Road Trip: Utah and Arizona

On June 5th, I flew out to Vegas to begin a 10 day, 1800 mile road trip around Utah and Arizona. The highlights were the national parks, namely Zion, Bryce Canyon, Arches, and Grand Canyon. My friend who came with me did an excellent play by play report with pics on our trip so I will just cheat and refer you to his site for details.

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For those of you into hiking, there are many great opportunities to hike in these national parks. They are best avoided in wet season though (such as when it's snowing) as often times you would be walking or scrambling over slick rocks. There are signs all over many of these parks warning you of the dangers of falling. In the summer, it is also best to avoid hiking mid-day. There are also signs all over the place warning you of the dangers of heat exhaustion. To make matters worse, the lighting on the rock formations suck when the sun is high above. For best lighting for photography, you want the sun early morning or later in the day just before sunset. Unless you are going to be in the canyons - then you want the light above. Unfortunately, I didn't plan for photography very well so don't expect too much out of my pictures

If you are into biking, Moab, Utah is apparently the biking capitol of the world (or US?). At the very least many biking opportunities were advertised around there. Also, while on our trip we saw several participants of the Race Across America. This is a crazy event where mostly solo cyclists race coast to coast from California to Maryland - in like 10 days. When I saw the first cyclist while driving across Monument Valley, I was wondering where he's coming from and where he's going. It was hot out, he was going mostly up hill, and the road streches for miles on end with nothing in between. We were getting tired just driving it. Just when I thought nobody could be this crazy, we passed several more crazies in Utah. A couple days later in Arizona, we saw few more crazies cycling up this pretty steep and windy scenic road that connects Sedona and Flagstaff (89A). I probably should be impressed, but all I could think is crazy, crazy, crazy.