Bicycling Utah, Arizona, Nevada
May - 2009
Wednesday May 6, 2009
(almost) East Entrance Zion National Park to Springdale UT
Distance 16.3 Miles
Today was an interesting day. Almost all day we rode our bicycles down hill. We only rode our bicycles about 2 miles from the motel before we came to the East entrance to Zion National Park.
We traveled a few more miles and came to a tunnel which we successfully passed through. A very short time later we came to a second tunnel and bicycles are not allowed to ride through the second tunnel. It is over a mile long and was built in the 1930's. It was designed for automobiles of that age and today's buses and motor homes must drive right down the center of the two lanes or they will hit the roof as the sides of the tunnel are very low.
The ranger directing traffic at the tunnel entrance found a pickup with an empty bed and we loaded both bicycles, all our luggage and ourselves in the bed of the pickup. The driver than hauled us to the other end of the tunnel where we unloaded everything from the pickup, reloaded our luggage on the bicycles and continued on our way. Scott lost a rain jacket off his bicycle after just a very short distance but did not know it was missing. We were traveling down a very steep decent on a series of switch backs with 20 mile per hour turns at the end of each switch back. We stopped at one of the turns and one car asked if we had lost a jacket. They then volunteered to go back and get the jacket for Scott. A second car came down a few minutes later and had the jacket with them.
After that we continued on our way finally arriving at the Zion National Park Visitor Center.
Zion National Park does not allow automobiles on the road up Zion Canyon alongside the Virgin River. Instead they operate a free shuttle which hauls people into the canyon. We got on a shuttle and went to the far end of the canyon and walked 2 miles round trip to where the Virgin River fills the entire canyon. Unless you walk in the river you can not go any farther up the canyon.
We got on the shuttle and went to another stop were we climbed a steep ½ mile walk to the Weeping wall. Water runs out of the sandstone cliffs for several feet and drops down from the cliff face to form a small stream.
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