From all over the world, every year hundreds of thousands of tourists plan to visit some of the national parks of the American southwest. Visiting a national park is actually a little more difficult than you would expect, if you do not live within driving distance yourself. The area of the United States covered by Southern California, Nevada, Utah and Arizona has a large concentration of these parks and protected spaces, generally due to the wide open areas of the West and the fact that the area was largely underpopulated during the industrial booms that took so much natural space and permanently destroyed it in the name of progress. The protected areas of the southwest remain unspoiled for the most part, and have been designated as protected in order to allow for visitation by the curious in order to witness unique and beautiful areas of the country in their natural form. Tourism had been on the decline for years, bringing up the debate within the government of potentially releasing these spaces from federal control and potentially opening them up to development. Luckily, a push towards awareness has once again raised tourism levels to the point where they are viable as national monuments.
The confusion on exactly how to visit a national park if you do not live in the area is best approached for clarification as to answering a few questions. Do you feel comfortable driving a rented car more than 4 hours through desolate desert areas to get to the park? Do you know what to do when you get there, as some of these parks are literally hundreds of miles across? What kind of experience are you looking for? All of these questions will dictate the methods you use in order to plan your trip to places like Bryce and Zion. If you were planning a Bryce and Zion tour, the best thing to do is to fly into Las Vegas as a starting point in order to make the most of the driving time. Bryce is about the same distance from Salt Lake City, which is the other closest city with airline traffic capabilities, and Zion is actually half the distance from Las Vegas. This means that it makes sense to fly into Las Vegas and plan a multi-day trip that drives you to Zion first for the day, and then on to Bryce the second day. If you like, once you are at Bryce there are also several other parks that are close by that you could visit like Monument Valley, Antelope Canyon and the Grand Canyon. Planning the trip as a multiple day multiple park trip will maximize the amount of time it takes to get from the starting city to the first park, as each park is relatively close together once you are out and about.
Bindlestiff Tours can take care of the driving and touring aspects for you. We offer several different packages that will take you to Bryce and Zion as well as the other parks. We will visit the primary areas of interest in each park, and you will be refreshed and have enough energy to explore once you are there. Contact us today to find out more.