Snowmobiling in Zion

Up until this year, I had been at Zion for quite some time and have never been snowmobiling. I am not much of an adventure seeker when it comes to the power sports using motorized equipment. It just is not one of my passions, but still I am willing to do it if it is needed. Andrew, who is one of the law enforcement rangers, has to do it as part of his winter duties. He needed someone to come with him. I fit perfectly into the schedule for that. So he asked me if I could go. I was excited to give it a try. The first time he took it easy on me. We drove the roads up the Kolob Terrace Road from Wildcat Canyon to Lava Point. From Lava Point we hugged the park boundary until ending up back on the Kolob Terrace Road.

 We then went up to the Kolob development by the reservoir. There was a nice family by the name of the Cottams who we had some hot chocolate with. We visited with them for quite some time. Then we went up to the reservoir. Andrew wrecked his snowmobile here trying to get around something. He quickly righted it and then we were speeding down the road. He was definitely going faster than me, but I was only going to go as quickly as I felt comfortable. The most difficult part of the whole day was putting the snowmobile back on the trailer where we had to line it up just right. The next week we went out again. This time Andrew was determined to break my cautious streak.

We did the same patrol around the boundary, but we also went up onto land outside the park to try some things out with the snowmobile. Andrew encouraged me to experiment and I did try but I was not particularly interested in seeing how much interesting things I could do. Still, we charged up to the top of this very steep hill where we rode the ridgeline for some time. We both got our snowmobiles stuck with Andrew tipping his. But we carefully maneuvered and eventually got off the other side of the ridge. I followed Andrew as he took us through the trees, once running directly into a tree.

 The snowmobile came out just fine and eventually we were fitting ourselves through tight spaces with brush sticking up above the snow. We found our way out of the trees and Andrew thought that was awesome. I was just happy that I didn't wreck as I was not sure what we would do if it would happen. We road back up and visited with the Cottams again. Along the way, we saw a llama that was loose outside the park. Andrew tried to feed it a cliff bar. That llama could reek havoc in the park later this year as there was nothing stopping it from getting in. We rode down again picking up all the boundary signs for the season. Then the treacherous climb onto the trailer and back down to the warm days of summer slowly approaching. It was a beautiful couple of days playing out in the winter snow, but it was time for spring to start melting it all away.