Day 7: La Verkin UT - Cedar City UT

In marked contrast to yesterday, today was short on miles but long on Places to Go and See.  As noted yesterday, first port of call was Zion National Park and you need to get there early before the car park fills up.  This is because the place is shaped like an inverted "T" and if you want to go up the leg of the said "T" you have to park at the Visitor Center and take the shuttle bus up the canyon.  Failure to find somewhere to park means you have to go back to Springdale and get the bus from there.  This makes the natives of Springdale very happy, as they charge anything up to $15 for parking.  This Unit actually got his act together and found a spot inside the park.  Huzzah!

The buses are frequent, free and bendy, consisting as they do of a bus and a trailer of bus-like functionality, and if you're in the back half you can spend the trip up to the far end gazing at a huge picture of a suppurating wound on the back of someone's hand.  This is actually a warning not to feed the sqirls as they tend not to know the difference between a handful of trail mix and the hand that feeds them.  And if The Man catches you feeding the sqirls he will charge you $100 not including medical fees, so don't do it.

There are three sorts of passengers making the trip up to the Temple of Sinawava, viz.

• Old gits like me
• Dangerously athletic-looking twenty-somethings with carbon-fibre hiking poles
• Goths

Actually, there was only one Goth; I think she was Australian.  I decided to go all the way up to the far end of the canyon and then work my way back, as you can leap on and off the bus at nine stops, or you could if Weeping Rock hadn't been closed because a big chunk of Utah detached itself from the rest of Utah and flattened the bus stop.  Though happily not any visitors, park staff or sqirls¹.  From the Temple of Sinawava² you can get off and walk a ways upstream on the North Fork of the Virgin River until the path stops.  If you are a dangerously athletic-looking twenty-somethings with carbon-fibre hiking poles you can carry on to a slot canyon yclept "The Narrows" but this entails proper footwear and walking in the river a lot of the time and is unsuitable for old gits carrying their Stuffs in a plastic bag from the duty-free shop at Calgary airport.  So I didn't, and nor did Ms. The-Birthday-Party.  The views are stunning enough as it is.

Court of the Patriarchs.  And what should we do with the Patriarchy?

Definitely worth the early start as I'm told it can get unpleasantly warm in the canyon later in the day.  Back at the Visitor Center there are more sqirls and also deer.  And motor-ists circling the car park like Californian Condors waiting to pounce on the space vacated by anyone who's leaving.

Deer with a gammy leg

From here I retraced yesterday's route up UT-9, wot is the horizontal bit of the "T".  Far less traffic then yesterday and only one person afflicted with National Park Disease, which presents in the form of stopping dead in the middle of the road because you have seen a deer/unusual tree/funny-coloured rock.  Of which latter there are many.

After which the road goes through a mile-long tunnel, which is best not shared withe a phalanx of Harley-Fergusons³ and out into more park with more bonkers rocks.

Checkerboard Mesa

Finally I ran out of park, coninued to US-89, headed north and then back west on UT-14.  With check-in here being at 4pm there appeared to be Time to be Wasted so I headed off-piste to Navajo Lake - the road having been paved since the last time I was here - and sat back to Defile the Wilderness With Rock'n'Roll while continuing to read Graham Hurley's "Raid 42".

Thence to Cedar Breaks National Monument, for the third or fourth time.  Just because.

Fire in Chessman Canyon; started this morning by a lightning strike

Natch my time-wasting exercise was rendered, well, a waste of time, as there were a couple of sets of temporary traffic lights on the way back down Cedar Canyon.  Final port of call was the Little Free Library in a Cedar City back street, to drop off one of Will's Travelling Books.  Will Walton aka Mr Sunshine, died last year leaving Miss von Brandenburg the unenviable task of disposing of many of his worldly goods.  In the words of the Founder:

Will died on 12 November 2018.  I have inherited most of his books.  I’m sending them on a journey.  Each book will have a note inside it telling the new reader who the book used to belong to.  The note will include a link to this page.  I’m hoping the new readers will visit this page and write about the book they have chosen.

You may learn more here: https://www.facebook.com/willstravellingbooks

1: Actually, I'm not sure about the sqirls
2: Sinawava, I'm told, plays a prominent role in the Creation Myth of the Paiute Indians
3: Fortunately there were none.