We landed ourselves in Zion on Thanksgiving. The drive through Zion started out like a lot of parts of Utah with familiar red rock formations. Quickly we started seeing new formations, the most notable resembled mudslides that had been petrified. It is amazing how many different styles and formations of red rock can exist in a single state. The road was winding and the max speed was commonly ~20 miles an hour. There is a narrow tunnel that is at least a mile long and has not a single overhead light. The sun began to set approximately 3/4 though our drive causing the red rocks to glow an even deeper hue of red. We didn’t stop once as our plan was to return in the morning and there was still hope we would get to setup camp in the light, but the drive was truly magnificent.
I have not traveled on Thanksgiving and did not anticipate that there was any way a campsite touting 160 tent sites could be full at the end of November. I was wrong. The state park was completely full and there was a parking lot RV site with terrible reviews in town with a site for $30. The cheapest hotel started at $90 and also had terrible interweb reviews. Deja and I both have an allergy to paying tourist rates and decided that the we would explore Zion further on a future trip and we venture onto the next town. The next town is a bit over an hour away and when we follow our camping app to the sites that we had targeted, they are very urban camping. Practically right in the middle of town, and not the good part of town. Both Deja and I’s spitey sense are going off so we opt to continue on a little bit. We find an RV park a bit more outside of town that is not too bad. We consult the camping app one more time and realize there is a state park approx 2 miles away and opt to check this out prior to committing to the RV park. We follow the app directions and end up traversing under the interstate in a one lane underpass that is super creepy and up the side of a small cliff face. We continue on along a body of water for approximately a mile and are presented the entrance to the state park. We pull in and find a spot. Surprisingly there are a handful of other campers at this very out of the way campground. We get camp setup in record time at approximately 15 mins and curled up to call it a night. In the morning we are pleasantly surprised there is a lovely little creek below our site and above us are a set of red cliffs. While the location felt a bit eerie the night before it feels surprisingly remote for being only a few miles from the nearest town of Leeds UT.
