Category Archives: Utah

Bryce

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We moved on from Kanab and the Zion area, passed by Bryce and was tempted to stay there but continued on to Beaver, UT.  Beaver was about 200 miles away so it met our daily driving distance and we had to make some more distance north.  We stayed at the Beaver Canyon Campground as it was a Passport America location and I am still trying to avoid KOA’s if I can.  This campground was very ‘interesting’.  It is definitely not a chain campground.  There are many permanent tenants but they all have their own side buildings that they have variously customized.  Some are quite entertaining.  Everyone in the campground is very friendly.  To top it off there is a very good Mexican restaurant on site!  We ate there two of our three evenings!  There is even a nice loop walking path near the campground.  Here are some deer we saw in a pasture on our walk:

Beaver is a small, highway-oriented town on I15.  It has one grocery store, one ‘department’ store and many fast food places.  But we were there to go back and see Bryce National Park. Beaver is about 1 hour from Bryce and Bryce was not very crowded so it made for a nice drive.  It had been 15 years since we visited.  We utilized their shuttle service and took a relatively long rim walk.  Here some pics:

The last picture is of Thor’s Hammer.

After 3 nights in Beaver, we moved on.  We had to do laundry, get a package delivered and see a movie!

Zion

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Our next destination is Kanab UT but let me talk a bit more about our 5-night dry camping stretch.  We were running low on water, or we thought we were.  We have never run dry and we cannot trust the meter so we don’t really know our limit.  I felt we were very close to filling the grey water, but that is usually our issue.  Let’s talk battery.  Each night was cold enough to run our furnace and each evening we watched 3 hours of TV with the satellite through the inverter.  This took our battery bank down about 14-17% by the morning.  We were lucky to have an absence of trees to the south which allowed the batteries to fully charge each day.  Wonderful.

We had moved to the RV park in Kanab for 6 nights.  This gave us a chance to do some visiting in the area and get some chores done.  Here was our spot:

The first place we visited was the Pipe Springs National Monument.  I did not know about this monument until I saw the signs on the road by Fredonia AZ.  Time to cross the time zone, again, back to AZ.  We really enjoyed this monument.  It told the store about this natural springs, an oasis to the locals.  There, however, was conflict between the Native Americans, the whites moving west and the Mormons.  The Mormons actually created a fort here.  The fort still exists and they give tours of it.  They also have a loop trail that goes up a ridge and back around, naturally we took that.  Here is Roxie on the trail (terrified) and her sitting by the fort by the spring:

One of the days we took a day trip to Zion.  From Kanab, you enter through the east entrance of the park which is less busy than the entrance from Springdale.  You also get to see a lot of sights that others may not.  Like the Checkerboard Mesa:

It was difficult to find parking in the main parking lot, even though it had a sign stating it was full.  We drove around for about 15 minutes until one opened up.  This made it much easier ride the shuttle bus to our first hike, the Lower Emerald Pool.  The trail starts at the same place as the Angel’s Landing trail.  Many people were heading that way but we went the other way.  We have a few shots from the walk:

We stopped at the Zion Lodge for a refreshment break and were joined by a fellow from Washington and we talked for a bit with him.  We hopped back on the shuttle to our next hike, the Riverside walk.  This was a nice out and back walk along the Virgin River.  We stopped at the narrows where the trail ended with many others continuing walking directly in the river.  Here are some pictures of the Narrows and back down the river:

The next days consisted of hiking a few trails in the Kanab area and one day of going to Hurricane UT to get a prescription filled and to watch a movie (Solo).

I have been coming to Zion for years as a child and I wanted to relate a couple of stories that I remember.  The 4 of us took off on Angel’s Landing hike but my mother and I stayed behind just past Walter’s Wiggles.  My mother would not allow this 8-10 year old on the chains to get to the summit!  I remember on the same trip hiking the East Rim trail.  It had a portion that was about 8 feet wide and carved into the side of a mountain.  Being that same 8-10 year old I was running ahead of the pack and I tripped and fell but not over the edge.  This did not seem to matter to my mother as she got pretty upset about that.

We had to leave to continue north to meet our friends in a relatively short time.