Zion National Park - March 16, 2014

Sunday - March 16, 2014
We spent the day at Zion National Park.  It was really busy because it was spring break for a lot of people.  We had a hard time finding a spot to park.  We ended up parking in a pull-out area off the side of the road.  We thought we would hike over to the place we had wanted to go.  We wanted to go see were the start of the hike through the narrows was, but it was too crowded.  We didn't plan to hike the narrows.  We want to do that sometime, but we weren't prepared to do it today.  Anyway, so we found a trail near the spot where we parked and began to hike.  We hiked over to the next little pull out area and we sat for a little while.  While we were resting, I took a lot of pictures of the kids.  They wanted me to take a picture of them looking like they were going to fall, then photoshop it onto a picture of the tall mountain behind them, so it would look like they were going to fall off of a cliff.  We had fun taking their pictures.

After our break, Grandpa decided that he didn't want to finish the hike with us.  So, he stayed there, while we hiked.  We didn't go too much farther before the brush started to get too thick and we turned around.  My dad ended up being able to see us from the road for most of the hike, so he followed us that way.  When we decided to turn around, we just headed up to the road and hiked back to the sitting area.  Roger, the kids, and I decided to go back on the hiking trail at this point.  Hiking on the road made me too nervous that one of us would get run over.  My dad stayed on the road, since the thought of hiking down to the trail was not very appealing to him.

After our hike, we got back in the truck and headed for a short drive so we could go through one of the tunnels.  Right after we got out of the tunnel, we noticed that there was a little parking lot, so we pulled in.  Then we noticed some steps across the street from the parking lot.  We couldn't resist going to see what it was.  Brinley and my dad didn't want to come with us, so they stayed with the truck.  We thought it was probably just a little over look, but it turned out to be a hike.  It was a really fun and pretty hike.

The hike took us to a look out.  Someone there, took a pictures of us.

 On our way back down, we ran into Brinley and Grandpa.  They came to find us since we were taking so long.  We hiked back a little ways with them, then we turned around and headed back to the truck.

 On the way back to Grandpa's house, we stopped to see a ghost town - Grafton, Utah.  The movie "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" was filmed here.  Grafton was settled in 1859, but the town was nearly destroyed during the great flood of 1862.  The residents all moved a mile upstream on the Virgin Rover and built a new town they named Grafton, after Grafton, Mass.
In 1866, Utah was in the midst of the Black Hawk War and Grafton was one of the many remote settlements that were abandoned for fear of Indian attacks.  People began returning on 1868, but flooding from the notoriously volatile Virgin River again became a major threat to the town's safety.  By the early 1900s, most of the residents had moved away and only a few families remained.
The Grafton Heritage Partnership restored and protects the town's remaining structures.

 The school house was built in 1886 and is one of the most photographed ghost town buildings in the American west.

On the way home from Grafton, we passed through Rockville.  Rockville was in the news in December.  Here is a link to the story.  A boulder fell from the mountain in the night and smashed a house.  The two residents who lived there were killed when it happened.  Anyway, we stopped to see what was left as we drove by on our way to Grandpa's house.  This is what is there now.

 Here are some pictures from the news.  This is what it looked like before and what it looked like right after it happened.