Kolob Canyon, the West Part of Zion National Park

Monday, May 17 for Saturday, May 15.

We started our Saturday morning tour by entering Kolob Canyon, which is attached to Zion National Park and the West entrance. Right away, we found beautiful scenery and fabulous weather.

I'd like to put in a plug here for another Application we use on our iPhones, but is also available for Android phones. It is called Seek by iNaturalist, and is associated with National Geographic. We have been running around these mountains and trails and snapping pictures of flowers and trees, and most of the time, Seek will get you down to Genus and Species -- we have it set for common names rather than the Latin. It is a free app, and we highly recommend it. Thank you to Trey and the Benfield boys for showing this to me before we left NC, because we really have used this a lot. The picture below is from Seek. Randy has built a Seek photo file on her iPhone. There is a function to identify and save the photo, but that was not activated on Randy's phone yet -- I fixed it later -- so we can't tell you what the flower below is!

If you can make anything out on the picture of an information board -- Randy takes a lot of these -- you'll get a general feel of what we observed.

I include the picture below for this reason -- I hate it when old guys wear baseball caps backwards, but it was SO windy, I had trouble keeping hats on my head. The only way was to wear it backwards, so the wind wouldn't pick up the bill. For my own decorum, as soon as I got out of the wind, I turned it back right side.

Eventually, we reversed course and left Kolob Canyon. We had been advised by a Park Ranger to follow a road called Kolob Reservoir Road, and to go at least as far as a sign that said the road would not be maintained beyond that point. He told us the ride would be worth it. By the way, his name was Bryce, but he wasn't at Bryce Canyon National Park.

Interestingly, the road switched back and forth between National Park land and privately held land. You could tell the difference in the road when that happened, and definitely in the areas around the road. Most of the private land was held by large, well-kept ranches, but some was also hard-scrabble farms.

The next group of pictures is somehow out of order, not that you would know, but they were taken on the way up to the reservoir. We went beyond the sign, and it got to be pretty rough road, because Don was stubborn and wanted to get all the way to the reservoir, at over 8,000 feet.

A beavertail cactus in bloom.

It turned out the reservoir was boring, the water level was low, and that part of the journey was a waste of daylight time. So we started back down.

At some point, we came to a trail that had an overlook, but the distance to the trail was about two miles out, and two back. Randy didn't want to do it, so I got out my walking stick, and in this case, was wearing an Ohio State baseball hat. I probably got about half-way out, and Randy tells me not to worry about it, but I hated leaving her back in the car, so I decided to go "off-trail" and see what I could find. I saw a fairly clear path, and headed out. I found a couple picture-worthy scenes.

There was a dry creekbed I followed off the trail and back to it.

Also, for Randy's benefit, I took a picture of the plant below -- Seek could not identify it by species, and now I have forgotten the genus!

I rejoined the trail to return to the trailhead and meet Randy, and fell in behind another older couple. I eventually drew even with them, and the man said, are you really associated with Ohio State? That started the conversation. Their names are Steve and Deb McKee, and he has done various things, including teaching as an adjunct prof at OSU main, and other campuses. He is a botanist and a naturalist, and he said, if we looked on iNaturalist (mentioned above) for Zion, all of the pictures are his! I was supposed to get a picture of them, or all of us, but we talked so much it was forgotten. They live most of the year in Mansfield, OH, but live about two months of the year near Zion, and spend a lot of time there. It turned out we had some friends in common in our Christian lives.

We drove out of the park, ending this day's tour.

We asked our new friends, since they were familiar with the area, for a recommendation for a restaurant in Cedar City, which was on our way back to our hotel. They suggested the pizza place I posted earlier on Facebook.

As you'll see in the next post, we are still not done with Zion National Park.