Chills Just Thinking About Bicycling Zion National Park Today
By Alan Snel of LVSportsBiz.com
It’s a little after 8 a.m. and scant sunlight is slicing into the canyon valley at Zion National Park. It’s 19 degrees and just too cold to start pedaling at the country’s fourth busiest national park, a park that has grown in popularity in southern Utah during the past decade that its visitor count outranks iconic name parks like Yellowstone and Yosemite.
Instead of bicycling the canyon scenic drive at this frigid hour, I drive in my car though Zion National Park, navigating a half-dozen switchbacks to the east side of the national park where sunshine is beginning to illuminate the sandstone works of natural art.
The cold temperatures keep the crowd size small at Zion this time of the year and in a few hours I’m back at the visitors center lot and launching into a bicycle ride along the main canyon scenic thoroughfare.
The parking lots along this two-lane scenic road is already full by 11 a.m., so park rangers have shut down the road to motorists.
That makes the road a perfect setting to ride a bicycle without cars passing me. The only cars are ones heading in the opposite direction and leaving the canyon road. Take a look at a two videos.
Two years ago in 2018, Zion National Park, which opened in 1919, attracted 4.3 million visitors, trailed only Great Smoky Mountains, Grand Canyon and Rocky Mountain national parks in park visitorship in the USA.
Zion’s bus shuttle service ferries visitors during most of the year, but in the cold-weather month of December there’s no shuttle except for the holiday stretch of Dec. 24-Jan. 2. Here’s a map giving a lay of the land at Zion.
After bicycling the popular canyon drive, I drive with my bicycle through the 1.1-mile Zion-Mt. Carmel Tunnel and snag a parking space in a small 10-car lot right after the tunnel. Then I ride my bicycle for a 10-mile round trip along the meandering two-lane road that’s cutting through the jaw-dropping sandstone formations sprinkled with green evergreens and sandy patches.
Sure, the six-mile-long canyon scenic drive features two popular natural show-stoppers — the Angels Landing hike that features a metal chain to hold on to at its end and the Narrows, the watery slot canyon carved from the Virgin River.
Today it was all quiet along the scenic drive, which features my favorite stretch — Big Bend with its curvy, stretch-to-the-sky rock walls.
But on this day, I’m reminded how much I adore the Zion-Mount Carmel Highway segment of Utah Highway 9 on Zion’s east side, with its own headliner natural feature — the Checkerboard Mesa that extends to 6,670 feet tall right before Zion’s east entrance. The road curls its way through a variety of sandstone formations with the calico and white colors blending in with the dark green evergreens.
For more about bicycling Zion, I have a story on Zion National Park in my book, Bicycle Man: Life of Journeys. If you want to buy a copy, please email me at asnel@LVSportsBiz.com. All books are sold through me and a copy costs $20.
