Today's post is dedicated to the photos taken on our trip to Zion National Park in Utah. I want to start off by saying that we were unable to visit the most popular and touristy spots in the park because these are only accessible through the use of the park shuttles. The tickets for the park shuttle are sold on the website in a very absurd way. You can either buy the ticket to a specific time slot for a particular day two weeks or more in advance or only the day before your planned trip as they go on sale at 9am. It is a very weird and ridiculous system which leaves you with very limited options if you are planning a trip to Zion national park which is happening within two weeks of your planning. Given that we were within the two week period at the time we were planning our trip, the only option for us to get the shuttle tickets was to buy those through the website the day before our trip. I carefully logged onto the website and created the account in advance so that we could snatch the tickets as soon as they went live at 9am, however, the website glitched as I was at the checkout causing us to lose the tickets in our cart. By the time I reloaded the website all of the tickets were sold out. The shuttle tickets were literally sold out in under 3 minutes which was a very frustrating experience because there is literally no reason why it should be so hard to buy tickets if you are within the two week period. Regardless we decided to make our way to the Zion National Park since we were in the area anyways and we might as well check out the area which is accessible to the public.

We have only dedicated half a day to Zion National Park since we were unable to secure the shuttle tickets. Unfortunately there is not much to do in Zion if you do not have the means of transportation to the most popular spots. You can always hike there yourself from the visitor center but it would take you a few hours just to reach the shuttle drop-off points. Given that we were coming from Bryce Canyon National Park we entered Zion from the east entrance gate and we were glad we did. The drive from the east entrance to the visitor center was truly breathtaking. The views of the mountains around us made us feel so small and going down the serpentine to make our way further into the valley was a really cool experience. The road from the east entrance also took us through the rather long tunnel which was built inside of the mountain. Just driving around the roads in the park made us appreciate all the effort that went into building all of the infrastructure while preserving the beauty of the park to its visitors.

We left our car at the large parking lot at the visitor center and tried our luck with the shuttles. There is a giveaway of a few shuttle tickets around 3pm which is done at the visitor center on the first come first serve basis. These usually go out pretty quickly and given the fact that we arrived in the park closer to 4pm they were already done giving those tickets out. We asked one of the rangers about the things that can be done without the shuttle and there were two trails available to the public. One of the trails was just following the creek so we decided that it was not exciting enough for us. The second trail actually involved hiking and was a little over 3 miles roundtrip. Since we did not really have much choice we set out on that trail that was called a "Watchman Trail" and which takes you up one of the smaller mountains to about 300 feet (90 meters) above the canyon floor. The hike was pretty elevated and with all the heat we were actually struggling with even this small hike. We were visiting the park in early October and it was still pretty hot outside (85F or 30C) so it was definitely not helpful. But nonetheless we made it to the top of the Watchman and enjoyed the view of the canyon before making our way down.