Parking Hell in Scenic Heaven

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Today is my first day in another compelling southwestern National Park, Zion.

I got a nice taste simply leaving my hotel room this morning, large cliffs of red sandstone rising above Springdale.

Sadly, things got worse from there.

Zion Parking Hell

Every visitor to Zion National Park who drives has a parking rant.

Please indulge me for a few minutes while I do mine.

Vastly more people try to visit Zion National Park each year than the amount of parking.

Zion Canyon is very narrow, so it has no place to put any.

Zion probably has the highest ratio of prospective visitors to available parking in the entire national park system.

Until 2000, that caused the notorious car conga line, a huge queue of cars backed up on the road, nose to tail, waiting for a parking spot.

Park managers had to do something.





What they did was institute a mandatory shuttle system.

People now must park either at the entrance or outside the park, and take a shuttle to park sights and trailheads.

By itself, this would be a good thing because it reduces both car fumes and traffic.

The policies around it, however, make it a nightmare.

After the shuttle started running, park managers closed all parking within the canyon and expanded the lots next to the visitors’ center at the entrance.

Since this added little parking overall, the park STILL doesn’t have enough.





Their solution here was downright batty.

They added a SECOND shuttle, one that goes through Springdale to the park entrance.

The theory is that people would park in town and take the shuttle to the park.

What it did in practice is offload Zion’s parking problems on the townspeople of Springdale.

Anyone who lives in a major city, where parking is always at a premium, knows what has happened since.

Finding parking in Springdale is now a horror show.





If someone stays at a hotel in Springdale, they should be able to park there while seeing the park.

The park brochure encourages this.

What they DON’T mention is that all hotels only allow this if a guest books the room for the days before AND after seeing the park.

Planning to see the park and then drive somewhere else?

Good luck finding parking elsewhere.

A number of businesses exist near the park entrance, including a grocery store that is a lifesaver for buying hiking supplies.

Care to park in their lot?

Either buy a pass for $50(!) or have the car towed the minute one enters the park.

If those aren’t options, how about parking on the street?

The time limits downtown quickly kill that idea.

The problems go on and on.

I personally got VERY lucky and a sympathetic employee at an outdoor store pointed me to a side street with all day free parking used by regular hikers.

It required a long walk to the park entrance, but was well worth it.





Clearly, the park has to keep the shuttle system.

Equally clearly, the current solution is insane.

The park needs to acknowledge that they have created a park-n-ride system, and then create a REAL park-n-ride system, one with big lots a ways from the park entrance that can handle the visitor volume.

Thanks for listening, and I now return to the regularly scheduled travel writeup.

Zion Canyon

Zion National Park centers on Zion Canyon, a narrow canyon carved by the North Fork of the Virgin River.

Near vertical walls of red and white sandstone soar above the river.

The white sandstone layer, which I saw in glorious form last night, sits on top of the red.

The park is part of a huge formation called the Grand Staircase, layer after layer of cliffs of colored rock rising north of the Grand Canyon.

It covers all of southwestern Utah.





Every major feature in the park has a pretentious biblical name.

One huge white cliff is “the Great White Throne”.

Three cliffs close to each other are “the Court of the Patriarchs”.

A huge white cliff with a red streak on it is “the Altar of Sacrifice”.

Zion itself refers to a holy land.

Many people think the names were given by Mormon settlers, but they actually came from Methodist minister Frederick Fisher.

He visited in 1916 and saw the overwhelming beauty as proof of God’s handiwork.





Zion Canyon must be seen on a shuttle.

They are reasonably frequent, so the lines and wait were tolerable.

The view is another story.

Even more than Yosemite Valley (see A Symphony in Granite), the best views in Zion are straight up, which in a shuttle bus nobody can see.

Owners of normal cars probably don’t notice, but for a convertible owner it’s obvious and painful.

Shooting photos becomes problematic as well, thanks to the reflections from the window glass.

I quickly learned to press the camera against the glass to minimize them.

Zion should offer the open air shuttles available in Yosemite to eliminate these issues.





Past the visitor’s center, the shuttle heads up canyon.

It firsts passes two enormous cliffs called the Watchmen.

Next is the Altar of Sacrifice, a big white cliff.

The road then crosses the river on a bridge with a view of the canyon to die for.

Learn to shoot pictures through the glass before this!





After the bridge, the canyon quickly becomes very narrow with just enough space for the river and road.

The river is lined with cottonwood trees.

Giant red and white cliffs tower above.

The cliffs in Yosemite Valley are much larger, but they are also further away.

Riders can only see the lower portion of most of them, it’s worth noting again.





The canyon widens out a bit at the meadow holding Zion Lodge.

It looks like it’s been there forever, but it actually dates to 1966, when the previous lodge burned.

Two very popular hiking trails start here.

Zion is one of those parks where the roadside views are good, but the trailside views are much better; so I hiked one of the trails, Emerald Pools.

It’s the second most popular in the park.

Emerald Pools Trail

The trail crossed the river on a long bridge and then forked.

I took the right branch, which followed the river briefly and started climbing a hill near the bank.

This stretch is lined with low trees.

These eventually open up into an incredible view of the cliffs across the canyon.

This is the view that people in the shuttle bus SHOULD see, but can’t.





The trail passes from the hill into a side canyon.

It has steep walls of red rock, but ample trees block a view.

Eventually a wall of carved sandstone appears through the trees.

Getting close, a large pool appears at the base of the wall.

Normally it has green water from algae, the source of the name Emerald Pools.

Today it was brown from all the rain three days ago.





Thanks to that rain, something rare appeared on the cliff.

A set of waterfalls dropped as a long series of drips.

The trail runs along the base of the cliff behind them.

This provides great views, except that the drips fell on the trail!

Getting through this meant a small bath.

It was worth it for a view of the waterfalls close up.





Now on the other side of the canyon, the trail climbs the side wall.

It becomes very narrow and passes over a long series of slippery sandstone rocks, with nothing but a low wall for safety.

This section of trail makes great practice, because Zion is filled with trails like this.

At the rim, hikers then encounter a long series of rock steps, now surrounded by trees.

Those end at a fork.

The wanted branch heads left, right into a narrow crack in a giant boulder.

Clamber through this to reach more trees with a view of an open area in the distance.

The trail finally reaches it, right on the edge of a cliff.





This area sits right on top of the cliff containing the waterfall.

A chain keeps people away from the edge.

A little pool exists here, the second of the Emerald Pools.

This one actually is green.

A little stream flows over the sandstone into the pool.

Downstream shows a huge view of Zion Canyon from the cliff.





That stream has to flow from somewhere.

The trail crosses it above the pool (step carefully!) and enters more rock steps in yet more trees.

As it heads up canyon, the trees gradually thin out to reveal desert scrub, plus some nice wildflowers.

Downstream shows another huge view of the cliffs of Zion Canyon, while upstream shows an incredibly tall red cliff with a black crack in it.

The trail takes a long time to reach the base of the cliff, during which the sandstone wall grows so large that everything else shrinks to insignificance.





Close to the cliff, the trail rejoins the stream.

It then ends on a sandy beach, at the third Emerald Pool.

Like the first, this one was brown from rain water.

The stream water seeps from the cliff, supporting algae colonies that color it black in places, plus hanging plants.

After big rainstorms, part of it becomes a tall waterfall.

The trail ends here, so I had to retrace my steps.





Back on the shuttle, the road passes a tall and narrow rock fin on the left called ‘Angels Landing’.

Frederick Fisher thought that only angels could set foot on this spire and named it accordingly.

On the other side of the canyon sits a huge white cliff shaped like a narrow trapezoid, the ‘Great White Throne’.

It does look like a throne from the right angle, but that angle is nearly straight up.

We couldn’t see that.





Past the Throne, both river and road do a sharp horseshoe bend around Angel’s Landing, showing just how the river carved that narrow spire.

During this stretch the road runs directly under a vertical wall of sandstone on the other side of the river, which we could barely see.

Angel’s Landing contains nearly vertical walls on this side, a favorite of rock climbers.

We saw two of them.

The Narrows

After Angel’s Landing, the canyon gets narrower and narrower.

Eventually, it has room for the river, road, and nothing else.

Soon, it reaches a point where it has no room for the road, and pavement ends.

A wall of rock spires sits here, the Temple of Sinawava.





With no room for a road, a trail continues up the canyon.

It’s the most popular hike in the park, and paved.

Thanks to the narrow canyon, the trail also has a flash flood warning.

The trail passes big cliffs, boulders that fell from the sides, cottonwood trees, and lots of wildflowers.

In a few places, it passes pretty grottos filled with hanging ferns.

They live on moisture that seeps through the sandstone.

The canyon gets narrower and narrower throughout the hike.

The trail ends at a rocky beach where the walls are only twenty feet apart, just wide enough for the river and trail.





On this hike, I was passed by a steady stream of people.

Nearly all of them were heading downstream.

All of those were wearing dry suits and strange shoes.

They have just finished one of Zion’s most difficult hikes, the Narrows.

Past the rocky beach, the canyon narrows to nearly a slot, with walls thousands of feet high but only ten feet wide.

The river fills the entire width for several miles.

With a free permit people can hike and wade the river through the canyon heading downstream.

It’s filled with deep pools, slippery rocks, and ice cold water; hence the need for the specialized equipment.

Outfitters in Springdale will happily rent it, part of the reason they promote this hike so much.

It’s great, but not what I’m in the mood for.

Weeping Rock

On the bus ride back out, I squeezed in one last hike.

Two hanging side canyons appear just to the left of the Great White Throne.

A very steep trail on a big pile of boulders climbs to their entrances.

I didn’t climb that.

Just before things get steep, a side trail branches off to the left following another stream.

It quickly ends at large but shallow grotto in the sandstone wall.

Water drips from the sandstone just above the grotto.

The lower sandstone is harder than that further up, so water percolates to that layer and then flows to the surface.

It forms Weeping Rock.





The dripping water supports a huge community of plants within the grotto.

The walls are absolutely covered in ferns, moss, and flowers.

The trail climbs right into the grotto and next to the plants.

Unfortunately, entering or leaving guarantees a small shower from the drips, along with slippery footing on wet rocks.

It was still well worth it.





I got a campsite in the Watchman Campground in Zion tonight, partly for budgetary reasons.

I couldn’t get one last night because I knew I would be arriving too late.

The campground sits in scrub filled desert near the namesake peak.

The site itself is nothing special but the view is spectacular.

Dining in Utah

After dark, I drove into Springdale to find dinner.

This was my first exposure to restaurant dining in Utah, and it was unusual.

Springdale has no chains!

Near nearly every other national park, the local towns are overrun with chain restaurants and fast food outlets.

Springdale has none at all.

Turns out, this is due to Utah’s liquor laws.

Utah was founded and settled by Mormons, and the church prohibits members from drinking alcohol.

Since church members dominate state politics, alcohol licenses are very limited and hard to get.

Chain restaurants won’t open without one, so they stay away.

The refreshing result is that local places thrive, although finding a drink can be an adventure.





I had dinner at Oscar’s Cafe, a local hangout recommended by the same outfitter employees who showed me where to park this morning.

The food was meat heavy and descent.

They really shined with desert, something so large only hiking in the hot sun could work up enough appetite.

They served brownies covered in ice cream and chocolate sauce that resembled a small volcano.

I finished it, barely, because tomorrow will be a real adventure.

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Photos

Zion Canyon from Third Emerald Pool
Glorious view of Zion Canyon seen heading back from the Third Emerald Pool

Court of the Patriarchs
The Court of the Patriarchs in Zion Canyon, shot through the suttle bus window

Zion Canyon from Emerald Pools Trail
View of Zion Canyon from Emerald Pools Trail, which beats anything the shuttle bus shows.

First Emerald Pool
The first pool, shot from behind the waterfall drips. The pool is brown from recent rain

Emerald Pool Cliff
The cliff behind the first Emerald Pool. Note the waterfall under the pine tree on the upper right

Second Emerald Pool
The second emerald pool at the top of the cliff. The chain exists for a reason.

Third Emerald Pool
The third Emerald Pool at the base of a huge red cliff

Heart of Zion Canyon
The heart of Zion Canyon: the Great White Throne, Organ, and Angels Landing; shot through the suttle window

Upper Zion Canyon
Zion Canyon, heading for the Narrows

Riverwalk Gardens
Hanging gardens high above the Riverwalk Trail

Weeping Rock
Distant view of Weeping Rock and its hanging gardens

Rock Weeping
The famous weeping of Weeping Rock, caused by seeps halfway up the rock wall

Under weeping rock
Under the ledge of Weeping Rock.

Zion Sunset
A photo that many people want, Zion Canyon near sunset