Welcome to Part Four of the travelogue about our RV trip to Utah, Colorado & Nevada in the fall of 2018.
Map of Part 4 route
Thursday, Oct 18, 2018 (Arizona / Utah) Page, AZ (Page Lake Powell Campground) to Springdale, UT (Zion Canyon Campground & RV Resort)
We headed out this morning —destination Zion National Park— but we stopped along the way at the Glen Canyon Dam Overlook and walked down to the rim of the canyon
The canyon view was impressive, as were the amazing layered rocks.
This was one of those days where our route did a bit of a crisscrossing thing. We went from Arizona, through a section of Utah, back through a bit of Arizona, and then back into Utah!
It’s a common road-maintenance tactic to ‘paint’ cracks in the pavement with tar, resulting in lots of black lines crisscrossing the road. As we drove along Hwy 89 through the Paria Canyon area east of Kanab, UT, Chris started spotting some unusual black lines and got my attention.
At first, it seemed like some squiggly black lines had been ‘enhanced’ to look like snakes. But then we spotted simple shapes, like spirals and smiley faces. And then several more ornate shapes, as shown in this photo collage.
We searched online later, but couldn’t find an explanation for the whimsical ‘highway maintenance’ in this region. Although one of the ‘symbols’ seemed possibly related to the mascot at one of the Utah universities, so it’s possible that all of these road ‘repairs’ were simply the result of college students having fun :-)
Throughout this trip, as well as on previous ones, we saw numerous ‘deer crossing’ signs along the highway (some of the signs even had flashing yellow lights), but we had never seen a single deer in any of those areas.
Today, we finally saw three deer running toward the highway, not too far ahead of us. The car in front of us slowed down, interfering with the first deer’s forward momentum, but the deer quickly altered its course and ran behind that car. Luckily, we saw them soon enough for Chris to slow down enough to allow all three of them to safely get across.
And although I had the camera in hand, I was more focused on watching them than photographing them, but I was able to capture two of the three in this photo!
