Day 47 – We the Keepers

Oct. 23
Zion National Park /Utah
Total driving so far 4,158 miles / 6,653 km

http://Zion-south-entrance-on-google.maps

Improving today
Informing tomorrow
Protecting Forever

I like this thinking. Its strategic, sustainable, creative, thoughtful.
This is the mantra of the Zion National Park Forever Project, https://zionpark.org, and looking at the explosive growth of the Zion visitor numbers one can recognize the rationale for the project:

The park hit 5 million visitors in 2021, which is an enormous number and creates major challenges for the sustainability of the park, as well as the neighboring towns such as Springdale/UT.

Well, we added the count of 2 to the 2022 visitor number. Even though nearly the end of October, the park was quite busy on Saturday, giving an idea how terribly crowded it must be during the high season in summer.

The absurdity of tourism – we like to travel, but we don’t like to see others traveling to the same places we do. The anti-human tourism bias.

Sunday was less busy, since it had rained during the night, the temperature dropped from 66F / 19C to 52F / 11C as high temperature. The mountain tops were covered with small snow caps on Sunday.

Both visit days were absolutely fabulous.

Zion offers such a enormous views of big landscape, colors, stunning rock formations, the Virgin river, ponds, waterfalls, trees, bushes, flowers and wildlife, and the weather changes very quickly.

Even when driving from our hotel in La Verkin to Zion, and when driving back, we got spoiled with amazingly beautiful landscape and a dramatic light I have hardly seen in New Jersey:

Wide angle and panorama photography is one attempt to capture the majestic views:

Zion also offers endless opportunities for drawing smaller vignettes of the many diverse corners and habitats and creating abstracts of many kinds:

And finally back to larger views:

And finishing off the series of vistas and vignettes with one of my favorites: