Start Location: Cedar City, UT
Ending Location: Hurricane, UT
Miles Today: 120
Trip Miles: 3772
States Visited: 8
National Parks Visited: 10
Low Temp: 47.3° F
High Temp:105.4° F
Min Elevation: 2786'
Max Elevation: 6014'
Route Map:
National Parks 2010 - Day13
Today was an interesting day. Because we needed the new front
tire, we got up a little early to head to St. George. We were on
the road by a little after 8:00 and pulled into the dealer by 9:00 AM
this morning. Another traveler had arrived just before us
and they were changing the oil in his ST1300. He wanted a new
tire as well but they didn't have one the right size for his bike.
His name was Rich and we talked for at least an hour while they
worked on his bike in between other service appointments. He was
a really nice guy and seemed to know a lot about motorcycles and riding
in general and loved to talk about them. It wasn't until he was
about to leave and the service guy started asking him some questions
that I found out his name was Rich Schlacter and he was a well known
road racer back in the late 70s and early 80s. In fact he was a
Formula 1 champion in '79 and '80. He's a builder in Connecticut
now, had been on the road since the last week of August and wasn't
planning to get back until early October.
Anyway,
we were out of the dealer by 11:45 with a brand new front tire and a
bill for $232.17 not to mention an elevated confidence level.
Since we planned to stay in Hurricane tonight and we had to ride
right through there to get to Zion, we stopped on the way and made our
reservations so we wouldn't have to worry about the motel filling up.
While I was checking in, Linda was checking out all the pamphlets of
things to do in the area. Her favorite was "The Polygamy Experience."Tour the world's largest polygamist colony! No joke. It is for real.
We
arrived at Zion National park at about 1:00 this afternoon. The
park was very full and they had put signs out saying that both the
visitors center parking and the overflow parking were full and that we
should park in town (Springdale) and take the shuttle into the park.
Like I mentioned yesterday Zion uses a shuttle system and there
are actually 2 loops. One loop goes between various parking
places in town and the visitor center and the second loop stops at all
of the popular spots in the park. We ignored the full signs and
found a spot in the overflow lot that only a motorcycle could fit in.
We started at the visitor center and boarded the park loop
shuttle. The first stop was at a human history museum where we
watched a 20 minute film about the origin of the park and lots of
information about the park and its hsitory. I won't try to spell
it out here since Wikipedia
and lots of other sources can probably explain it better than I could.
The buses drop you off at each point and you can hike or just
enjoy the scenery and then get on another bus whenever you're ready.
Buses come every 6 to 8 minutes so you never have to wait very
long. This seems to be a good system for such a popular park.
The first time we were here back in the early 80s, you just drove
through the park. The problem is that you are in a narrow canyon
so parking places are very limited and there were always traffic jams.
It took forever to get anywhere and then you couldn't stop.
We
spent all afternoon riding between stops and taking short hikes at most
of them. One of the interesting and famous ones was Weeping Wall.
Here water drips right from the stone and it appears to be
raining. Most of the stone in the park is Navajo Sandstone and
very porous - like a sponge - so it soaks up water when it rains and
the water eventually works its way out of the rock. Because of
all the moisture it's also a good example of a hanging garden. We
took lots of pictures and even hiked as far up into the park as you can
get. It was a popular hike and there were lots of people on it.
You're
going to have to work on it a little bit to see the pictures this time.
The way the picture tagging works is that a digital picture has
EXIF information attached to it with lots of data about the shot.
One of the pieces of information in this data is the time the
picture was taken according to the clock in the camera. The GPS
also logs the latitude and longitude and attaches it to a very precise
time value in the GPS. The software places the tags on the map
based on the comparison of the two times. Normally, while we are
moving, this works great. The problem is that bike sat in the
same spot all afternoon, so all of the tags are in the same spot and on
top of each other. You can still view the pictures however.
Directly above the map is a drop down box with the file names of
all of the pictures. If you select a name from the box instead of
clicking on a tag on the map, you get a thumbnail of the picture and
you can click on the thumbnail to see the full picture. Not as
convenient as the tags but it works and it's one of the consequences of
the shuttle system. Maybe next time I'll wear my wrist mounted
GPS and merge the two files together.
We got back into
Hurricane around 6:00 and it looks like we are heading for Great Basin
National Park tomorrow. This park is in eastern Nevada and it's
one we have never been to. It's also kind of in the middle of
nowhere so we have to plan out gas stops and motel lodging carefully.
