Day 18 - Zion National Park to Rachel, Nevada

The plan was to do Angels Landing this morning and then continue on to Nevada to the ET Highway.  Once again, this would involve quite a long drive so we planned to make as early a start as possible.  Also to avoid crowds on Angels Landing.   Angels Landing is one of the world's most renowned hikes and we'd been looking forward to it ever since we'd started planning our trip.

Checking out

Woke up with the 05:00 alarm, showered, had breakfast and set off hoping to get to the Zion Canyon visitor centre parking in time for the first shuttle bus at 07:00.  We arrived just after 07:00 got out the car into a gale force wind. OK, perhaps gale-force is a bit of an exaggeration but it was VERY windy. This is somewhat different to what we had been advised the day before when a ranger at the visitor centre had said that it should be calm now for a couple of days.

Within thirty seconds or so, we had decided that doing Angels Landing in this wind would be foolhardy to say the least. Yes, we could have waited around for a few hours to see if the wind dropped but that would have put our other plans out of kilter so we decided that we would continue on towards Nevada at a more leisurely pace picking out a few caches on the way.... yet another reason to come back to this area.

I’d noticed a ghost town called Grafton on a travel blog so we headed there passing over an old iron bridge on the way. It turns out that the Rockville's Historic Bridge was the main route to Zion Canyon before the road tunnels were build in the 1930s.

The cemetery at Grafton has a curious collection of graves. It looks like the locals had a pretty tough time in early 1866 with a large number of deaths in a short space of time. The causes ranged from diphtheria, scarlet fever and ‘unknown’ to an accident on a swing and being killed by Indians! The good ol’ days eh?

There are two or three restored original buildings in Grafton and interestingly the hamlet had been used as a film set in a 1940s film but the film makers had built a temporary saloon bar near the school house as well. There was no sign of this saloon though.

Continuing on our way, we did a selection of virtual caches. One was at a Mormon temple in a city called St George’s – the most intriguing part of this was seeing the groundsman spraying the grass green with some hideously toxic smelling dye!

A couple of Virtuals were relating to a canal in Hurricane. The Hurricane canal was a 7.5 mile irrigation built in between 1891 and 1904. This diverted water from the Virgin river to enable people to settle at Hurricane. The canal is no longer used and pretty overgrown in places but information boards along the route give snippets of information about it.

We were planning to stop at The Little A’Le’Inn motel at Rachel in Nevada. This is about thirty miles along the brilliantly named Extraterrestrial Highway. The ET Highway is a single carriageway road with a 70 mph speed limit and no petrol stations for 150 miles so we decided to fill up at Alamo ten miles or so before we reached it.

The Sinclair garage at Alamo is a surreal jack of all trades garage. Apart from what you’d normally expect at a filling station it also had a grocery shop and hot food counter selling all sorts of amazingly good smelling food. They also stocked fuel cans.... A lot of fuel cans. 😀

We filled up with petrol and continued on to Rachel.

Alien Research Centre

The Little A'Le'Inn motel is a mecca for UFO enthusiasts. The entire place is alien themed and after dumping our stuff in the static caravan we’d booked we headed to the bar for a bite to eat and drink. Apart from UFO nerds, the inn has, in more recent years, become legendary for Geocachers enticed by the colossal ET Highway series of caches. A small area of wall in the bar has an array of geocoins to admire and discover and there is even an actual geocache in the bar. Nice and easy to find that one!