Saturday, October 12, 2024
The start of the narrows where the Virgin river emerges from a Canyon.
The canyon walls are very tall. The trees at the rim look tiny.
Hordes of people on the Narrows hike up the river.
Zion is midway down the Grand Staircase formation with rocks the can be found at the bottom of Bryce Canyon.
The plan for Zion was to spend two days in the park but things didnt quite work out. Days of the week are a bit of an abstract concept on a trip like this and we didn't realise we were going to be in Zion over a weekend. Campground were all fully booked and motels and hotels in the area were insanely expensive. We ended up staying in an RV park for the first time.
RV parks as a concept are something that I don't really understand. In most cases it's like staying in a car park for the price of a hotel. Almost always the RVs are all lined up next to one another with no privacy/greenery/appeal. The benefits are you can connect to power, water, and sewerage but compared to the campground we've been staying in there's no contest, it's just plain bad.
We ended up only spending an afternoon in Zion because it was incredibly crowded. Doing a hike was like being in a slow procession. The landscape is very beautiful but such extreme crowds are not much fun. I think we just timed things badly being there over a weekend at this time of year which was unfortunate.