For those who ventured a guess where my teaser photo was taken, it was sitting at the Weeping Rock shuttle stop in Zion National Park. This is the first in a series of posts detailing our 2017 trip to Utah.
A subset of the Utah National Parks can typically be found on any park fan’s bucket list. Zion and Bryce Canyon are perhaps the most popular, with Arches, Canyonland and Capital Reef following. For whatever reason, they always seemed somewhat mythical to me, places you read about and see pictures of, but that are impossible to reach. Turns out, all it takes is a little bit of planning.
I discovered early on that it was impossible to visit more than two parks during our planned seven-day visit. The distance between them was too great, and I didn’t want just drive-through introductions to each site. So, I decided to focus on Zion and Bryce Canyon.
The parks we’d previously visited were all summer trips—they had to be or we’d encounter impassible areas—but this trip was different. With the help of an excellent Lonely Planet guidebook and plenty of internet research, I determined that summer was the worst time to visit most of the Utah sites. Not only were crowds heaviest, but temperatures were also at their peaks, often exceeding 100° heat indexes during the day. I knew I couldn’t go in September due to work commitments, so I settled on the second week of October. At that time of year, Zion’s daytime highs were estimated to the 70s, and while Bryce Canyon, 3000’ higher than Zion, might be somewhat cool, the feasibility of a day trip would certainly exist.
With dates selected, I booked a flight to Las Vegas, arranged the car rental, and selected a hotel in Hurricane to serve as our base of operations.