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Zion is one of the busiest National Parks in the country. I read that if you don’t reach the visitor’s center by 10:30 am you won’t get a parking place. At 9:18 am all the spaces were taken. By the looks of dozens of people fishing around in their trunks getting stuff out, we could see that we just missed several spots.
We have a full-sized van with kayaks on top, right? That kind of makes us look like an RV, right? I quickly slipped into the RV parking lot and claimed one of the two or three remaining spots. Alright, that worked.
Now here is the awesome part of the day. The Park doesn’t allow cars on the main scenic road. That means no traffic except the occasional shuttle bus. The shuttle bus system limits the number of people that can access the main scenic road. This means, yes, you are probably catching on, that the Park’s best part is not so packed after all.
Enter, our ebikes. Bikes are allowed on the main scenic road. Better yet, class 1 ebikes are allowed. It is 8 miles from the visitor’s center to the end of the scenic road. There are up and down grades. The scenery consists of a lush green canyon bottom, the clear fast running Virgin River splashing down through the greenery, and tall pink and white majestic rock walls guarding over the valley. What better transportation than ebikes for this trek into paradise? We felt sorry for the poor people stuck on the shuttle buses. Ebiking was absolutely, the only, the best, the greatest way to see Zion National park.
Of course, everyone zoomed up to the Narrows, the pre-eminent trail in the Park. Basically, it is a walk up the Virgin River through a slot canyon. To reach it, you have to go to the end of the scenic road, walk two miles up the Riverside Trail to where the canyon walls finally close in on the river.
We got as far as the Narrows Trailhead. You needed a good pair of water shoes to continue on. Some people were just wearing plastic sandals. That wouldn’t cut it for long. Those who wanted to continue farther really needed high-tech water boots. We saw many of those. You could, if willing to wade waist deep in the river, get up river several miles, and the hearty ones did.
We had neither good or crappy water shoes. I did rock hop up a very short way just to get a feel for the trail. For us, the two mile Riverside Trail was a pure joy in its own right.
Another much ballyhooed trail was the Angel’s Landing Trail. It’s a brutal 5.4 mile round trip with a whopping 1,500’ incline to a scary narrow path along the knife’s edge of a rock formation. I wanted to go so badly, but we were so excited to hop on our bikes that we didn’t bring our backpacks for water and high-energy snacks.
Instead, we took a 3 1/2 mile round trip with a 350’ incline up to the Upper Emerald Pool. At 2:00 pm, the sun was killer. Without our water and snacks the sun seemed to triple the 350’ climb. The two things that saved us were: 1) The Emerald Pool was shaded by the cliffs that surrounded it. It was actually kind of cold by the pool; 2) The walk back was all downhill. We would have died on Angel’s Landing.
The drive back out Highway 9 was just as breathtaking as the drive in. I can say that our visit to the first of 5 National Parks in Utah was all that it was cracked up to be, and then some.
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