The Other Zion

Have you ever wondered if the people who supported the establishment of Zion National Park in the early 1900s were known as Zionists? Sorry. That’s a thought that entered my mind when we drove into the park.

Oh, in a previous post I spelled Navajo as Navaho and my spell checker didn’t flag it. Maybe its an alternate spelling.

Anyway, driving through Zion National Park was interesting. As we entered the road that led to the park, we thought we saw a sign instructing drivers of large vehicles and RVs to stop and read some instructions. We noticed the instructions as we passed them, but I decided not to turn around to read the rules. When we got to the park entrance, the Ranger looked at our trailer and said we needed to pay a $15 fee to be escorted through the tunnel. So we paid.

The tunnel wasn’t too bad, especially since the Rangers have traffic alternating in a single direction through the tunnel so I was able to go right down the middle. Since the sides of the tunnel are about 12 inches below the top of the trailer, that was a good thing. This image is of a bus on the main road through the park. Our trailer is about the same width as the bus. While we drove this road I purposely refused to look in the right side view mirror to see how close to the rock wall we came. Later we saw that there were no scratches or dents on the trailer.

Zion National Park is another one of those places in Utah with breathtaking scenery. Huge peaks of sedimentary rocks in various shades running from almost pure white to dark red.

As in some of the other places we’ve visited in Utah, the rock formations were originally sand at the bottom of an inland sea and then shaped  by millions of years of erosion – in this park, erosion by the Virgin River.

And as in the other places we’ve visited in Utah, these photographs cannot impart the incredible scale and grandeur of these massive peaks and cliffs.