We have planned to go to Snow Canyon today which we have been looking on to for nearly was week. This is the canyon that is only about 6 miles from our house.
This is the entrance to Snow Canyon.
The ravine through the middle of this picture is the view we look up at from our house in Entrada on to the white Navahoe sandstone to our right.
The whole of the park is scattered with large chunks of lava from extinct cinder cones and lave tubes that blew our huge chunks of hot lava over 3 thousand years ago - but in the main, have never moved from the spot they landed.
After spending some time here in Snow Canyon which is effectively on our doorstep, we drive further north and east to the last part of Zion National Park that we have yet to visit.
This is a 30,000 acre block of Zion that is very different in both location and look and is another canyon of rocks called Kolob Canyons.
The drive is a fairly short 35 miles along the highway I15 to reach the Kolob Canyons, and once within the park entrance there is almost immediately a very steep climb up to the plateau that the rocks can be viewed from.
But on turning the first bend the view is spectacular from the start.
Again it is difficult to get an idea of scale for these mountains from photographs, but the trees you see in the distance in the picture above are fully grown spruce trees which can reach over 100 feet tall and are like moss on the mountainside from this distance.
As we drove up the winding switchback road more and more of the huge canyon became visible.
It should have been a straightforward shot - but our Ex Chief Navigator got her foot stuck climbing up and getting upright from a "stuck" position was really hard - but was very funny.
The hilarious video that Fiona was shooting which shows this unfortunate event (for the Ex Chief Navigator that is) is available at reasonable cost.
Send your cheques to Carolyn Hunter c/o the usual address!
Anyway, we got the picture at last....
From the top of the road where there is a viewing are, the sheer size of these mountains give the feeling that there should be dinosaurs roaming around in the valley below.
In fact part of Jurassic Park was filmed here, but cinematically, this area is probably more famous for being used as the hide-out of the "Hole In The Wall Gang" in the film Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid which starred Paul Newman and Robert Redford.
As mentioned above, these are all fully grown trees that are on the mountain side which gives an idea of the huge size of these mountains.
We are already at 9,000 feet above sea level here, so these mountains are well over 12,000 feet.
As regular readers to this blog will know, we started off with a Chief Navigator who disgraced herself completely by sending us on a 3 hour wild goose chase looking for the Giant Sequoia Trees when we were in Yosemite National Park by programming our route to a truck stop on the road to Palookaville which happened to have the same name as the beautiful grove we were supposed to be visiting.
And for those of you who looked at the text and comments at the bottom of that particular entry, you will know that our Ex Chief Navigator has been banned to the boot of the Chevy ever since.
As you will see from the pictures above, the Ex Chief Navigator had been broadly forgiven for her lack of direction but today she found other ways to disgrace herself and get sent back to the boot.
On one of the lookouts on the road to the top of the canyon we had stopped to take in the view.
The silence of Canyons was mesmerising and all that broke the perfect harmony of natures rocks in the burning sunshine was the occasional bird song or snake scurrying around in the undergrowth.
This was nature as it should be, silent and peaceful. Calming with no sounds of human interference.
That is until the sound of our enormous Chevy's car alarm started echoing around the canyon like an air raid siren - scaring off every living thing for 5 miles. There was no let up - it went on and on and on.
The peace was broken, fellow hikers looked on in disgust from a mile away and rocks that had been solid on the mountain for a million years started to crack and fall from the deafening sound.
And who do you think set off this unearthly noise - yes you guessed it The Ex Chief Navigator and now also Ex Chief Co Pilot.
Back to the boot with you!
However as this view was so spectacular we decided she was allowed out of her space in the boot to take a look, on the strict proviso that she did not touch the Sat Nav, the door handles, or indeed any buttons of switches in the car.
But she was not let out soon enough to get in this picture...
Or this one....
However in her defence, she may be an absolutely rubbish navigator, and disturber of the peace - but she has certainly been doing a wonderful job looking after the meals in our kitchen at our house in Entrada. So for that we forgive her - not sure the NPS does though.....
So she was allowed another picture looking at the spectacular views of Kolob Canyon.
So after an afternoon of red rocks and spectacular views, it was time to spend our last evening poolside before going back to pack for the next leg of our journey in Las Vegas.
These pictures were taken about 7:30pm at night, but the air temperature was still around 90°F.
And so, to the pool.....
On the last walk back to our house, the sky was turning bright orange as the sun began to set, and on this evening the bright colours against the clouds reflecting off the red rocks was quite amazing.
And over the next 15 minutes or so, the colours got more and more intense in the sky as you can see from the photo's below.
It looked like the sky that would appear in an oil painting from 200 years ago.
And as the sun finally set on our last evening in Entrada, we were forced to think about packing up and moving on.
This is a very beautiful area and with scenery and colours (and weather) so different from our own back home, it will be sadly missed.
However the days plod on and we are bound for Las Vegas, home of the big shows, the wonderful restaurants, the amazing hotels, the gambling - but not for us all this glitz and glamour, for I am told by my female companions that this is a "Shopping Trip Visit!"
Oh dear, I think the gambling might have been cheaper........
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