Zion National Park – Road-trip Day 3

Zion – fantastic for hiking true wilderness

After we had been to the Standing rocks and Lee’s Ferry we packed up in the van and went for Zion National Park. A place I hadn’t been before. Our danish companion asked how many of us had been there… And he guaranteed that we would all be silenced and just go ’WOOOOW’….. Rather a promise and I was, let’s admit, a wee bit sceptical. This year’s road-trip was re-planned a bit over the earlier ones. And we got to spend an early evening, a whole day and the following morning. Our first stop within the park was the Checkerboard mesa that you see in the picture above. We went on and at our next stop we went for a short walk over to one of the sites with petroglyphs.

From there we went down the road, through the tunnel and stopped by the bridge over Virgin river. This was where everyone gathered with or without camera to see the sun set. I generally tend to like it better being away from the group, seeing my own motives etc so after a while I turned around instead and walked back a bit and got the last rays of sun on the cliffs behind the bridge.

Bridge over Virgin river, the place for a Zion sunset

The next morning we were challenged with a scavenger hunt, 8 words to be illustrated in a picture… We went back up to the South Gate and ’worked’ our way down to the bridge again.

Zion is an high altitude desert and very dependent on the water running in the Virgin river. We were headed for one of the easier hiking trails by the river. And even with a limited time frame we had I loved the paved walk by the river. Meeting some guys who had been on hiking the river from upstream and seeing their faces made it even more inviting. It gave me the want-to-do more feeling. Zion is definitely a place I’d love to come back to and spend lots of more time in. But here are some pictures from the days spent this time…

 …Enjoy!