It took one day of driving just to get from Santa Clara to the vicinity of Zion National Park. The route is basically I-5 southeast, cut east through Bakersfield and the Mojave, then take I-15 northeast through Las Vegas to St. George, Utah.
I stopped for breakfast at a McDonald's. Here we find the Rosetta Stone of trademark disclaimers.
I-15 cuts through a corner of Arizona between Nevada and Utah. Here
the highway follows the Virgin River as a shortcut to the high Utah
plateaus. In some cases, the gorge walls are so close together that
the highway seems to be built on top of the river, rather than beside
it.
I'd been warned that Las Vegas traffic would be very bad on a weekend. It was busy, but not enough to really be slow. The main thing that slowed me down were the miles and miles of 55 mph speed limit through "road construction" that wasn't actually happening.
I-15 through the rest of Nevada and into Utah was a breeze. When the speed limit is 75 mph for everyone, including trucks, pretty much everyone goes the same speed. And given the light traffic through that area, it was pretty easy to make the occasional pass at 1 mph speed differential.
St. George is built directly into a canyon. Here is the view from the
motel.
The weather was forecast to be very hot in Utah. At 6:30pm, the bank in St. George showed the temperature as 104. At 8:20, the Weather Channel said it was still 98, with a predicted "low" of 76. Given the hot weather, I'd already planned to do my hiking in the early morning. Fortunately, despite the time difference in Utah, I had no trouble falling asleep at 8:30.
