Ranger workbooks for the next day. Then we left the park and drove a few hundred yards to our hotel, a Comfort Inn with a stunning view just outside the park gates.
