I arrived on time in Denver at 11pm, but my mother, sister and aunt, who were supposed to already be there waiting for me, were instead snowed in at Newark Airport. After spending over 24 hours at the airport, being in line for hours, walked from one terminal to the other (1/4 of a mile) under the snow and lost the flight, they finally arrived the next day at 1am, so I had to sleep in Colorado Springs and visit the Royal Gorge by myself. After the Royal Gorge however, instead of driving ahead for only 50 more miles on US-50 to Salida in order to arrive at Pagosa Springs in the evening, I had to double back for 156 miles to Denver, where I tried to catch some sleep at the airport while waiting for the others. So I had to drove 170 miles through the mountains at night, to get back on the original route in Salida and arrive at Pagosa Springs at 7am, where I could finally sleep a few hours until 10am and be back on track. The bloody clerk at the motel was sleeping and I wasted a precious half hour to wake him up!

This is were the Paria River flows into the Colorado and the north rim slopes down from a 500 ft cliff to a beach, making this the only place where you can cross the Colorado in over 600 miles. For this reason, in 1871 the Church of Jesus and the Latter Day Saints (that is, the Mormon Church in Utah) financed John D. Lee so he could build a ferry service here to connect Southern Utah to Arizona. The ferry lasted until 1928, when the Navajo Bridge was build. However John D. Lee is better known for his part in the Massacre of Mountain Meadows in 1857.

During the second quarter of the '800, following the teachings of Joseph Smith, the Mormon religion was born in the US. Mormons were discriminated against from the start so they gathered in the Western state of Utah, at the time, like other Western states, far from the reach of the Federal Government. During the summer of 1857, the Federal Government began advancing troops to regain control of Utah and the Mormon Governor declared martial law. That was the time when a caravan of colonists from Arkansas started on its march towards California, because of personal and commercial reasons as well as because of the gold rush. On their route they had to cross most of Utah from north-east to south-west. When they were already close to the Nevada border, in Washington county (where Zion National Park, Hurricane and St. George are, all places we passed through later on), they were massacred by a band of Mormons led by John D. Lee himself. The reason behind the massacre, in which 100-150 civilians were killed, is not clear, that is some witnesses stated the killers thought the colonists really were spies and/or federal soldiers in disguise or that they had received the order from the Mormon Governor himself. Clearly the Mormon Church always denied the allegations (however, if they had learnt anything from the Roman Catholic Church of centuries past, one always denies until proven otherwise and even after that).

A couple of buffalos in a field along the road. Behind the buffalo you can see a large black bird pecking at a carcass.

The rock texture clearly explains the name Checkerboard Mesa.

The arch is actually a cave and not a rocky arch and you can see it in the center of the picture, at the end of the canyon.

Zion Canyon seen from the trail to the Lower Emerald Pools.

On the left, the almost dry fall of the Lower Emerald Pools. On the right, the rock wall around the Upper Emerald Pools.