My how things have changed! It's been 11 years since we've been to Zion. Zion now has a shuttle service to reduce traffic in the main canyon. Parking has always been a disaster, so the shuttles were an obvious answer. Zion also has a "new" Visitor Center.
We arrived in the park just after the sun started hitting the peaks on the west side of the canyon. Since we had missed sunrise, we skipped shooting West Temple from the old visitor center and shot down Pine Creek from the bridge. There were a few clouds in the sky and the light was still warm. Pine Creek was nearly dry so there were no reflections to shoot like in previous years. That was disappointing but not surprising since it's the end of October instead of April. A storm with strong winds had blown through before we arrived. Nearly all the maple leaves were gone and the trees were bare.
We drove to the east end of the park near the Checkerboard Mesa before turning around. I'm looking forward to returning to the slickrock to photograph when we get some good lighting.
We returned to the main Zion canyon and drove the loop up to The Narrows. The lighting was terrible, so we just checked out our favorite places and made mental notes of what we want to photograph later in the week. All the forecasts are for warmer weather as the week goes on, so we're confident we'll have lots of opportunities to photograph in good light.
With gray skies and growing cold winds, we decided to return to the motorhome at the Zion River RV Resort. After lunch, we spent most of the afternoon at Walmart. Carol had forgotten some of her medications, so we needed to get her prescriptions re-filled.
We had planned to return to Zion for sunset, but it was windy and cold and the motorhome was nice and warm. We made Mac & Cheese for dinner, and I worked on images from our New England trip. I've now seen all the images from the first 3 days of our New England trip and have added images to the journals of the first 3 days of that trip. I have a lot of images left to process.
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