Mar 31 – Watchman Trail

This feels like the real start of our trip after the mad dash across the continent.

We walked the 1 km from the campground over to the visitors center and bought our national parks annual pass. From there we decided to take it somewhat easy on the first day and do the 5 km Watchman Trail. It has a 500 foot vertical gain to a point overlooking the park entrance.

Our destination is the point almost dead center in the picture below.

Jennie checking out the plants

And the rocks.

Getting Jennie ready for the even steeper and narrower trails to come.

Up ahead we had to zig zag because it was so steep.

The view from the point back down towards the visitor’s center.

Up the valley towards the main canyon.

Jennie wouldn’t come out to the point. This is me looking back towards her at our lunch spot. You can just barely see her red  shirt.

Looking towards the town of Springdale and our RV park.

That’s us.

Today is the last day that you can take personal cars into the main canyon. Starting tomorrow every one must take a free shuttle bus. Here they are waiting.

Heading back

There are lots of sharp pointing things if you are not careful.

 

After dinner we drove into the actual Zion Canyon while we are allowed to.

Well, I know I am prone to say this a lot but this is the most amazing place I have seen in my life. The shear multi-thousand foot vertical cliffs make you feel very small. There are going to a lot of pictures in the days to come but they do not even come close to conveying the feeling of being here. The wide angle lens compresses everything too much.

This is called Angel’s Landing.

You hike out to it along the narrow 6 foot wide ridge in the picture below with 1500 foot drops on either side. 5 people have fallen in recent years. I am not sure I have the nerve for that one.

Everyone was watching two guys climb this wall. The walls are this tall all around you here.

This pillar sits in the middle.

Everything is just too big to fit in a picture.

Enough for one day.

Mar 30 – To Zion National Park

For about the first hour after leaving Flagstaff, it was all downhill.

I was thinking “What a relief, some easy driving for the last day”. Oops. It turns out that this was one of the hardest days of driving the RV I have had. The scenery was amazing, when I could pay attention. We had a bit of everything, sun, rain, snow. steep up and downs with hairpin turns but always a very strong wind which changed from side to side but never seemed to be a tailwind.

Heading north The scenery was pretty open with lots of sandy hills.

Can’t escape the billboards.

Once we turned west it got really beautiful.

But out in the open the wind was a killer. The shoulders also got narrow and I had a hard time keeping it centered. A lot of the time I had the steering wheel pointed about 45 degrees into the wind. You can see how bad it was from the dust that was being kicked up.

It got breathtaking as we dropped down to cross Glen Canyon.

We saw this little parking lot marked as a viewpoint. It looked too small for me so we continued across the bridge.

After seeing what me missed we did a U turn and came back. We had to disconnect the car so that we could turn around in the lot but it was worth it.

There are actually two identical bridges here. One is only for pedestrians. I guess at one point this was going to be a 4 lane highway so both would be used.

I went out on the bridge while Jennie checked out the cactus.

Onwards being buffeted by the wind.

According to the map we eventually have to climb out of the valley up those hills in the distance, above. This plain is at around 3500 foot elevation. We went to just under 8000 feet in one long continuous steep climb.

 

We stopped at a viewpoint on the way up, partly to give the engine and transmission a rest.

The black streak along the middle is the road we were just on. There is a big truck just about dead center.

Behind us, farther up the hill the dark clouds looked ominous.

We were high enough for pine forests

First rain.

Then snow.

We stopped at another lookout before we went back down. Note the winter jacket.

You can see the highway snaking off in the distance.

Back down on the plain we went from dark to clear and sunny.

But always that wind. It was mostly from the south but from one section it seemed to come from the north, just to screw me up. NEVER from the east.

We are just about to enter Utah.

We saw this strange house.

We did a steep downhill into the town of Hurricane.

Which of course meant we had to climb back out.

The scenery from Hurricane to the park was exceptional but unfortunately it was raining a bit and the camera kept focusing on the windshield.

We are at a private campground just outside of the national park. We can walk to the visitors center. It is a good thing I reserved. The park is very full.

We are here for 3 weeks so in case of bad weather we don’t feel bad about taking a day off.