Thanks to Covid making traveling a little lackluster, and not being able to take time off work, it’s been a while since I went somewhere. I saw a two week gap where I would be able to snag time away from work, but unfortunately I had to ditch the hubby on this one. We’ll go somewhere together soon! What started out as a sisters trip, unraveled into a family vacation and I’m excited to be spending some quality time with my parents now as well. 🙂
Here’s the agenda – 10 days:
– Zion National Park
– Bryce Canyon National Park
– Yellowstone National Park
– Grand Teton National Park
Getting There:
We flew into Las Vegas at 10:30pm wicked cheap ($130 roundtrip including checked luggage on Frontier) and got a reasonably priced SUV through Turo.
If you haven’t heard of them, Turo is great alternative to your typical car rental agencies. It’s basically the Airbnb of cars. It was $300 cheaper than any agency we could find.
Today’s agenda was just to drive the 3 hours from Las Vegas to Zion, stopping for groceries and cliff jumping along the way.
Things to Do:
- Sand Hollow Lake state park is in Hurricane, about 45 minutes west of Zion. Its a $20 entrance fee for non locals, and It’s more of a “locals” park than a tourist trap and was the perfect place to hangout, cool off, swim, and cliff jump. If you’re going to be camping like we were, you’d appreciate the showers outside the restrooms which was super convenient for us. They also have camping there which looks recommendable, but we wanted to be a bit closer to Zion.
- If you’re going to do anything in Zion, I’d recommend going the evening before to get oriented with how the park and visitor center area is laid out. We would’ve been lost the next morning if we hadn’t. The visitor center, information center and stores close at 7pm.
Picnic supper at the local town park in Springdale. They have nice bathrooms, volleyball, pavillions and a water spigot.
Where We Stayed:
We’ll be staying in a lot of National Forests or BLM land and just do primitive dispersed camping. Not a big deal since we do that often, but it’s kind of a new thing doing it in the desert and in this heat. Very little options for shade or water which I’m just now realizing makes camping much less comfortable. Lol. I’m from the North. I underestimated how much my body is shocked by 104 degrees. (Night time mid 70s.)
We did a little driving around and were lucky to find some trees alongside a little stream off Kolob Terrace Road on BLM land. (Link to location here). When we were there, a creepy permanent looking RV was camping up the road from the spot we picked and we were a little sketched out, but it was getting dark and we had no options. If it wasn’t for the RV, and you like isolation, it wouldn’t have been a bad spot. Later on we overheard that there were more primitive sites along the creek further down the main road as well but we never made it there.
It was hot and no one wanted to sleep in a tent and no one wanted bedding so we set up our hammocks in the trees and slept in those. My parents included. They’re troopers! I didn’t get a picture in daytime. We settled in and left in the darkness.
