Today we traveled to Zion National Park. Except, not exactly… We are camping 13 miles outside Fredonia, AZ, at the Kaibab Paiute Band Tribal RV Park. The RV park is across the street from the Pipe Springs National Monument, and is about 50 miles from Zion…
I took this picture because… Not Rocks!
It was an easy drive. After about 1 1/2 hours we arrived at the town of Kanab, UT, a nice little town…
We stopped for lunch at the Rocking V Cafe… Interesting place in this very remote town…
Other Airstreamers were in town, too, having lunch, shopping for groceries…
We also shopped for groceries – finally found half-&-half. The last four grocery stores didn’t have any… What’s up with Southern Utah and their lack of half-&-half?
As we left the grocery store and headed to the RV park, we noticed a strange thing: It is 1:34 pm, and we will arrive at our destination, 20 miles away, at 1:06 pm…
Obviously we are in Utah, and our destination is in Arizona. They are in the same time zone, but Arizona does not believe in Daylight Saving Time… However, as we approached the RV park, rather than changing the actual time to Arizona time, it changed the destination time to Utah time! Apparently the RV Park is quite close to cellular towers in Utah. Our Apple devices and our computer similarly kept switching back and forth such that we never able to know what time it was… To avoid the confusion we set a real clock on Utah time, and the Caravan all agreed that we would operate on Utah time… Of course, Zion is on Utah time…
As we approached the RV park, this was the landscape surrounding us… Arizona looks a lot like Wyoming around here…
Zion National Park is an national park located in Southwestern Utah near the city of Springdale. A prominent feature of the 229-square-mile park is Zion Canyon, which stretches 15 miles long and spans up to half a mile deep. It cuts through the reddish and tan-colored Navajo Sandstone by the North Fork of the Virgin River. The lowest point in the park is 3,666 ft at Coalpits Wash and the highest peak is 8,726 ft at Horse Ranch Mountain. Located at the junction of the Colorado Plateau, Great Basin, and Mojave Desert regions, the park has a unique geography and a variety of life zones that allow for unusual plant and animal diversity.
Zion National Park includes mountains, canyons, buttes, mesas, monoliths, rivers, slot canyons, and natural arches. Human habitation of the area started about 8,000 years ago with small family groups of Native Americans; however, these Indians moved away by 1300 and were replaced by other Southern Paiute subtribes. Mormons came into the area in 1858 and settled there in the early 1860s. In 1909, President William Howard Taft named the area Mukuntuweap National Monument in order to protect the canyon. In 1918, the acting director of the newly created National Park Service, Horace Albright, drafted a proposal to enlarge the existing monument and change the park’s name to Zion National Monument, a name used by the Mormons. According to historian Hal Rothman: “The name change played to a prevalent bias of the time. Many believed that Spanish and Indian names would deter visitors who, if they could not pronounce the name of a place, might not bother to visit it. The new name, Zion, had greater appeal to an ethnocentric audience.” On November 20, 1919, the United States Congress established the monument as Zion National Park, and it was signed by President Woodrow Wilson. The Kolob section was proclaimed a separate Zion National Monument in 1937, but was incorporated into the park in 1956.
We parked The Villa and set up camp… As did all the others…
As we settled in at the RV park we learned that one of the Caravaner couples, who live in coastal North Carolina, had learned that their property (not their house) had sustained damage due to debris and flooding from Hurricane Florence, so they decided to leave the caravan and return home… We held an impromptu gathering to wish them well…
After the gathering, as we headed back to The Villa. The sunset was striking…
Another momentous event occurred 39 years ago today … Our daughter, Erin, was born… She celebrated today by letting her not-quite-three-year-old capture her on film:
I think he has caught her essence…
And an enjoyable time was had by all…
Adventures in the Villa 