Utah, Nevada, California and Nevada in a day...Death Valley National Park, California

March 2015
We had made plans to visit some friends in Laughlin, Nevada which is about a 90 minute drive south of Vegas.  We had visited Vegas in 2013 for a Long Weekend and vowed and declared we would never go back....never say never is a lesson I am still learning! So we decided to leave the house in Enoch, Utah and drive to Vegas, spend a few days there, then head to Laughlin to see Marilyn and Rick.  When we looked at a map, I saw Death Valley National Park looking pretty close to Vegas, and it was a place I had always been  intrigued with.  So the plan was to drive from Enoch, Utah, to Las Vegas Nevada, down into Death Valley NP, California, then back to Las Vegas, Nevada.  Only about 11 hours of driving and we would get to tick a few states off.  So we left early in the morning and travelled on the I 15S for about 4 hours....watching the sun come up...

and then watching the sun hit Vegas as we got closer...

We crossed into Nevada, then California....

driving on a long, quiet road and finally getting to...

Death Valley NP is in the U.S. states of California and Nevada located east of the Sierra Nevada, occupying an interface zone between the arid Great Basin and Mojave deserts in the United States. The park protects the northwest corner of the Mojave Desert and contains a diverse desert environment of salt flats, sand dunes, badlands, valleys, canyons, and mountains. It is the largest national park in the lower 48 states. Approximately 95% of the park is a designated wilderness area. It is the hottest and driest of the national parks in the United States. On July 10, 1913, a record 134 °F or 56.7 °C was recorded which is the highest temperature ever recorded in the world.
This place was truly amazing and like no other place we had been to.  Vast, empty, diverse, hostile, welcoming, unwelcoming, spectacular........it was warm, but not too bad...and it was March, so I can only imagine what summer would be like here.

It was amazing to see an abundance of wildflowers.

 There were salt-flats, badlands, mountains, snow, dust.....

I always had problems with high altitude, particularly in Colorado, where we sometimes got up to 14000 feet, so I had no problems with the altitude at Death Valley NP!

The area was once used for gold, silver and salt mining and there was a little bit of evidence from that on display.

The park is huge and unfortunately we didn't have the time to see it all, but what we did see was fantastic. There were so many different colours in the mountains and as the light changed they became even more spectacular.

We did a loop drive called Artist's Drive and Palette and it was stunning....

These colors are caused by the oxidation of different metals(red, pink and yellow is from iron salts , green is from decomposing  tuff-derived mica, and manganese produces the purple).

 As we left the park we saw these gorgeous cactus flowering on the side of the road.

We crossed back into

leaving behind the sublime and heading towards the ridiculous...Las Vegas!

Kanab and Zion National Park, Utah

March 2015
I had read about a town called Kanab in southern Utah, just north of the Arizona State line.  Over 100 Western movies and TV shows were filmed there since 1924, as the local area is typical of the scenery you would see in old Westerns. It was only 2 hrs from where we were staying (Enoch) so we were able to take our time getting down there. We visited Little Hollywood Museum which has a gift shop you walk through first (as most places do) and then we went outside to check out the old Western sets which have been dismantled from the movie sites and reassembled by the owners of the museum.  It was a free museum which is always good and was well preserved. We watched a short film where they told us some of the tricks of the trade, and when we went for a walk and tapped on some of the "brick work" of the buildings, it was still surprising to find that they were made of foam! Very realistic.

On the way out of town we drove past this??? Shades of Ettamogah? But look at the beautiful backdrop in the photo...stunning mountains.  Everywhere!

Utah has so many amazing National Parks, so we were a little disappointed when we decided to visit Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park.  We had visited a couple of sand dunes NP's in Colorado and New Mexico, which were amazing, but this wasn't up to their lofty standards....and it was a fair way off the main highway.  Still, it was kind of weird seeing snow scattered amongst the sand dunes!

Heading back to Enoch, we drove through Zion National Park...which has been on my list of "must see" for the past 2 years.  It was really beautiful, but full to the brim of people and cars, which is something we try to avoid.

 And we have been really spoilt with visiting places that we have had pretty much to ourselves. There were so many cars in the park that we couldn't go to the Visitor's Centre, (no parking) or pull over onto the side of the road (too many cars) so I got a lot of photos from the car window as we were driving.

But it is beautiful.  We did manage to find a carpark at a Canyon, so went for a walk into the canyon, with hundreds of other people...and a few squirrels

Once we were out of the park the traffic decreased significantly and after taking a side road we came across this gorgeous fox, who was very, very suspicious of us.

and drove through some more fantastic country.

And that's another reason we love America so much...to be able to see this amazing, diverse, beautiful landscape by driving in a car for a few hours.  Utah Rocks!