Ludwig & Gertie's Adventures

February 20, 2018

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

February 19, 2018

Day 3: Bryce to Zion

The funny running we experienced on the first day only got worse on the second. On the third I woke up to the smell of raw gasoline and the trouble became clear: there was a little-ish-getting bigger gas leak right under the tank. Under normal driving the drip-drip-drip wasn't enough to notice but under load, it starved the carburetors a little, and Ludwig struggled up the grades.

The fix was easy-peasy, but I knew it would involve spilling at least a(nother) pint of gas on the ground, which I didn't want to do in the campground. We drove it just outside the park to a service station. Unfortunately, then wouldn't let me spill gas on their parking lot either, nor would they let me use their shop. So some randos swapped out the offending three inches of fuel line.

Okay, enough of that. Forty-five minutes and $25 later we were back in the park, seeing the sights.

That's Bryce Canyon, and beyond that, Grand Staircase-Escalante.

It'll be so much nicer once the President and Secretary of the Interior start improving the view with the addition of some oil derricks. MAGA.

This was supposed to look like we're keeping her from running off the cliff.

That's a Bristlecone Pine (right), a very young one.

Ludwig's new record high point didn't even last 24 hours.

These ladies from Baltimore were feeding the ravens (ah, the irony). Stinkerton was having none of it; she stormed over and yelled "Don't feed wildlife!" at them until they couldn't ignore her anymore.

After hiking around the Bristlecones we made our way to Zion.

That hole below and to the right of center is one of the windows in the 1.1-mile Zion-Mt. Carmel Tunnel. We won't bore you with the video we took driving through it. I mean, the tunnel is awesome but the video isn't.

The contrast between Bryce Canyon and Zion was almost disorienting. We'd awoken to temps in the teens and had our boots and coats on all day, hiking in the snow. Once we got through the tunnel, it was warm and a little further down the valley there were palm trees.
The moon rose right in the middle of that rock cradle up there.

miles 39128.5-39254.5

February 18, 2018

Day 2: Syracuse to Bryce Canyon National Park

The Mormon Temple, a couple blocks away, is the much more imposing building. Just in case you wondered where the real power lay in the Beehive State.

Headed to see something up by Fish Lake.

No more 'up' left.

I guess we just ran out of 'up'. This is Ludwig's new highpoint (though see Day 3).

Why drive so high to this out-of-the way sylvan lake?

Because along its shore grows the world's oldest known living organism, an otherwise unassuming Aspen grove named 'Pando' that is estimated at 80,000-plus years old. How can you miss going to see something like that if you're gonna be anywhere near it?