Western U.S. Road Trip, Continued

In a continuation of yesterday's post, today I will show some photographs from Zion National Park in Utah, as well as a few other photos from the road trip "Out West" that my husband and I took with three friends in 2012.

The Zion National Park has several lovely areas and hiking trails to explore - so naturally I took a bunch of pictures. Here are some of my favorites:

Here is a photo of what much of the landscape we drove through looked like. Amazing how much "nothingness" there is Out West, and how red the dirt is. So different from south-east Michigan back home!

Toward the end of our road trip, we swung by Mt. Rushmore in South Dakota. Our timing was perfect so that we visited the great stone carving/tourist trap right on July 4th, Independence Day.

Western U.S. Road Trip

Here are some of my favorite photos from the "Out West" part of our Western U.S. road trip in 2012. My husband and I joined three friends on a drive from Michigan to Oklahoma City, through Arizona and Utah to see the Grand Canyon and Zion National Park, to L.A. for the X-Games, through the Rockies and Colorado, up to South Dakota to see Mt. Rushmore, up through Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and then back across the Mackniac Bridge home to Metro-Detroit.

Some of the parts of this trip have already been posted to this blog - namely, the photos I took of the U.P. and northern L.P., in Michigan, as well as photos of beaches in California.

Today the focus is OKC & the Grand Canyon.

Our first stop on the road trip was Oklahoma City, to visit a friend. The downtown area is really beautiful, with a canal running through. We walked around a bit and I took some pictures:

And what trip "Out West" would be complete without a stop to the most famous naturally formed canyon?

The Grand Canyon in Arizona was... much grander than I realized. For some reason, I had always pictured it as the canyons in Road Runner cartoons, where the whole canyon/most of the canyon can be seen at once, from above. I was not picturing something that was too large to be captured in a single photograph; a winding canyon that stretched farther than I could see in either direction.

I'm not sure if I will ever use these as inspiration for future artwork, but anything is possible! I love "collecting" photographs anyway, just in case.

I'll show the rest of the "Out West" photos in a post tomorrow.