The easiest and closest national park for us to visit is Zion – the entrance is only 30 minutes away from our campground! And since the weather was fantastic, we made our first trip to Zion a few days after we arrived. We weren’t quite sure how to plan it, since it’s so close we couldn’t really do a car nap for the kid, so it was a real wing-it kind of day. It’s easy to come back if we don’t see it all now!

We arrived at the east entrance, and from there it was actually another half hour of driving to get to the visitor’s center. We were surprised that it was such a long way, because that means that Zion is more like an hour away from us.

The east entrance road includes a very long tunnel through a mountain. When you exit the tunnel, you are confronted with this view:

The park is so busy that the main artery of the park is shuttle bus only. There were signs at the visitor’s center warning that parking was full, and you’d have to park in town and take a shuttle out to the park, but we found plenty of parking available even for our beast of a truck. We planned to walk the paved hiking path and pick up the shuttle at one of the later stops.

There are actually a lot of rental bikes around, as people can opt to do the scenic drive on bike and then skip the shuttle. That’s probably a great option! Our walk was easy, gorgeous, and pretty secluded besides a few electric bikes. The path criss-crossed a stream, adding to the fantastic scenery.

We made it to our shuttle stop and a bus heading in the other direction indicated to us that buses in our direction did not stop, and he even waited for us to get on his bus. Very kind! So that took us back to the visitor’s center, where we had to wait for a shuttle to take us on the scenic drive.

The shuttle was…I don’t know. They tried to put as many windows in it as they could but it’s still not as easy to see things, and the windows are horribly dirty which accented the sun’s glare, so I didn’t take many photos. Atlas loved the ride and charmed everyone else on our shuttle.

We got off at a couple stops but since we didn’t have time for any more hiking there wasn’t really a lot for us to do. It seems the shuttle is great for dropping people off at some of the amazing Zion hikes, but that’s not our jam right now.

The drivers did point out some incredible climbers working on a rock face that takes two days, minimum. This was actually really great because otherwise there’s no way to portray the sense of scale at Zion, the cliff faces are impossibly huge. When Kyle saw this photo he was like “whoa, that’s some amazing resolution!” It’s not, it’s two completely separate photos taken with two different camera lenses.

We saw some mule deer! This ended up being pretty funny because our first time spotting them was interesting. But, much like the deer in Michigan, these ended up being a real nuisance for the rest of our stay in Kanab, especially after we almost hit some.

Back at the truck we ate some lunch – definitely not our worst lunch views!

Then we decided to drive out the main entrance of the park and check out town. It would probably be a very fun place to stay. We had to go back into the park and drive through to get home.

In hindsight, we thought that the scenic drive of Zion was all there was to it, probably because the map of the park doesn’t even include the east entrance road. But that road is still a huge part of the park and we totally skipped it today. To be honest, we are pretty disappointed with our shuttle experience. We’re lucky that this park is so close to our campsite because, knowing what we know now, we would have planned a completely different day. We can make that happen!