June 9, 2026–Wild, Wild West Expedition: Zion National Park

We spent the last couple of days in Zion National Park at Zion Lodge. We have been to Zion before, but it was probably in the late seventies or early eighties so we don’t remember much about our time here, except that we camped.

I have mentioned this previously, but after the National Park Service was created in 1916, railroad companies built rail lines to bring visitors to America’s new national parks, as well as constructed some of the first hotels in the National Park System. At Zion, the Utah Parks Company, a subsidiary of Union Pacific Railroad, ran a spur line as far as Cedar City, Utah (about 30 miles from the park) and established a lodge in Zion Canyon. Zion Lodge was built in 1926, but burned in the sixties and had to be rebuilt, so it has none of the charm of Yellowstone or the Glacier Lodges. Part of the lodge is in the background here:

Like a lot of National Parks, cars are more restricted than they used to be, so although you can drive through Zion, parking is limited and some of the park can only be reached by taking a park bus. When we came in, the ranger at the fee office had to come out and measure Vanna to make sure she could pass through the historic 1.1 mile Zion-Carmel Tunnel built in 1926. For once, Vanna made the cut, but we were kind of freaked out when we started through it. It was narrow and dark and lit only with six giant window like openings. But we made it. Not my original pictures below because we couldn’t stop and take one. The first is of the entrance and the second is a distant view of one of the “windows” (look to the left of the four taller trees towards the bottom).

We went on a short tour yesterday morning im a tram-like vehicle to see the part of the park that’s not open to cars. Our guide, John, was a regular comedian. He said that he is a life long bachelor (he was probably in his late forties?) but he’s trying to figure out how to become an eligible bachelor. It was a weird joke. Rock climbing is a big thing in Zion, and we saw the the guy in the first two pictures below make this much progress in the five or ten minutes we were stopped here. Notice the dark spot with a little ledge way above him in the first picture that he climbed to in the second picture. Not for the faint of heart.

Back in the late seventies when we were camping in places like Zion we traveled in a conversion van. Well, more a DYI van because Doug converted it himself. In the back of the van we had a mattress up on a plywood platform, and then all of our luggage, camp stove, lanterns, etc. were stowed underneath the platform. We have a lot of memories, but one in particular that we still laugh about is the Dinty Moore beef stew night. We got to the campsite late that day and it was cold, so we heated up a can of Dinty Moore stew. We were about half way through the meal, and Doug suddenly stopped eating and said he was full. A couple of days later he told me that he had found a piece of hide in the stew. Well anyway, he said he hoped it was cow hide and not from a rat. I screamed, “Why didn’t you tell me?” And he said, “Are you kidding? You would have freaked out.” Why, yes, I would have been most horrified.