I’m afraid that nothing too exciting happened today. Well, other than my brother’s dog jumping out of his slow-moving Jeep and possibly fracturing her leg. Other than that, I’ve been editing all the photos I’ve taken in Utah that I hadn’t gotten to yet and started uploading them to flickr. Seeing as it’s over 400 megabytes, I’ll let it run overnight and it should be done by morning when I head for the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone National Parks. Midday on Wednesday my parents will head back to Michigan so my dad can be to work on Monday.

Anyways, it’s dinner time, and I need to load the Jeep up; expect a few picture posts soon.

I woke up at 5am this morning to shoot the sunrise on the Towers of the Virgins in Zion National Park. The park was pretty when we drove through it briefly around sunset last night, but it was positively gorgeous this morning. The red light of morning light up the rock formations brilliantly and produced some wonderful contrasts. We’ll see how the photos turn out, but I’m fairly confident they’ll turn out well.

Around 7am, my dad and I packed up our gear and headed back to the hotel to wake up Scott, Sarah and my Mom. Got there around 7:30 and finally made it out of the hotel around 10am. We headed into the park and took the shuttle bus into the scenic drive of teh canyon (from late March through (or until, I can’t remember) November, the only access is via the parks free shuttle service. They run every 6 to 8 minutes during the peak hours of the day, and it does ease congestion quite a bit.

The park is undoubtedly pretty, and the walk along the river towards the narrows is a lot of fun, though it’s rather crowded. (I can’t recall a single time that we didn’t see other people around us.) Unfortunately, we didn’t bring the proper gear with us to hike through the Narrows (the canyon narrows significantly, constricting at its tightest point to 18 feet). Oh well, it’s a trip for another time, and I will be back eventually.

By the time we worked our way back through the park to our car for lunch, with a five hour drive ahead of us, it was time to roll out… with a quick hour or so detour along Carmel Highway to look at the park approaching from the east. It’s an entirely different view and well worth the time to drive it.

An uneventful trip back to Hill AFB, and now… definitely time for sleep.

Travel Distance: 335 miles

The plan initially was to hit the road at 8am, but due to our really late night thanks to the traffic jam on the way back from Salt Lake last night, we decided to put it off until 9am, which turned out to be 10am in the end.

No matter though, we hit the road, our first stop was the old mining town (now a ghost town) of Frisco, UT. The mine at Frisco pulled over $60 million in minerals out of the ground and boasted a population of 4,800. The town died in the early 1900s when the mine caved in. All that remains now are several kilns, a cemetery and a few ruins.

Then it was on the road to Zion, we popped into the parks for a few minutes in order to find a spot for a sunrise photo, after coming back out and doing a bit of research on the internet, we think we’ve found a spot called Towers of the Virgin.

Travel Distance: 397 miles

After a couple hard days, it was nice to sleep in a little bit – until 10am anyways. Not a particularly busy day really, I spent quite a bit of the day working on processing photos from Arches National Park (I’m actually almost done…). Around 3:30pm, I realized that the Hill AFB Aerospace Museum closed at 4:30, so if my dad and I were going to make it, we had to head there ASAP. We ended up with about half an hour to poke around, and we’ll probably be heading back for some more photos on Monday when we get back from Zion and Bryce.

In the evening, we headed to The Bayou, a cajun restaurant with an absolutely amazing beverage selection. Their beverage menu had over 250 different options on it in fact. We wrapped up our evening by heading to Keys on Main, a piano bar. It was my first time in a piano bar, and I will say that it was nice. The singing wasn’t that great and the “dueling” was non-existent, but it was still fun.

Well, the evening was fun until we got on I-15N from Salt Lake back to Hill AFB. Then we set in a traffic jam for an hour and a half as the road was closed from 10:30pm-6am daily. So, the great state of Utah, instead of simply closing off one or two of the lanes at a time, closes the entire road. At one point we timed it, and covered 3/10 of a mile in half an hour. Just another reason to wonder what the people running this state are thinking.