Our Nest on Wheels

by Steve

We were last in Zion National Park in 2007. It was June, and it was 106 degrees when we arrived. After a 90-degree night in a tent in high winds, we decided that maybe this wasn't the best time to be in Zion, so we spent a day seeing the highlights and got ourselves out to cooler places.

Flash forward 11 years, and we are back in Zion, this time in March. The weather is much, much nicer, and we're able to do all the hiking and sightseeing that we want without extreme heat worries. Well, mostly. It seems that in the intervening year,s Zion has become a more popular place to visit, with annual visitation around 4 times what it was back in 2007. And we're here during spring break, when everyone from Los Angeles and Salt Lake City is here too! We did not expect this.

Zion has a shuttle bus system to take people into the canyon. You can't drive your car in most of the park, and with good reason. With half a million people visiting in a typical month, the road would be jammed with bumper-to-bumper traffic with no one finding a parking place. The shuttle buses take visitors to eight different stops in the canyon with a hop-on/hop-off type system. It's free. And it works pretty well, except during spring break.

On Saturday, we rode the shuttle bus to a few locations to do some hiking. We had to wait about 30 minutes to board the bus down at the visitor center. The line was long, but it moved quickly as new shuttles arrived every few minutes. But the following Tuesday, even though we got to the park early, the line was somewhere around 2 hours long! We didn't stand in line that long; we just hiked up to the next shuttle stop and got on there, saving about 1 1/2 hours. But it does show just how popular this park has become.

But there's a quiet side of Zion. There's an entrance off I-15 that is about an hour's drive from the main area. This is called the Kolob Canyons, and it probably gets visited by fewer than 1% of the Zion visitors. But it's just about as spectacular as the more famous Zion sites.

Kolob Canyons consists of a series of narrow slot-canyons that extend back into the mesa. Here we are looking down one of them. 

We found a nice day-hike that follows a stream in one of these slot canyons. It's called the Taylor Creek Trail, and we highly recommend it. The rangers at the visitor center had recommended it, but we had no idea just how spectacular it would turn out to be.

At five miles total (out and back) it's not particularly long. And since it follows a stream, there's not a whole lot of elevation change, so it's an easy walk. Except that you have to cross the stream a few times. Fifty-four times. Each way.

Fortunately, the water level in the stream is generally low, even in spring, so this is not really a major concern. And the view along the trail as you get farther into the canyon is worth it.

The walls of the canyon tower above you on both sides. The sunlight against the wall makes the whole place glow orange (which is difficult to capture in a picture).

Here are some tips for visiting Zion National Park during the busy season (March -- November):

by Steve

If you've followed our posts for any length of time, you probably know that we are generally not "city people." We prefer to spend our time visiting natural wonders in national parks and the like. We made an exception this winter by staying in Tucson for 4 1/2 months, and we made another exception by visiting Las Vegas. Near to Las Vegas is the Hoover Dam, a monumental undertaking when it was built, and still an impressive structure. And we had never been there.

Until 1947, it was called Boulder Canyon Dam, even though it was built in Black Canyon. There had been many years of analysis done to find the best location for the dam. It came down to two finalists (from seven): Black Canyon and Boulder Canyon. Because Boulder Canyon had been long considered to be the likeliest location, the project had been informally referred to as Boulder Canyon Dam.When Black Canyon was selected as the best location, the name Boulder Canyon somehow stuck. In 1947, Congress changed the name was changed to Hoover Dam to honor Herbert Hoover, who, when he was serving as President Harding's commerce secretary, figured out how to settle the long-running dispute over who would control the allocation of water.

After the dam was finished, it took six years to completely fill Lake Mead behind it. The dam rises over 700 feet, and that's a whole lot of water--at least when the reservoir is full. Unfortunately it has not been full in a long time. So all the statistics about the amount of water in the lake and the miles of shoreline are no longer valid. At the time I write this, the lake is down about 125 feet. It's nowhere near the top of the dam.

The white line in the photo shows the normal water level when the lake is full. The dam has two gigantic spillways, one on the Nevada side and one on the Arizona side. These are made to allow water to bypass the dam during periods of high water flow so that water does not over-top the dam.

Here's the Arizona one. The last time water flowed through here was 35 years ago in 1983. They tell us it would take 10 years of average snow in the Rockies to refill the lake, and we haven't had many average years in a long time. The dam has a small boat dock located below the Nevada spillway. Since the lake water keeps going down, they have had to put in stairs to get down to the water level. One set of stairs has been abandoned, and a much longer one put in its place. Which only leaves you about a 20 foot drop down to the dock!

While the low water level looks pretty dramatic at the dam, it's far more noticeable along the shores of Lake Mead. The roads that used to go along the shoreline are now a couple miles away from the water. If you're a boater and plan to put your boat in at the Las Vegas Bay boat launch, you will need to find another location. Here's a picture of the boat launch. 

We are standing near the end of the original boat ramp.The line in the foreground shows where they extended the boat ramp. You can see a car in the distance at the end of the extension but you cannot see any water, only bushes and small trees. So while they say that Lake Mead has 550 miles of shoreline, I sincerely doubt it. Not when there are entire bays of the lake, like this one, that have been bone-dry for years.

Hoover dam was built to take on one of the greatest challenges of its day: taming and controlling the Colorado River. Now it seems we have an even greater challenge: taming and controlling our own water usage, so that there will be water for the generations to come.