National Park Sampler Platter

Today we started our "Sampler Platter" of National Parks: over the next three days we plan to cover 5-6 parks, though only getting a taste of each one. No long hikes, but that as fine because the canyoneering adventure had left us both quite sore. Unfortunately today we had a lot of miles to cover since we needed to get clear across Utah by nightfall.

We started with a brief driving tour through the southwest corner of Zion National Park. (I had actually thought our canyoneering was within the park but it turns out guides are not allowed to operate within the park itself.) You can't see much of Zion from the car  since most of it is only accessible via a shuttle service.

We also had to skip Bryce Canyon due to lack of time, though there were some nice oddities on bypass:

Scenic Bypass Route 12 then took us through Grand Staircase National Monument which was gorgeous.

In fact, the entire journey on Route 12 took twice as long as we expected since we ended up having to stop every couple miles to take yet another picture of the spectacular desert scenery. As it was Canada Day, we made sure we only listened to Canadian music the entire way.