Friday, April 8, 2011 - Zion National Park, Springdale UT
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Morning Snow, South Campground, Zion National Park, April 8, 2011
Plans, we don't need no steenkin' plans
Sheesh. I tend to travel with only a general idea where I'm headed, maybe just a tad more of an idea than my father who, when he wanted to get away for a few days, would drive up to Albany Airport and take the next flight out, sure of an adventure wherever it took him. Just a tad more.
A couple weeks back, I made rough plans to head west to visit with relatives in the Las Vegas NV area for a few days after I got my new refrigerator in place. And from there head up to Zion National Park to spend the month of April drifting eastward across southern Utah before blasting back east for the summer.
Well, I made it to Zion ok, but these rough plans are falling apart. Here it is well into April, it's snowing in Zion, the Feds are threatening to shut the National Parks and National Forests tonight, and I'm still in Zion National Park with enough snow falling to make me uncertain whether LD will have enough traction to make it through the tunnel and up the hill (with the $15 escort pass I bought on my way into the park - they figure this rig is too big to go it alone) on Saturday if it comes to that. If I can't make the climb I'll have to detour way south. Sheesh.
[Update] A walk down to the Visitors Center yielded a little info that might prove useful. The current thinking there is that if the Feds close the park, the current guests at the campground will have until Monday noon to leave but anyone arriving Saturday forward will not be admitted. Waiting out the storm and leaving Monday was my original plan, cut short by the return of my check for 5 nights stay in exchange for a check for 3 night stay. Uh - so does that make me a new arrival come Saturday or am I Grandfathered in as a current guest? Right.
I also posed a question about how to determine if the road east up through the tunnels will be passable if I'm ejected Saturday. That's easy - the Park closes the road if it becomes questionable - no need for me to fret getting stuck mid climb.
Night camp
Site 112 - South Campground, Zion National Park, Springdale UT
- Verizon cell phone and EVDO service - good signal
- Go to Zion National Park website
- Locate Zion South Campground on my Night Camps map
- Check the weather here
Beware of Hypnotic Media
To live sanely in Los Angeles (or, I suppose, in any other large American city) you have to cultivate the art of staying awake. You must learn to resist (firmly but not tensely) the unceasing hypnotic suggestions of the radio, the billboards, the movies and the newspapers; those demon voices which are forever whispering in your ear what you should desire, what you should fear, what you should wear and eat and drink and enjoy, what you should think and do and be. They have planned a life for you — from the cradle to the grave and beyond — which it would be easy, fatally easy!, to accept. The least wandering of the attention, the least relaxation of your awareness, and already the eyelids begin to droop, the eyes grow vacant, the body starts to move in obedience to the hypnotist’s command. Wake up, wake up — before you sign that seven-year contract, buy that house you don’t really want, marry that girl you secretly despise. Don’t reach for the whiskey, that won’t help you. You’ve got to think, to discriminate, to exercise your own free will and judgment. And you must do this, I repeat, without tension, quite rationally and calmly. For if you give way to fury against the hypnotists, if you smash the radio and tear the newspapers to shreds, you will only rush to the other extreme and fossilize into defiant eccentricity.