Road trip 2011 – part 8

Day 23 11/29 – We drove from Bryce Canyon to Springdale, UT and stayed in a local hotel there. It was dark on the drive there and we didn’t know if we would find anything open in Springdale, so we stopped in a small town along the way at a grocery store and got some snacks. The cashier warned John about watching out for deer along the way. So glad that she did, because we saw probably 8 deer along the side of the road!
While driving, we could also tell that we were passing some very large mountains along the side of the road, but we couldn’t see them very clearly. One part of the road has a VERY long tunnel – so long that I was starting to get concerned that it would never end! Inside the tunnel, we saw a strange critter – looked kind of like a cat with a raccoon, fluffy tail. Later, we asked a park ranger what it was and they told us that it was a ringtail and that it was very rare for people to see them.
I know it will be hard to believe, but I really did weed out a lot of pictures! These are just some of my favorites. We really liked Zion National Park – absolutely beautiful and different than Bryce Canyon in its own way. At Bryce, the main viewing points are at the rim. At Zion, the main viewing points are down in the bottom, so both offer a very unique, beautiful view of God’s creation.

Just look at the colors of the rocks!! And the sky!!!

It’s hard to grasp the scale, but these are VERY large. Did I mention the colors? :)

We drove to the end of the road first and worked our way back out. We took a very easy hike along the river.

Just a bunch of shots of the fam and the canyon during the morning hike. It was cold!!

On the return, we saw a small group of deer eating along the path. We watched them as they crossed over the river.

We also took another hiking trail – this one a little less groomed and we hiked to the emerald pools – small waterfalls with pools below them. Much more enjoyable hike, as it had warmed up a bit. There was a narrow pathway, so we spent some time goofing off.

Words and pictures just don’t do it justice – it is incredibly beautiful! We already want to go back and spend more time there doing some of the longer hikes.

To try to give you a sense of perspective … we spied some climbers scaling the face of one of the mountains. The above series shows them up close (far left), a little further away (look very closely at the dark stripe in the center) and finally zoomed out all of the way (the dark stripe is right about the center of the frame). Can you spy them in the last one? We watched them for a few minutes – long enough for the bottom climber to catch up the the upper one. I have no idea how high they were planning on going, but WOW!!