Day 4: Zion to Valley of Fire

 We may have entered the desert and shed our Winter clothes the afternoon before, but it was chilly the next morning.

Three seasons of the year, the road into Zion Canyon itself is only open to the Park's shuttles. In Winter you can drive it yourself.

The canyon is home to the North Fork of the Virgin River.

Even in the high-walled canyon, by mid-morning the coats and hats had come off.

Weeping Rock quenched our thirst.

After lunch and a grocery stop in Hurricane ("HER-i-kn", not "HER-i-kane") where we saw lots of sister wives, we hit the road South. After St. George I-15 cuts through the extreme Northwest corner of Arizona, passing through the Virgin River Gorge.

It cost $10 million dollars per mile to build this chunk of I-15, the most expensive in the system outside a city. And that's in 1973 dollars; in 2018 the bill would've been over $53.5 million per mile.

Twenty-nine miles and over $1.5 billion later, we were in Nevada. Some of this trip was a bit of a retrace for Ludwig, incidentally.

We made it!

miles 39269.2-39405.3