Happy Halloween. This is two years in a row that we've been camping on Halloween.
We had set alarms for photographing sunrise in Zion, but they went off way too early. We shut them off, rolled over, and slept until 10:30. I don't think we've totally recovered from the New England trip, because we both seem awfully tired on this trip.
We grilled hamburgers for an early lunch and set off for Zion. Today is a gorgeous day. The temperatures in are in the 70's and there isn't a cloud in the sky. We're back to t-shirt weather. That is a welcome change after New England and the first couple days of this trip.
Our first stop was the new Visitor Center. The amazing thing about the visitor center is that it's designed so it doesn't need air conditioning in the summer or heat in the winter. And it gets VERY hot in the summer in Zion. There are huge parking lots around the Visitor Center because this is where most people park to catch the canyon shuttle. Private vehicles are not allowed in the main canyon loop during most of the year. In fact, they just shut down the shuttles the Monday before we arrived. They still have a light schedule of shuttles on the weekends, but they allow private vehicles on the weekend as well.
From the Visitor Center, we drove up the main canyon and had planned to photograph at Weeping Rock. Then we saw all the cars in the parking lot and remembered it was Saturday. We decided to re-schedule for a week day when we wouldn't have to fight the crowds to get a good shooting location.
We continued up to the Temple of
Shinawava, but found a full parking lot there also. We managed
to find one of my favorite shots in the canyon, but soon discovered
that the flooding and landslides in the late 90's had changed
the river and now prevented any way of getting down to the edge
of the river to photograph. The shot of the Virgin River we liked so much on previous
trips is probably gone forever.
We shot a couple other places along the Virgin River as we tried to kill time before shooting sunset
at "The Bridge." The classic shot in Zion is shot from
the bridge over the Virgin River with a view of The Watchman
down the canyon.
This is especially good when the cottonwoods
on each side of the river have turned to gold. As it turned out,
we killed a little too much time. We had forgotten that this
isn't really a sunset shot. The best photos are about 90 minutes
before sunset before the sun goes behind a ridge and you lose
the lighting on the cottonwoods. We were also there to shoot
moonrise over East Temple, so we just hung out and photographed
as the lighting changed around The Watchman.
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We kept waiting and waiting for the moon to rise above the canyon walls, but nothing was happening. After an hour, we decided that maybe I had misread the computer program. We returned to the Explorer and were going to drive down the canyon to see if it had already risen just beyond our line of sight. We had only driven a short distance back over the bridge where we had been photographing when we saw the moon. We pulled off the road and immediately started shooting. The sad thing was that neither of us got any good shots of the moonrise. Since the canyon walls were so high, the moon had arisen a long ways before it was visible. That meant that the sun was totally behind the ridge and East Temple was no longer lit. We had a bright moon and very dark canyon walls. That amount on contrast is big trouble and neither of us figured out how to handle it well, except to say that we should have shot it a day earlier when moonrise would have been an hour earlier.
When we got back to the motorhome,
we grilled salmon to go with our salads and baked potatoes. We
certainly rough it on these camping vacations...
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