Sunday, July 15

Our Trip So Far: Gloucester MA to Zion National Pak, Utah - 3,068 Miles
(letters do not quite correspond to daly posts)

Sunday, July 15: Grand Canyon to Zion National Park

This was a day when we just had to sing "This Land is My Land." What a country! From the Grand Canyon, which we left around 9:30 am (PDT)  to Zion National Park, where we arrived around 6:30 pm (MDT), it was just one beautiful day. Almost impossible to describe the absolutely gorgeous landscape we drove through all day.  From the Grand Canyon we dropped down 2,000 feet to Cameron, AZ (where we spent some time and money at a wonderful trading post and visited a museum quality gallery of Navajo and Hopi crafts), then drove north on US 89 to Page, AZ, the Glen Canyon Dam  and Lake Powell, then Kanab, Utah and on into Zion.

The scenery was extraordinary all the way: brilliant red cliffs, buttes like flags with alternating stripes of red, yellow, white, and purple; cliff walls where the red strata were horizontal, adjoining lighter buff strata that were tilted at a 45 degree angle. We would climb  for miles up a steep grade and look out at a flat plain, with the less grand but still startlingly deep gash of the canyon carved by the Colorado river;  the enormity of the Glen Canyon Dam (was that the one Harrison Ford slid down to escape Tommy Lee Jones? -- no, that one urned out to be in North Carolina, but the image came to mind anyway); the blue-green of Lake Powell, a sudden shift from towering red cliffs, sagebrush, sand and stunted junipers to a startlingly bucolic rural landscape, with green grass, fenced paddocks, and horse farms.

Panic stop in the tunnel

And then finally the amazing -- and hair-raising -- drive into Zion National Park itself: pitch-black tunnels with peeks at towering mountains through sudden apertures,








and then a long series of switchback roads going back and forth, back and forth,  down, down, down to the canyon floor far below. No guardrails, white knuckles on many a steering wheel as our long string of cars made its way down. But everyone seemed to make it, and we pulled into our Quality Inn, just outside the park gates, at 6:30. A nice supper (crusted mountain trout and creme brulée) at the Spotted Dog Café across the street, where we were buzzed by a dozen hummingbirds enjoying the restaurant's strategically placed bird feeders.

I'll put in some more pictures with tomorrow's post.

Joy at Dinner. You can't see the hummingbirds, but they're there.