Catching up on Blogs, Zion and Kolob

Catching up on my blogs. We’ve been out of Utah for several days now, but I still need to post about Zion National Park .

For my money and drive time I really enjoyed Bryce Canyon and the surrounding area better than I did Zion. If you go to Zion National Park you really need to heed the advice of getting there extremely early. If you don’t get there early you have to park in the town just south of the entrance and take a shuttle bus in. Not that it really matters since even if you park at the visitor’s center you still have to hop the shuttle busses around the park.

I understand why they have the shuttle bus system, it cuts down a ton of traffic and carbon emissions and all that, but I’m terrible ok with sitting in a shuttle bus why people sneeze and cough and don’t cover their mouths when they do it. And the body odor, my god, why isn’t hygiene a priority? On top of it all, our last shuttle driver looked like he had enough, I think it was nothing short of a miracle that he didn’t drive the bus into one of the cliffs. Can’t say that I blame him, I got hip-checked a couple of times and tourists were rushing to the next thing to see. Why are people in a hurry to have fun, doesn’t that kind of take the fun out of it? ‘By god I’m going to have fun and I’m going to do RIGHT NOW!!’ Seriously, where’s the fire? I would have loved to have taken the time to walk some of the more extensive trails and paths, but the people just ruin it. I have no interest in hiking a path, no matter how beautiful, with someone on my heels, or someone who doesn’t understand personal space, or the people who walk 2-3 abreast and look at you like you kicked their dog when you say excuse me to pass them. How dare I interrupt their walk, don’t I know the sun rises and set’s on them?

All that aside, the one place in Zion I did actually find very interesting was the Weeping Wall. This is were two different kinds of stone come together and one lets the water through while the other doesn’t so it get’s squeezed out of the wall and makes it look like the wall is a waterfall, but the water doesn’t poor over the wall, it leaks out of it. Scientists have studied the water coming out of the weeping wall and have determined that is was originally rainwater that fell on the top of the cliffs and has taken 1200 years to work it’s way through the stone and come out of the wall. When you walk the path you get ‘rained’ on, it’s really like being blessed, kind of a cool feeling, no pun intended.

We got fed up with the shuttle system and the rude tourists pretty quickly, so we decided to be done with Zion and started heading back to Cedar City. On our way back we passed the entrance to Kolob Canyons, Zion National Park. We took a spin through there and found it to be pretty and peaceful. The rock formations were interesting with the striped uplift areas and the forming arches. All in all not a bad experience, but if we ever return to the area we’ll likely stick with Bryce Canyon and Cedar Breaks. Or maybe head out and see Arches and Canyon Lands. Who knows where the wind might blow us.

That’s it for now, I have to go through the next set of pictures before I can post more.

Cheers~
;-)K