Tag Archives: Arizona

Zion

Posted on by

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.

Grand Canyon North Rim

Posted on by

While in the Page area we decided to head to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.  This was the Sunday before Memorial Day weekend and we had no idea where we were going stay that weekend.  We don’t do reservations more than a couple of days ahead since we don’t really know where we might be and everywhere would be already reserved.  This was weighing on my mind a bit.  Researching the North Rim via Campendium showed many boondocking NFS areas and a few NFS campgrounds up that way.  The North Rim had only opened 5 days previously but the NPS campground was already booked, naturally.

We drove the 80 miles between Page and the North Rim turnoff, which goes past the Vermillion Cliffs (very beautiful):

We went to the campground (Jacob Lake) that was right next to the North Rim cutoff.  This campground has one loop that takes reservations (fully booked), and one loop that is first come, first served.  Both loops were full or reserved, but were they?  The camp host told us there was one spot left in the reserved loop, #35.  We drove over to look at it and decided to take it:

It appears that if there is a multi-day reservation and the reserver does not show the first night, the camp host waits until 2 pm the next day to release the spot.  This is what happened here and we could only have it for one night.

The camp host also told us to get up the next AM and look for a non-reservable spot in the other loop.  Once you get in there, you can stay for 14 days.  That is what we did.  We looked for another spot at around 10 am and found one!  We paid for 2 nights to see the North Rim and figure it out.

The North Rim is quite different than the South Rim (we were there about 1 1/2 months ago).  Fewer people and different views.  We were there for 2 different days and took a few hikes.  Here are some pictures:

We discussed what to do for Memorial Day and Roxie suggested we just stay at Jacob Lake through that weekend.  That would be 8 nights there but what else can we do?  The local private campground allowed outsiders to use their dump but not use ANY water.  The local Chevron allowed people to fill up however even though the water up there was shipped in from about 30 miles away.

During one of the days there, we took a trip to Kanab (in Utah) to see the biggest town around and see the RV parks there as we would like to use that as a base for a trip to Zion.  We talked to the RV Corral in Kanab about coming down there the Tuesday after Memorial Day and they had space.  We made the reservation.  However, there was one spot where the RV’er was possibly going to leave in a few days.  I asked him to keep us posted on that.

After night 5 at Jacob Lake, on the day we were going to go dump (you also could only dump from 11-12) and fillup I contacted the RV Corral.  They told us the RV’er had left that morning and we could take the spot.  This was on Friday of the Memorial Day weekend and we had a spot!  We headed down there and thus our visit to the North Rim was over.