Catching up with Summer: NV/UT/AZ ~ Thursday, October 17, 2019

Last June we started a vacation by flying to Las Vegas. On the way in, we got a nice view of a solar power plant.

This, however, was just our jumping off point. We picked up a rental car and were soon on our way to Zion National Park. Along the road, we stopped in St. George, UT, and happened across the St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site Museum, where you can naturally see fossils, but the biggest attraction is that the building is built over an exposed layer of rock with numerous dinosaur footprints embedded in it. There is also a mural of a prehistoric (OK, I don't honestly know if it's Jurassic/Triassic/Cretaceous, etc!) scene which has a few Easter-eggs:

Zion is, of course, stunning. I won't bother posting pictures of scenery that you can see better views of via Google image search. One less well known thing that we found, though, was "Sacrifice Rock", which has petroglyphs.

The spiral symbol represents the sun, and on the summer solstice, a V-shaped shadow described as "the jaws of a coyote" is supposed to swallow it. In fact, we were there on the summer solstice, but I don't have any idea if this effect is supposed to happen at dawn, noon, dusk or some other time, and we didn't want to hang out all day in the desert heat watching shadows move. Anyway, if you want to find this site, which is not exactly hidden but isn't publicized either, it's an easy walk from the visitor center at the western gate. More specifically, it's across the road from a campground, near an electronic sign (which will probably be telling you that all the parking lots are full).

Since this is a transit-related blog, here are some pictures of busses. Las Vegas has some nice-looking articulated ones:

The airport shuttle busses are a product of our local (Hayward, CA) builder Gillig.

The National Park runs an interesting fleet of propane-powered (they do smell a bit like camp stoves) shuttles with trailers.

These shuttles go the whole length of the canyon, and help with the aforementioned lack of parking by connecting to parking lots outside of the western gate of the park.