Road trip part 7 - Zion mon

Headed west from the Escalante and spent the night in Coral Dunes before heading to Zion for a couple days. We went in through the east entrance past some incredible slickrock formations. They made me wish I'd brought my gear. It was all I could do to keep from scrambling up, and up, and up...




But if I had, I'd have missed the greatest climbing draw of Zion canyon - the BIG walls...



Unbelievably sheer cliffs, towering hundreds of feet straight up. Wall Street's got nothing on Zion...


In keeping with the general theme of the trip, we headed first for the narrows...



After about a mile upstream, it got pretty narrow. That's me back in there...





We stopped to explore a side canyon...

And the weather started to turn on us so we headed back out.

The next day we decided to take a walk up to the rim and check out the view. We passed a small slot canyon on the way - Echo Canyon - and I may add photos from there to this post another day (or you can click the title of this post for a link to more photos). The hike took us up a thousand feet or so, and that necessitated a rest on the way...


And a lunch break at the top...


It was an awfully nice view...
The river winds through the middle of the canyon and the main park road runs alongside it. The best part about the view from up here was realizing that there were no cars on the road, no car noise, and no car exhaust. The park has restricted all vehicle access from the park for most of the year. All visitors have to take a shuttle bus. I'll be honest - I was a little dubious at first, but it didn't take long for me to be convinced that it was a great way to go. Places like this should have as few cars as possible. Well, really, they should have as few people as possible. But it's a national park so people are going to be drawn in to see what it's all about. The least we can do is leave our cars at the gate.

this is the seventh post in a series on the canyon country road trip
click the title of this post for a link to more road trip photos including Coral Dunes and Echo Canyon