Zion NP, UT

Friday morning we left the Flagstaff KOA and started heading for southwestern Utah. Before we headed north, Jodi and I wanted to check out the town of Sedona, which is just south of Flagstaff. Jodi has been there before and she told me I would really like it. We took a small detour south through Oak Creek Canyon until we hit the town of Sedona. We drove through for a while and checked out the town. What an amazing place, with amazing views. After we spent an hour or two there we headed up north, and back on track to southern Utah. Below is a picture of Sedona, AZ area.

After a couple hours of driving, we crossed over the Colorado River via the Navajo Bridge. We pulled over in the parking lot, got out, walked across the bridge and took a couple of pictures. Below is a picture of the Colorado River passing under the Navajo Bridge.

Once back in the car, we pressed on through the desert until we hit Zion National Park. We entered Zion National Park around 2pm and headed straight for the visitor center. The visitor center is on the other side of the park, so we drove through and took lots of pictures. Again, most of the roads in the park were under heavy construction. This gave us lots of time to snap photos as we waited in line for the one way traffic. Once at the visitor center we talked with a park ranger and asked what there was to do. She recommend we take the shuttle bus up (can't drive through the canyon anymore, because of heavy congestion) through the canyon and check out some hikes. That sounded like a great idea to us, so we caught the next shuttle heading up into the canyon. As we were riding through the canyon, we were reading the trail guide to see which hike we wanted to do. We decided to take the shuttle to the very end, and do the "narrows" hike. This hike was the most popular and gave you the greatest sense of the canyon. There were plenty of others ones we could have chosen, but given the time of day we opted for this one instead. Sure enough we took the shuttle to the end, got out and walked the mile or so to the start of the narrows hike. The cool thing about this hike is you can go as far as you want upstream, then turn around and head back. We didn't have much time until dark so we hiked upstream for about a half mile of so. We then turned around and headed back to the shuttle. Once at the bus stop we grabbed the next shuttle back down to the visitor center. We got out one more time to check out the popular "Moonlight Buttress", and snapped some pictures. Caught the next bus, then headed back down the visitor center. Once we got back to the visitor center it was dark. It was close to 8pm and still we needed a place to stay. We drove out of the park and to the next town, which is like 2 miles down the road. Found a great campground and set up camp. We were a little hungry from the jam packed day so we headed into town for a pizza and a beer at a local restaurant called "Pizza & Noodles". The food was great and so was the beer. We left there after dinner and headed back to camp for some sleep. Below is a picture we took on our "narrows" hike.

Here are some more pictures of Zion National Park.