Scoring tickets to ride the shuttle isn’t easy! It’s an online thing and the tickets go very, very fast, like in minutes. I was able to get some, they are only $1, just so hard to get. I had to be late on a video meeting because the tickets went live at the exact same time. I was done within 15 minutes. I believe needing a ticket to ride the shuttle is new because of the pandemic. They also changed how many people would be on each shuttle. It’s HUGELY different. They took every other seat physically off of the bus and no longer accommodate any standing riders. They used to put 60 people on each shuttle bus, so a total of 120, per vehicle. Now they do only 33 people to that 120. WHAT? Anyway, there was a nice, long line to get onto the shuttle. I took a picture when we were about 1/2 way through the line.
You had to wear a mask, but no one was enforcing the 6’ft apart part, though most people did give 3’ anyway. If we weren’t fully vaccinated, we wouldn’t be doing this. The shuttle ride was pretty cool! No cars are allowed where the shuttle mostly goes, but bikes ARE allowed with the shuttles. I will have a future post about that because we plan to do it. We plan to ride our bikes where the shuttle goes but stop and do a hike in the Grotto section of Zion. Anyway, back to the shuttle ride. The shuttle has roof window/vent things that they had open and when you were driving through the canyon, the bus driver would point out rock climbers. I tried to get a picture, here’s what I got. Actually, this is Joel’s picture! That tiny dot is a rock climber!
Quite a few of the shuttle stops were closed because the trails were ruined by rock slides or other terrible weather events. They make everyone get off at the end of the canyon which is also the last shuttle stop, it’s called Temple of Sinawava. It has a trail called the Riverside Walk. it is a little over 2 miles. We decided to do that hike. It was really busy. Maybe 20% of the people were wearing masks. It’s a beautiful walk at the end of the canyon and then it
goes up to the Narrows. Here are some pictures from along this walk.
I found another picture of some rock climbing crazy people! I’m very much zoomed in for that picture!
Here are a couple of pictures of the shuttles you take.
It was a great first day and night at Zion! We did this last Friday afternoon and then Saturday morning, May 1, we hiked that Watchman trail that I wrote up and posted yesterday.
We are having a great time. It is hard balancing when we need strong coverage for work and getting out on the trails that have zero coverage, but we are making it work so far. Zion is so incredible if we did nothing else, the 30 hour drive to get here would be worth it just for ZION!
I love you!
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