Today was our moving day from Valley of Fire to Zion National Park. We're actually staying outside of Zion about 15 miles at the Zion River RV Resort. It is a beautiful campground with all the amenities and a great staff. We had hoped to stay at the campground behind the Quality Inn in town, but no one answered their phones. Being 15 miles outside the park doesn't work well with changing weather and light.
Before leaving for Zion, we had one stop to make. Carol hadn't shot Atlatl Rock yet. It's right outside our campground and has some of the best petroglyphs in the park. I discovered that I had missed some of the petroglyphs on Friday, so we both had new stuff to shoot. The entire area around Atlatl Rock has petroglyphs scattered all over. We also got our shots of the antelope ground squirrels we had been seeing around the campground. We kept saying we would take time to photograph them, but we had never seen them when we had long lenses on a camera.
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After shooting the petroglyphs around Atlatl Rock, we finished packing up and drove to Zion River Resort. We quickly got set up and drove in to Zion. Then, we got a shock. We expected to be hitting the fall color at prime time, but it was very clear we had missed fall color completely. Not only were the red maples in the upper elevations gone, but the cottonwoods in the main canyon were also long gone. We were bummed. We found one cottonwood under the arch near Checkerboard Mesa that still had good color, but it was the exception.
Just before we reached the tunnel on the way back to the main canyon, we saw a whole herd of desert bighorn sheep. There must have been about 15 of them scattered across the hillside. There was one big ram with the ewes, but he had no interest in being photographed. The ewes were much more cooperative. The sun had already dropped behind the ridge, so we didn't have a lot of time to shoot the bighorn.
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