Tourism at national parks is rising each year, predominately due to a successful advertising campaign that has created greater awareness of the beauty of these areas over the course of the past few years. The campaign was launched after it was recognized that although national parks had remained unchanged over the years, tourism levels to them have been steadily declining. While there could be many reasons for this decline, one major one seemed to be a lack of awareness that they existed and were available to tour. Another issue has been their remote locations, as gas prices cause more and more people to rethink road travel as part of vacations. There is nearly no ability to fly to a national park and not be required to have some form of road travel in order to get into the park area, due to the fact that national parks are protected spaces and development around them is restricted. This means that you are doing to have to drive there from the closest city. In the case of southwestern national parks, many of them are closest to Las Vegas or Salt Lake City, and Las Vegas makes the most sense as a starting point due to the fact that it is a tourist location of it’s own. This means that the flights and hotels in Las Vegas will be more affordable and plentiful than surrounding cities that support airline traffic.
If you are using Las Vegas as your starting point for a national parks tour, you may want to consider visiting Zion Canyon first before traveling from that point to your eventual destination of choice. This is because Zion Canyon is actually located about 2.5 hours drive from Las Vegas, where just about every other national park is located about 4 hours plus from the same starting point. Zion Canyon is also on the route to most of the parks that are on the shortlists to visit, making it a logical place to break up the driving as well as seeing an additional national park during your trip. It is common for people making these road trips to add a day to their plan in order to spend one day n Zion first then camp overnight and continue traveling the next morning. This way you can spend the first day driving a short distance and then exploring the park before driving fresh the next morning around the same distance and exploring the next park. Many tours like the ones that we offer will make a tour loop that uses this strategy to visit multiple parks while minimizing the drive times in between them. We prefer to visit several parks on our tours and camp in between them, allowing the rigors of traveling to be minimized for our guests. On most of our national parks tours, Zion Canyon is our logical first stop from Las Vegas, so if you are taking a single day or multiple day tour, you will get to visit Zion and a combination of additional parks. https://www.bindlestifftours.com/package/bryce-tours-and-zion-tours-overnight/