We returned from a trip to Utah last week in time for my syster’s visit. We drove our electric car from San Francisco to Springdale hopping between superchargers the entire way. Tesla has built out the supercharger network and changed their navigation software to take advantage of the newly built out network. We can now set Springdale as our desitnation and the nav software selects the superchargers to stop at and predicts the charge time we’ll require at each stop. This is exactly what I had done by hand in the past. It makes long distance travelling in our Tesla easy and hastle free.
Our visit in Springdale with friends was fun and very relaxing. We met some neighbors, one, Paul, an artist who also collects Anasazi artifacts and another who is a professor at UNLV. Paul and I had planned to go exploring, but Ellen wanted to leave that morning to get home for my sister. I went out on my own the afternoon before and found very little. Zion National Park is great for exploring. It is vast and open with very few trees. You can see where you want to go and get there with ease. There are gorges and cliff areas that can and willl force a change of route, sometimes more than once. Even so, bushwacking in the park is relatively easily done. I had a great time out on my own and though I searched for arrowheads and grinding stones, I found nothing but what might be a scalloped scraping tool and one rounded grinding stone among millions of small stones deposited in and around washes.
I highly recommend a trip to Zion if you find yourself near Southern Utah. Some hikes in the park are magical. If you happen to arrive when the aspen and cottonwoods turn, you’re in for a remarkable time that rivals the fall colors of New England. One year we visited the trees all turned at once and the valleys were filled with yellow. This year the trees were turning piecemeal; the color was not nearly so dramatic.