Zion National Park

Thursday, October 6

From the campsite in Hurricane to Zion, we had about a 30-minute drive. The geography was getting cooler with each mile that passed. First, mountains and mesas in the distance, and then, multi-colored red rocks surrounded us everywhere.

Even the Zion National Park sign and the road through the park are red!

Since the year 2000, you have to take a shuttle through the Zion National Park canyon to view it. There are simply too many people who visit the park each year, and traffic had gotten too bad. Recognizing that would mean Auggie would need to stay in the van for an hour or two, he and I found the one dog-friendly hike in the park and took that first for some exercise.

We were accompanied by a mercurial sky all day – it started off in the morning when we got to the park with blue sky and big, puffy white clouds that created shadows that my camera both loved and hated. Here are some of the shots that the camera loved.

Because of the huge amount of rain that had fallen the previous day, the Virgin River looked like churning milky Frappucino from Starbucks.

Auggie and I finished our couple-mile hike, and then I put him in the van to take an afternoon snooze. I jumped into the canyon shuttle to take a look at what was down that canyon.

Turned out that it was (more!) pretty cool stuff!

I got a glimpse of the Three Patriarchs, the Grotto and the Zion Lodge, as well as Angels Landing. (All seen through the windows of the shuttle, so I didn’t take photos.)

The end of the line was at Temple of Sinawava, where there was a one-mile trail to walk. Here are some shots from that walk.

From the end of that one-mile paved trail starts another apparently very cool trail called “The Narrows,” but the Narrows were closed the day we were there due to the risk of flash-flooding from the rain. I think I missed some of the cool parts of Zion due to that. Boo.

(In fact, all throughout Zion you see signs posted about the dangers of flash-flooding. First, they advise you to keep an eye on the weather and any signs of rain and/or storms, as well as sudden running water and/or the sound of it. Then, the next piece of advice is – if you are not able to escape a flash flood – not to try and outrun it, but rather to seek higher ground. And if you can’t do that, find a rock or something else to take the brunt of the initial impact of the water for you.)

This is not a joke!

Remember that mercurial sky I mentioned? It was getting progressively colder and wetter the longer I was in the canyon. The blue skies we’d enjoyed that morning on our walk were gone, and rain clouds had set heavily in. I took Auggie for a quick final walk around the Zion parking lot, and then we jumped into the van to undertake the VERY curvy, VERY steep Zion-Mount Carmel Highway that would take us out of the park and farther east in the direction of Bryce Canyon National Park.

More curves, more up-and-down-inclines – we just can’t seem to escape it!  J  But it was accompanied by more gorgeous geography, so I just had to smile.

I watched with trepidation, however, as the thermometer dropped slowly and steadily to below freezing. And then … the snow started.

Not heavy at first, but there were fat, icy raindrops hitting the windshield as we climbed. I saw cars coming from the other direction whose front grills and roofs were covered with a layer of snow. And as we got to the top of the mountain we were climbing, we looked all around us to see a light dusting of snow covering everything, and some thick storm clouds in the direction we were headed.

Welcome to an early winter in the mountains, Christine.

And then just as quickly as the cloud cover had hit, we broke free of it and found some blue sky again. And we were treated to red rocks with a pretty dusting of snow on them in the distance. Surely a different view than we would have gotten in the heat of the summer, but a cool view just the same.

As we got closer to Bryce Canyon National Park, we started seeing some more interesting geography – hoodoos. Take a look below at these cool iron-rich, red-rock formations (those are the hoodoos). They look like those fragile pillars you make at the beach when you let watery sand drip through your fingers. But instead of sand, these were made of 60-million-year-old rock that had been slowly and steadily eroded by water and chemical decomposition over time. These hoodoos and what are called “eroding fins” are what make up Bryce Canyon National Park.

But … we would see more of that tomorrow. First, we found our campsite next to Bryce Canyon National Park and pulled into our spot, where we could enjoy the snow on the tree just outside the door of the Champagne Chevy. It was going to be a COLD night!

When we took our evening walk around the deserted campground, Auggie and I encountered two male mule deer with big, multi-point antlers. I had to pull Auggie in tightly again and try to break his eye contact with the deer – the last thing we needed was two well-armored angry deer charging us!

Back in the van, I turned the furnace on, had some dinner and read some more of Potter Book Seven. Auggie and I fell asleep snuggled up close for warmth! 

Drive to Utah / Zion National Park

Wednesday, October 5

We woke up and got ourselves moving fairly quickly in the morning. We had a bit of a drive ahead of us, so we got started tout de suite.

We were headed to Zion National Park, which is in the lower southwestern corner of the state of Utah. The first leg of this drive was about an hour’s ride to Las Vegas, where we would pick up the interstate that would take us over toward Zion.

Here is Vegas, that shining beacon of a city, in the distance. This is the first time I’ve ever approached Vegas from the road. It’s also the first time I’ve really seen it “without its makeup on.” It’s not nearly as cool-looking as it is at night when you have a bunch of fun, silly, (slightly? More-than-slightly?) alcohol-buzzing colleagues with you and it’s four in the morning at a sales meeting. 

But that’s a story for another time ...

As we drove across the southern tip of Nevada, there were more cool, multi-colored layers of nature to look at. 

And the red rocks for which Utah is known slowly became more prominent, making me stare with more jaw-dropping gazes in all directions. This is such cool territory to an east-coaster!

Throughout the course of our day, we had a bunch of errands to run, so we made lots of stops. Nothing remarkable, so I’ll keep this short.

We arrived at our campsite in Hurricane, Utah, in pouring cold rain. We stayed in the van and made some soup to warm us up, read more Potter and had a fairly early evening of it. 

Death Valley

Tuesday, October 4

We woke up to 36-degree temperatures – it was cold! We heard on the radio that snow had, indeed, fallen in the higher mountains. I got breakfast made as quickly as possible and we got on the road.

Funny, though – we were headed to Death Valley. The range of temperatures we would experience that day was going to be dramatic.  In fact, over the course of our day, we would see temperatures span more than 55 degrees, from 36 degrees when we woke up to over 91 at the hottest point of the desert!

We also experienced dramatic elevation changes that day – from the more than 7,000 feet where we started at our campsite in Mammoth Lakes to lower than sea level in Death Valley.

But I’m getting ahead of myself … 

First we stopped to fill up the gas tank, and then we had about an hour’s drive south from Mammoth Lakes to the Visitor’s Center at Death Valley National Park. Boy, those mountains sure were pretty on the drive.

We stopped at the park’s Visitor’s Center quickly to use the facilities and to just make sure we were clear where we were headed. (I’m apparently paranoid about getting lost in the desert or running out of gas and getting stranded …) And then we were on our way.

Death Valley is so ugly it’s beautiful.

As we entered, the barren mountains looked like dry, crumbling mounds of old Nestle Quik chocolate powder. 

But then we got into some more interesting territory, which dropped us down into the valley, and we were able to see the vast expanse of land, as well as the layers of rock and color that bore the millions of years of evidence of Mother Nature at work.

There is minimal vegetation throughout Death Valley. And it all just looks so consistently dry, everywhere you look. At many points, I felt as if someone had dropped me onto the moon. Or into that scene in the very first “Star Wars” movie where those sand creatures come creeping out of the canyon cliffs and walls.

All of a sudden, I heard this massive loud boom that scared the bejeezus out of me. Quickly, I saw the fighter jet swoosh past above me in the sky on its practice run, turning at steep angles and upside down, eventually turning hard behind a mountain and descending out of sight.

We passed a multitude of interesting road signs, many of which I had never seen before and probably won’t ever again outside of this desert. For example, we saw the sign advising us to turn off our air conditioning for the next 10 miles to avoid overheating. [That was all well and good, except for when the temps reached 91 degrees!]

We saw the sign saying, “Caution: Extreme Heat Danger,” and we watched the temperatures bump steadily at the base of the valley up to 88 … 89 … 90 … and then 91 degrees. I was so glad I wasn’t doing this drive the height of the summer. (Any of my readers out there ever do that? I’d love to know what the temperatures reached in your car!)

Elevation signs are consistently posted along the road throughout Death Valley. Odd, however, was to see a sign for “Sea Level” when you are actually driving up a hill. The lowest point we saw recorded on a road sign was -190 feet at the Furnace Creek Campground on the east side of the park, although the Death Valley National Park pamphlet stated that the lowest point is actually -282 feet somewhere in the park.

And on the National Park Service map of Death Valley, there are also little signs indicating where water for your radiator can be found along the way. Yeah, I get it – overheating can be a problem. J

I was keeping a close watch on the thermometer as we drove across the more than 150 miles that was our drive from the west side of Death Valley to the east. The Champagne Chevy did well - no problems. 

The elevation and temperature roller coasted in inverse relationship with one another – as we drove down into the valley, the temperature started to rise. As we climbed back up to multiple thousands of feet of elevation, the temperature would sink again to something more conducive to ongoing human life.

I was also keeping a close watch on the gas gauge along our journey. We were fine and were never in danger of running out of gas in the desert. Which was a good thing, I tell you, because gas in the park was going for $5.39 for a single gallon of regular. Super was more than $5.79. That’s not a price at which you want to have to fill up a gas-guzzling RV monster!

It was such an interesting drive. Up a hill, down a hill, up another hill and then down a sharply turning steep grade. Colors changing, light changing, temperatures changing. Remnants of an old mining industry still lying decrepit and broken-down along the side of the road. We did not see any critters of any sort.

At one point, we saw a UPS guy coming at us from the other direction. Wow – they really do deliver anywhere!

And as we were approaching the end of our drive through Death Valley, we saw this older man on a bicycle on the other side of the road, wearing no helmet and no shirt, just peddling along his way. I wondered how far he was going to bike into the desert. I hoped he had enough water with him. I said him a silent prayer and thought to myself that he really might be a crazy man.

There’s really not much there once you exit on the eastern side of Death Valley. We weren’t heading much farther, only about 20 more miles to the thriving metropolis of Pahrump, Nevada. We were tired of driving and got to our campsite on the early side. It cost me only $15 for a campsite with both water and electric! (That’s the cheapest I’ve paid so far.) And they had great showers, laundry facilities and a good WiFi connection, so we did some laundry and made ourselves comfortable for our inexpensive night on this nice campground.

We had some forward trip planning to do, and so we settled in for what turned out to be a beautiful, clear but chilly night in the desert. 

Yosemite National Park

Monday, October 3

We got moving the next morning, took care of a few errands and then headed the few miles north into Yosemite National Park.

I hadn’t really felt a huge pull to come and visit this National Park – I had heard from some fellow travelers earlier in the summer that Yosemite can be like a parking lot in full summer. There are so many visitors to the park that it gets really hard to even move. Ick.

But in early October on a Monday morning, it was a beautiful time to go, and we were awestruck yet again with some gorgeous territory! Holey moley.

Along the popular road on the floor of the Yosemite Valley, we got out and took the short walk up to Bridalveil Fall, which was fairly dry and only a trickle this time of year.

We then parked the van and took a nice walk through Curry Village to stretch our legs, poke around and get some exercise. After that, it was on to walk up to Yosemite Falls, which were also a mere trickle of their springtime selves. 

Then we drove farther along the Valley Road to El Capitan, another massive granite cliff that is apparently a popular rock-climbing destination.

Since we were headed east out of Yosemite after our sightseeing, we took Highway 120/Tioga Road, which led us across the top half of the park. This road offered more fabulous scenery that I’m betting most visitors to Yosemite don’t get to see. I felt so lucky to have been driving this road – it was gorgeous!

Here’s a look along Yosemite Valley as we climbed.

Here are some vistas from Olmstead Point.

Here is lovely Tenaya Lake.

And here is a view across the beautiful Tuolumne Meadows.

And then as we got ready to exit the park, we crossed over the Tioga Pass, at an elevation of 9,945 feet. There were more spectacular views on the other side of that pass … as well as some snow and lots of cold weather! 

When we got to the small town of Lee Vining, we were treated to this pretty rainbow.

It was getting cold and dark, so we got gas in Lee Vining and continued our drive a bit farther south to Mammoth Lakes in the rain. We heard on the radio, though, that there was SNOW at 8,400 feet and above. We were at just over 7,000, so we had only (cold!) rain, but wow – how’s that for a shift? And a bit of a shock, to be honest.

I had packed hats, gloves and my warm tights into the van before I left Silver Spring, and I tell you, I was sooooo glad to have them. I never expected to be still on the road for winter weather, but it was here.

We spent a wet, chilly night on the campground in Mammoth Lakes and went to sleep reading more Potter.