Wrong turn

This past week, while in St. George, Utah, we took the opportunity to see some sights around the area. Normally when we go down there, we spend the whole time in Zion National Park, but with a whole week, we decided to see what else the area had to offer. Surprisingly we found more than the St. George temple, Brigham Young's winter home, and the St. George tabernacle (three sites on the Mormon history tour that we ended up visiting during our stay--partly because these sites were well-air conditioned and the temperatures while we were there were WAY past 100 degrees!) One day we planned a loop drive that would take us to Gunlock State Park, the Mountain Meadow Massacre site, Honeycomb Hills State Park, a ghost town, and some petroglyphs outside Cedar City, Utah. Anxious for a fulfilling Utah history tour, we carefully plotted the route and we got an early start, as we wanted to be in Cedar City around lunch time. Everything was going fine until we couldn't find a fork in the road that we were expecting. We drove and drove and DROVE--finally coming into a valley that was absolutely COVERED with joshua trees. Margaret looked at the map and noticed a point of interest on the map called "Joshua Tree forest." Unfortunately it was the other road than the one headed to Gunlock. At this point we were only a couple of miles from Arizona! We snapped a few photos of the forest, because it WAS impressive, and turned around and drove the 30 miles back towards St. George.

There's a tiny Indian reservation just outside the city, and we stopped and asked someone how to get to Gunlock. He told us directions and since it wasn't too far back, we decided to give it another try. My aggravation when we got to the fork in the road we were lead to was complete when I noticed something lying by the side of the road that I hadn't seen the first time we'd driven by it--yes, the road sign saying "Gunlock ->" At that point we were WAY behind schedule so we ended up only seeing the Mountain Meadow Massacre site and then rushing to Cedar City because we were starved. So much for our fulfilling Utah history tour. Our pioneer ancestors are probably rolling in their graves at our lack of desert navigation skills.

On the way back to St. George, we stopped at the northern part of Zion National Park to go on an afternoon hike. We started out, but the bugs were so bad that we were forced back into the car and ended up just appreciating the canyon from the air conditioned comfort of the rental car. This picture is one of the bugs in that canyon. We were driven away by biting flies, but if one of these hornets or wasps or insectoid alien-things or whatever it was were to sting us, I'm sure it would have been more like an injection than a sting. Notice the finger in the picture for size comparison! I wasn't even aware that bees could get that big outside of Starship Troopers!