Also by way of Zion National Park
After stopping at Vermillion Cliffs on the way from the south rim of the Grand Canyon to the north rim, we discovered that the road to the north rim was closed due to snow. Hmm. This was round about mid-May and we somehow figured the north rim would be similar to the south rim, which was lovely and temperate. We were in error. So, having nothing better to do while waiting for the road to open, we went to Zion National Park in southern Utah.
To get from one side of Zion NP to the other, you have to drive through a tunnel. RVs don’t fit well in the old tunnel, so you have to buy a special permit that enables you to hog the entire road for the length of the tunnel, blocking all the traffic going the other way until you are through. Then, having hogged the road and navigated the tunnel, you discover that there is no place to park an RV within the boundaries of the park. The handful of RV parking spaces are, of course, full by the time you get to the Visitor’s Center and there is no ancillary parking whatsoever. You must drive to town (I have blocked out the name of this town due to trauma) and pay $25 to park on the street there. Then you can ride a shuttle into the park and ride another shuttle around the park. Very little of the park is accessible by road/shuttle, and there are about a billion people trying to see the place, so what I mostly saw was other people. I didn’t really enjoy this whole process all that much. I would rather have ridden my trike around so I could see. But I didn’t know I had that option, so I spent the majority of my visit catching partial glimpses of this and that through the windows of a shuttle bus. When the bus stopped, I got out and walked as far as I could. Unfortunately, being handicapped, that isn’t terribly far.
In addition, the slot canyon known as The Narrows (which is what I most wanted to see) is accessible only by wading up a river which was, at this time of year, a raging torrent, and completely off-limits to the public. If the public was stupid enough to try to wade into it anyway, the public would be swept away. Even the public that climbed over the railings at the Grand Canyon was not silly enough to try to see The Narrows. Even I was not silly enough, and I wanted to see it very badly.
In my quest to See Absolutely Everything, I made a few stops along the road on the east side of the tunnel as I drove into the park. This was one of them.
More east side
The views at Zion National Park are all vertical. One spends a great deal of one’s time resting one’s head on the back of one’s neck while trying not to fall over.
This is the gentle stream through which one must wade to see The Narrows.
Here is Lower Emerald Pool. The stuff that looks like rain is actually waterfall. There are two of them falling from rocks that loom over the path so you end up walking behind them.
This is a picture of waterfall #1 taken from behind waterfall #2.