May 24, part 4 -- shifting to Zion

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Here is a link to the interactive expedition map.



Our destination for May 24 was Springdale, Utah, which is right outside Zion National Park.  You can see Bryce on this map (just before the blue path drops south down to Kodachrome). To get to Zion from Kodachrome, the most direct route was back past Bryce.

The landscape in the west means that travel in anything like an "as the crow flies" direction is often not possible unless you, too, are airborne...........

Doesn't this look like it might be a painted backdrop for a western movie which was not filmed on location?

As you can see from the map at the top of this post, after we left Kodachrome we back-tracked to Bryce.

Some of these pics have some of the same landscapes we saw in the last post.  The next image has Aquarius Plateau at the left edge.

Aquarius Plateau at left edge, again.

And now sandwiched between two other features.

And now at right -- this will be our last glimpse of Aquarius Plateau for this trip.

We saw a lot of land that looked much like this.  Flat, fenced, with interesting things on the horizon.  We didn't see that many cows given how much fence we saw.

Layers and layers and more layers.  The next one is a closer crop of the above.

This next shot makes me think of Valley of Fire State Park (which we visited on May 20).

Another closer crop of the preceding pic.  I would love to know the story of all the formation and folding and formation and folding that resulted in this set of layers.....

I don't know when we got to Zion.  I think this may be in Zion.

I am pretty sure this is in Zion.

The road through Zion to Springdale was not all that fun to drive.  Twisty, turny, narrow.  Mountain walls on one side, and serious drop-offs on the other.

In contrast to Bryce, where all the roads were on top of the plateau, in Zion the roads are nearer the bottom of the canyon (and Zion is really truly canyons -- created by rivers).

You spend a lot more time looking up, and a lot less time looking down over the edge.

I think this was taken at the Zion visitor's center.

Here's a link to the next post about the Grand Canyon trip.

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