This post will be relatively short.

In essence, Zion National Park is a nuthouse right now (and apparently, is usually kind of crazy). We found out from a couple we spoke to yesterday that Zion is not running their shuttle right now. This is usually the only way to get into the park as they don’t let cars drive in. With no shuttles, they are letting people drive into the park, but only have 400 parking spaces. On Zion’s Twitter page, they announce when they close parking each day. No matter the day of the week, parking was closing by 6:30 every morning. So we had a 3AM wake up call to try to get into Zion and get a parking space.

We arrived around 5:00, and promptly sat in line for over an hour.

We finally got moving, and the parking was INSANE. People were zooming around, going the wrong way to try to get a spot before other people, and just parking wherever they felt like. It was awful. BUT, we got a spot.

Getting a parking spot was just the beginning. Since the shuttle isn’t running, we had to walk to anywhere we wanted to go in the park. I really wanted to hike into the Narrows, which was a 3.5 mile walk on the road just to get to. Once we got to the trail head, we had a mile walk along River Walk Trail to get into the Narrows.

For those who don’t know, the Narrows is a hike in Zion in which you walk through the river floor and along the canyon edges. You can hike as much or as little as you want, but you WILL get wet. We hiked maybe a 1/2 mile or so through the river, water coming up to our upper thighs. There were tons of people there, which we didn’t like. I assume it’s because we all arrived to the park at the same time, so we all started hiking at the same time. There were also tour vans that were constantly dropping people off, which added to the crowded numbers.

We had fun hiking in the Narrows and I thought it was so cool to walk through the river! Scott didn’t enjoy it as much as I did, but still had fun!

After the Narrows, we walked the 3.5 miles back down the road to the truck. We ate some lunch while we decided what we wanted to do. The shuttle not running really put a damper in anything we wanted to do. We had already hiked 10 miles that day. We weren’t planning on doing Angels Landing (Scott is terrified of heights, plus the chain section is closed because of COVID-19). We didn’t really feel like walking further down the road just to have to walk back up it. Begrudgingly, we decided to get in the truck and drive out of the park. There was a hike we wanted to do just outside the main area, but there was no parking. Every single parking/stopping area in the park had cars parked in it. This is not an exaggeration. If we had come to the park and seen that, we would have left (there’s no way I’m walking 10 miles up the road just to hike and then walk back down!)

We did stop to see the Checkerboard on our way out, and also drove out the East entrance, which takes you through a 1.1 mile long, curvy tunnel. These were both pretty neat! We stopped at the entrance to get a map and take our picture with the sign, and then got out of crazy town! We got back to the camper where I proceeded to take a 2 hour nap 🙂

Zion is a park we were really looking forward to, but were both rather disappointed. I’m attributing a lot of it to the madness caused by no shuttles running, but Zion also seemed like more of a park that is an “it” thing to do. Don’t get me wrong, I plan to return and see if my view changes, but neither of us were all too impressed. If you have been to Yosemite, imagine Yosemite Valley but there’s nowhere else to go and you are just surrounded by all the people and madness all day!

 

Our plan for tomorrow was originally to go back to Zion, but neither of us wanted to deal with it again. So tomorrow will be sort of a rest day for us to enjoy our campsite, take a short hike in the Red Canyon portion of Dixie National Forest, and do some planning for our last week of travel!