Zion Canyon to Grand Canyon

Wednesday, October 08, 2008

The Major destination of the road trip is in sight. Today we travel the 150 miles from Zion Canyon National Park southeast to Grand Canyon National Park. Nothing exceptional was expected along the way.

What a surprise when we started out on Utah highway 9 East through Zion. First a one mile tunnel puts the traveler high on Navajo Sandstone ridges. Then many stops for photos on gentle sloping white and peach rock (there’s those peaches again) mostly bare of vegetation. Richard could not resist a walk out on the sandstone, in spite of the intense heat. He didn’t even notice until seeing the photos that there was vegetation and not just bare rock. It took some time to finally get onto mesa country and past the Zion rock.

The route passes several Utah towns: Mt. Carmel Junction, Kanab, Fredonia, Jacob Lake in the heat of October before turning south for the 70 miles of parkland to the North Rim of Grand Canyon. High on the Kaibab Plateau at up to 9000 feet the weather is definitely fall. Aspen have turned yellow and the sun and breeze on their leaves makes for more great pictures. We have well over 2,000 photos at this point, and many hours of video.

At North Rim we took a chance and had not made a camping reservation. Fortunately the camp ground was not busy - but no hookups here - we roughed it with our own water and battery power. The camp ground is right next to the abyss and an afternoon walk on the Transcept Trail along the rim took us 2 miles to Bright Angel Point for late afternoon views of the massive erosion caused by the Colorado River. All previous canyons are tiny compared to the depth and width of Grand. There was haze looking towards the South Rim but we had to remember that it is 10 miles across the canyon.

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