some of the desert we drove through looked like one of those sand art things, where you turn double paned glass filled with different colored sands to make swirly designs...remember those? Seriously that's what it looked like for miles.
Gorgeous colors, dramatic scenery and awesome rock formations as we drove through southern Utah...
...through Mexican Hat...
...and Monument Valley... (I think this is where Close Encounters of the Third Kind was filmed?)
We dipped back down into Arizona for a bit...more great rock formations...
We caught glimpses of civilization here and there when a few farms reappeared...
we watched out for horses...
we saw sheep...
...kept an eye out for jumping deer...
...and finally saw horses up close
...before returning to uninhabited desert again.
Outside Page, Arizona we drove through Glen Canyon Recreation Area and passed Lake Powell, and the Glen Canyon Dam. Smaller than the Hoover Dam, its still quite impressive. It was completed in 1966 and took 17 years to fill for the first time.
The Glen Canyon Bridge was built in 1959 and allowed crews to bring materials to the dam site and the new town of Page, AZ.
On the other side of the bridge, we saw Dilophosaurus dinosaur tracks found nearby in a side canyon. 170 million years ago, the area was marshy plains with shallow streams.
The Highway took us north back into Utah...
where we caught site of deer by the side of the road and managed to get a picture before it got too dark to see anything.
The rest of the drive was pretty cool, but of course no street lights or city lights to illuminate anything, so pictures were impossible. We travelled along Hwy-89 to Hwy-9 along the Zion-Mt. Carmel Highway en route to our Lodge which was right in the Park. We entered Zion via the East Entrance and passed Checkerboard Mesa but by this time it was wayyy too dark to see anything. Unbeknownst to us, the trail includes 2 tunnels blasted into the mountain, as well as several miles of very steep, zig-zagging road, which hugged the side of the mountain with multiple hairpin turns.
I mentioned that it was pitch-black, right? I won't lie...t was a little scary...
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