We got up and enjoyed a delicious hot breakfast made for us by our host, Valerie. Our goal for today was to enjoy as much of the beauty of Zion National Park as we could while avoiding the record-breaking crowds at the most popular places in the park. Our understanding is on a typical summer day more than 20,000 people are squeezed into 8 miles of the park, the main canyon. That just didn’t sound fun to us.
So, we took local counsel and spent the morning on a beautiful very much uncrowded drive up a road called Kolob Terrace. This well-maintained road took us in and out of Zion National Park, but in a very lightly-traveled area. There were many trail heads off this road back into the park, and about 16 miles up the road we decided to check one out. This was a trail head going into Wildcat Canyon. Our first thought was we would maybe go 20 minutes down the trail, but it was delightful and we had to continue. We walked about an hour and a half off from the trail head and experienced some of the best wildflowers we had seen in years. A highlight was when we watch a California Condor circling out of the canyon before us. Wow! That is a huge bird.
In large meadows we often saw carpets of flowers in yellows and whites and pinks and blues. There is also a lot of Indian paintbrush with its orange color. And also lots of sage brush and then many beautiful trees including large Ponderosa Pines. We walked and walked and occasionally met another individual or small group also having a wonderful morning. We all felt congratulatory of ourselves and each other at finding this off the beaten path way to enjoy Zion away from the crowds.
When we reached the end of the trail, at a couple of places we got fabulous glimpses of the red rocks and sand stone formations and mountains so common in this area. We also saw pinks and reds and whites in limestone and other beautiful large rock foundations and walls. Such beautiful views. The temperature was in the mid 80s and very pleasant. We so enjoyed walking and walking and finally turned around, eventually getting ourselves back to our car having walked 4 miles on a beautiful trail.
By this time we were hungry and headed to little further up the road to a trail known as Lava Point. This had also a wonderful overlook and a great picnic area where we dug into our cooler and had a feast sitting in the shade at a picnic table overlooking the park. Beautiful beautiful beautiful.
Time to head down the hill and we decided although we wanted to mostly avoid the crowds, we would make a short trip through the main park, still avoiding the highly crowded areas where one needed to travel only by shuttle bus.
We waited only a few minutes to go through the main gate and then joined the cars who were driving across the park and up through the 1 mile tunnel through the mountain. This was a great example of engineering expertise, completed in 1930. Going through the dark of the tunnel was interesting, well broken up periodically by windows that allowed us to have a view into the canyon. On our way back through, we cheated a bit and stopped to take a couple of photos through those windows. Boy, those people who made these roads and tunnels through these mountains did some astounding work!
Our goal was a walking trail called Canyon Overlook which was quite short, only about a mile round-trip, but built along the walls of a canyon. It had a long series of stairs and rails and walkways to help us gain quite a bit of elevation where we could reach the top overlook and see far into the main canyon and gorges. Patti felt a little anxiety at times of how high we were and how precarious she felt in some of the areas. But it was quite safe. At the top, we celebrated with others who had worked and came up to enjoy the beautiful view. We were above the large arch that we had seen as we approached the tunnel. Of course we had to engage in getting our pictures taken and helping others record these moments above the beautiful canyon.
We trudged back to the car with our eye on the sky. Our cell phones were buzzing with emergency flash flood warnings. During the latter part of our hike we had watched the clouds build to the north and now they were looking very ominous. Such a threatening storm is not something we are used to seeing with living in San Diego County, where we get only 10 inches of rain or less per year. We felt like we were in a bit of a race against the storm to get out of the park and back down to our Airbnb home.
We watch the storm roll in with increasingly black clouds behind us as we made it back to La Verkin. We made a quick trip to the grocery store to pick up some food for dinner that evening and reached the Airbnb home just as it was beginning to sprinkle. With our hosts, we watched the storm come in. Their house was far enough outside the park and the mountain area that we only got a little bit of rain. But we could see there was a lot of rain happening in the mountains to the north and west of us.
We did a collaborative dinner with our hosts, Valerie and Paul, and spent some time chatting with them into the evening.
Our thoughts said already begun to focus on our trip home tomorrow, and we opted to have Valerie pack us a sack breakfast that we could have ready for the morning. We did some packing and headed off to bed knowing this was our last night away on the trip. It had been a very good trip, and now we were ready to go home.
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