Zion National Park, Utah

I've decided to break my 2 week road trip with my good teacher buddies, Teresa and Heather, into several blog posts. Each post will highlight a different piece of the trip. This one will focus on Zion National Park in Utah, which is day 3 and 4, but the first time I started using my camera on the trip. I need the girls' photos from the previous days to fill in the early gaps.

We stayed in a private campground right outside the park. Since we didn't make reservations, we almost never stayed in the National Parks that we visited. This campground however, was one of our favorites of the whole trip. Aside from the fact that we were all sandwiched together with other campers and RVs, we had a site directly above a flowing river (the same one that flows through Zion and created that Canyon that was so gorgeous). We bought inner tubes and enjoyed floating and relaxing down the river. This campsite was very windy, and it almost never cooled down (I stayed in my bathing suit well into the night).

We took our full day and drove into the Visitor's Center. At Zion, that is as far as guest vehicles can go. They have a great and efficient shuttle system that got us to all our interested hiking trails. We did one major 5 mile round-trip vertical climb about 1200 feet above the canyon floor. Heather even continued on another 200 feet up or so on a narrow ledge of cables and rock to another look-out point!!
We also did shorter walks along the river and to see some natural waterfalls.