Buz Groshong wrote:Bob Sihler wrote:The Zion system works well because there is no other traffic and the buses run very frequently, but I share Day Hiker's complaint about the difficulties of an early start and a late finish. Again, I would suggest allowing vehicles into the canyon as long as they arrived before a certain early hour or after a certain late one.
I believe they do allow that.
In Zion, I'm not sure if they allow it or not; I've never seen it stated anywhere. But you can definitely drive in really early or really late, due to lack of enforcement and/or nobody giving a crap. The problem is you can't park there, so it only helps for an early start if one sorry sucker in your party is willing to drop off the group, drive back and park, and then run or walk or bicycle back up the road.
You can get a pass to park there all day, and we did that the last time we did Imlay Canyon, so we were able to get an early start. But they won't issue multi-day passes, so the problem is when one wants to get an early start for an
overnight trip. For our overnight trip in Heaps Canyon we encountered this problem.
By the way, the first time we did Imlay, we did the full canyon, starting at the West Rim TH, and it took us longer than expected. Conditions were difficult (potholes were low), and all three of us were Imlay virgins. So we took something like 22 hours from trailhead to road, and we arrived at Sinawava around 03:00. Haha, the last shuttle was at 22:00, and the next one would be coming around 07:00. So we had to hoof it for some miles on the road, to add on to our already long day. There is just something about going 3.5 mph where you would usually be going 10 times that fast.