Day 35 - Good morning Zion! (July 17th)

Each national park is unique and carries it's own superlatives. One could argue that Zion was the most beautiful but when it comes to organization, there is no debate, Zion takes the cake.

Just inside the main park entrance is a neatly laid out information center. Beyond providing information about the park, the information center is the jump off point for shuttle rides up the canyon. In addition to the information center, there are two primary campgrounds, one that could be reserved in advance and one first-come, first-serve.

After perusing the information center a bit we packed up a lunch and hopped on a shuttle. Our first stop was the "park museum" to watch the 22-minute introduction to the park movie. The video made for a great introduction to the park and was chalk full of interesting information. Since we hadn't gotten a very early start, we decided to do some of the parks shorter hikes.

The view of the canyon wall from the park museum.

We took the propane-powered shuttle from the museum to Weeping Rock, an extremely short hike to a vertical rock face that literally seeps water. Apparently the sandstone rock that makes up the cliffs of Zion are so porous that water gets trapped in the rock, only to later be squeezed of the lower rock wall face by the pressure of the layers of rock. It was very interesting and the wet rock face made for and extremely green alcove in the barren cliff.

Falls from the Lower Emerald Pools

From there we headed to the Emerald Pools. The Emerald pools were a couple of naturally-forming allege-dense pools (thus the the name) along a hike up the west side of the canyon. This hike would normally have been very easy but by this time it was the middle of the afternoon and temperatures had long since hit triple digits.

Handrails attached to the rock face.

A little friend we spotted on the hike.

After the short but strenuous hike to the lower and upper Emerald pools we took the shuttle back to the campground to wait out the rest of the heat in the comfort of our new favorite reading spot, the river!

-Dan