A trip to US West – Day 8

July 11,2019

Our plan for today is a short visit to Zion National Park and the head to Grand Canyon North Rim. From Page it’s almost 2 hours drive to Zion. We started around 10 AM from Page, and reached the Zion entrance by 12:30 PM. I was sleeping most of the time and I woke up only after we entered into the park. From the entrance, there is again almost 1 hr drive to the Visitor center. Our plan was just to do a drive through the park since we need to reach North Rim.

The road in the park looked different in color. Both sides of the road has different type of sand stone cliffs of different colors, cream, pink and red. As soon as we entered the park, we realized that we will spend more time here than we planned. The park is just awesome. We regret that we didn’t plan a day here in our itinerary.

We drove down and reached the visitor center. There are some locations in the park, where we cannot go by our car. We need to catch the shuttle and get into those locations. It was afternoon and the temperature was high.

We decided to catch the shuttle to have a view of those locations as well. We will have to cut down the North Rim, but the beauty of the park made us do that. The last stop of the shuttle is The Narrows. The Narrows is the narrowest section of Zion Canyon. This gorge, with thousand feet tall walls and the river, is one of the most popular areas in Zion National Park.

We got down there, thinking we will go for a small walk on the river side. But we all were tired due to the heat and my sister started behaving weirdly, so my parents decided to go back. I wanted to do the hike at Narrows, and my parents assured that we will do that next time. So eagerly waiting for our next trip 😉

On the way to the park visitor center there is a tunnel – Zion-Mount Carmel Tunnel. It’s almost 1 mile long. Also the road has several hair pins. The Google map shows those hair pins and it looks hilarious :O

We started from Zion national park to Grand Canyon after 4:30 PM. As per Google, we will reach North Rim only after 6:30 PM. From North Rim, we have again 4 hrs of drive to Williams, where we have planned our stay. So we decided to remove North Rim from our plan and decided to drive to Williams.

We reached the hotel around 9:30 PM, we had dinner on the way and went to bed as soon as we reached. We all were so tired, and we need to visit South Rim next day morning.