We went to the visitor's center and parked the truck. The park has a shuttle bus service, and strictly limits the number of private vehicles in the main canyon. This reduces not only congestion, but also air pollution. The shuttle buses run on propane.
The scenery was wonderful. A lot of the time it is hard to get a good picture because the canyon walls are so tall. Millions of years ago, winds blew sand here into sand dunes thousands of feet tall, some of the tallest in the world. All that weight piled up helped turn the sand to sandstone. Then the itty-bitty Virgin River started carving a canyon into the sandstone. On 15 or 20 days out of the year, the river floods because of melting snow or heavy thunderstorms, and is 60 times bigger than normal. That's when it really pushes sand, rocks, and trees down through the canyon. Now the canyon is thousands of feet deep, with some of the tallest sandstone cliffs in the world.
Here are a few pictures:
The National Park Service works so hard to make the park beautiful, they even made the road brown so it would blend in with the scenery, instead of being black:
After spending the day hiking at Zion, I decided I needed better hiking shoes. Luckily, there is a really neat shoe store nearby:
Tomorrow we are going to Bryce Canyon National Park.
Posted from Nana's iPad
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