Weather: sunny & hot
I was up at 7.45, and took breakfast in the diner next door to the motel, a rather disappointing cooked breakfast. After vacating the room, I headed back to the parking at the Visitor Center in Zion.
I had decided that first thing I would try the Watchman Trail, a trail at the south entrance to the park heading up to a viewpoint looking back up the main canyon, which was recommended as being good in the morning as it was reasonably shady at that time. The trailhead was a short walk up the road past the parking lot, and it was while walking along the side of this road, trying to keep out of the way of oncoming traffic, that I stumbled on the edge of the road and ended up in a ditch.
I headed back to the Visitor Center to attend to my wounds, a series of minor but rather painful cuts inflicted by the loose stones of the road surface. A helpful park ranger produced some plasters and antiseptic from a first aid kit, and I was soon able to set out again.
This time I was rather more successful, and I made my way slowly up the quiet climb of 112 metres to the viewpoint, still pleasantly shaded for most of the way.
At the top I met a young couple from Delaware, who asked me to take a picture of them with a backdrop of the main canyon. Having duly obliged, they offered to take a similar picture of me, perched on a convenient boulder. After a brief discussion of our respective holiday plans we left each other to admire the view.
By the time I came to head back down, the sun had made its way over the mountain behind me and it was rapidly becoming quite hot. From the surrounding landscape it was evident that the local microclimate was more typical of a desert environment than in the main canyon.
On return to the Visitor Center, I took a tram back into the canyon, stopping briefly at the ``Court of the Patriarchs'' stop to admire the view to a trio of peaks opposite, dubbed Abraham, Isaac and Jacob by early visitors to the area. I had lunch again at the lodge cafeteria before taking a tram back down.
I got off near the turn-off to Mount Carmel and took a short walk down to the river itself for a brief cooling paddle, then returned to the Visitor Center via the Pa'rus Trail, which followed the river back down to the campsite area, passing some wide expanses of land formerly used as farmland by early settlers.
I decided that before heading on to Mount Carmel Junction I should take the car into a garage to have the oil checked and also to determine the source of a rather strange noise it had developed that day. A helpful mechanic immediately identified the noise as being due to low power steering fluid, which he topped up along with the oil and the coolant, having spotted this also to be low. A sign of rather poor maintenance on the part of Alamo, I felt.
With the car now in better health, I finally took the road east through the park. A couple of miles on I was forced to stop outside the entrance to a tunnel carved out of the rock. This road tunnel was built in the 1920s, hewn out of solid rock with the spoil dumped into the river below, which soon cleared it away. Being an elderly tunnel it was designed to support two lanes of traffic typical of the era, and while it still supports two lanes of cars, coaches and large recreational vehicles pose problems. To go through, they must pay for an ``escort'', which is really no such thing: all that happens is that traffic from the opposite direction is halted until they have passed through.
After a wait of a few minutes, I was waved through, and headed into the tunnel, completely unlit save for vehicle headlamps and four large windows in the tunnel wall constructed in order to dump the spoil. The narrowness and darkness of the tunnel meant that I was not keen to travel too fast, but nor could I travel too slowly owing to the presence of a minimum speed limit, presumably intended to stop people pausing to admire the view from the windows and disrupting traffic flow.
I made voluntary stops a couple of times before leaving the Park, one opposite a natural rock arch eroding into the cliff face and the second at Checkerboard Mesa, a large and imposing rock face cracked into a semi-regular pattern of squares.
I met the main road at Mount Carmel Junction but had already decided to stop there for the night. I found the ``Golden Hills'' motel I had considered going to the previous evening, and after checking in for the night spent the remainder of the evening resting, nursing the wounds I'd sustained that morning and trying the pool.
After watching a little of the American version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? (identical to the British version save for a presenter rather less annoying than Chris Tarrant), I set out for some food. I did not have far to go, merely as far as the diner next door, where I had a salad and ``country-style'' steak.
After watching a little television and making plans for the next few days (Bryce Canyon the next day, then south to the less popular North Rim of the Grand Canyon and on to Lake Powell and Monument Valley), I went to bed.