Go West young man...v3

Oh yeah, here is a view from the top. I am sure my photo doesn’t do it justice. Click on it to see a bigger version anyway.

I have to say… driving in the canyon felt like we were in the animated movie “Cars”. I would bet you a dollar that the Pixar artists were driving around southern Utah and maybe Zion canyon for inspiration on parts of that movie. We even sat in on one of the nightly Ranger presentations about how the Zion tunnel was built. Fascinating how determined the men were who built the tunnel and along with it some of the bridges of the area…all for less than 2 dollars a day. The dollar figures were shockingly low to hear when you are used to hearing the numbers allocated for current infrastructure budgets or roadway projects thrown around in our “knowing all” digital age. I didn’t say “all knowing” because well… we don’t. More and more it seems like people “know it all” instead of actually know but that is just my take on things. Cool stuff and really interesting to hear about the use of dynamite in a controlled way when they were carving out the tunnels.

Camping in the park was pretty nice, nothing exceptional except that you are surrounded by high cliff walls and that is a pretty interesting thing to see when you first peek out of your tent “window”. Oh yeah, did I tell you? Amber got me just about the nicest tent you could buy for my birthday a month back and this was the first time I used it. It is a Mountain Hardware tent and it’s a 4 season expedition type tent. In other words, it can handle whatever nature can throw at it. Love that tent. Thanks sweetie.

I don’t know if Luc liked sleeping on the ground though. I forgot or had gotten rid of the sleeping pads I thought I had so I gave him the only option we brought… and I think it was more of a Yoga mat than anything. So tough sleeping for him but he is young, he got over it. I slept on the ground with just my sleeping bag so he shouldn’t be the one complaining. He told me just yesterday… “Camping was thought up as a plan for boosting the hotel industry.” He might be more like his mom than I thought.

We hiked most all of the smaller routes in the park but we did just one more of the longer hikes and it about did Luc in. He told me as we were already pretty far into the Observation Landing hike that he was done. He wanted to go home and that he missed everyone. Honestly my legs were really feeling it as well. We had really "stretched" them on the other big hike. Well I missed everyone too and I didn’t relish the idea of dragging an unhappy teenager up more mountains just because I wanted to do them so we descended and grabbed the bus back to camp. We tore down the campsite in record time and decided that we should start heading back to Texas. We did the 1300 mile return trip in 19 hours straight through…When I say we, I mean me. Of course, my navigator slept the whole time in the car. I expected that. I did the same thing at his age.

Here is my Navigator...doing what he does best ;]




On a side note…We went through Roswell on the way back and that town is a whole lot bigger than I expected. It was a small city for all intents and purposes where I expected a couple of buildings, a gas station and a diner. It was dark so I didn’t get to explore it much. I feel pretty confident we weren’t abducted. We didn’t see any strange lights and we didn’t seem to lose any time so we should be alright…and you know I was watching for anything strange of course. ;]

So back at the farm, everyone was really glad to see us and I know Luc was glad to be back in his bed although I don’t think he lost any sleep all trip. Every time I turned around that kid was out cold.

I will post up soon on the last week or so. Not a lot of photos in this post… just needed to wrap up the trip report. I will do better next time.

Oh yeah, I love comments so please… comment if you can.