Zion National Park – February 22 – February 25, 2025 – Part 1

It has been almost 7 months since I posted to this blog. I have been in a creative malaise for a variety of reasons. I have decided to pull myself up out of the malaise and move forward.

In early December 2024, I spied a hotel offer for a location in Springdale, Ut for a $110 room (remember when Motel 6 really was $6.00/night??). Springdale is at the south entrance to Zion NP and we thought that with the right timing, this accommodation could be the start of a great road trip. The keys to success for this trip were to arrive at Zion before high season when admission metering would not be in effect, shuttles were not running in the park and the weather would be welcoming. It all came together and it could not have worked out better.

In another great stroke of luck or genius, Maps routed us north from Cathedral City to Twentynine Palms and then through a long stretch of relatively deserted 135 mile, two-lane road through the desert to Amboy, Ca on to Kelso, Ca and then on north on I-15 to Las Vegas, up the Virgin River Canyon into St George, Ut and into Hurricane, Ut. where we spent the night. The route took us through the Mojave National Preserve. Both Amboy and Kelso are located in this preservation area.

Another great historical and geologic road trip! Amboy, settled in 1858 is the first of a series of alphabetical railroad stations constructed across the Mojave Desert. Eventually, Route 66 was established in 1926 through Amboy and it is part of the route taken. There is not much in Amboy that is currently open; a closed post office, a closed Route 66 gift shop, a cafe that might be open now and then, what looks like a motel and a couple of houses. Then there is the railroad which at one time was the life blood of Amboy. The BNSF main line still runs through Amboy, but like a lot of small railroad towns that grew up for servicing steam locomotives, Amboy got kicked to the curb. The population is listed as 4 but it looked to us like the number was a bit higher, probably people looking to escape. Near Amboy, there are two geologic features of note. The Amboy Salt Flats which are actually part of a larger, dry lake known as Bristol Lake is actively mined for calcium chloride salts by the National Chloride Company of America. It is a simple operation, they dig canals/ponds into the dry lake bed. In some years, the groundwater is shallow enough that it flows into the excavations. Other times, they pump water from shallow wells into the ponds, allow it to evaporate, leaving the salts which are then picked up with front end loaders. A minimum of processing results in a very high grade of calcium chloride salt. We did not get any pictures of this feature because we figured we would do it on the trip home. That did not work out well and we will have to make a road trip in that vicinity again.

The second geologic feature of interest is the Amboy Crater about 2-3 miles west of Amboy. It is an ash and cinder cone that sits in a 20-30 sq mile pahoehoe lava field. The crater is about 80,000 years old and was last active about 10,000 years ago. Again, we did not get any pictures as we were going to potentially stop there on the trip home. However, the BNSF had other plans that caused our photography stop to be canceled.

From Amboy, there is a jog east on Route 66 and then a turn north toward Kelso, a railroad town that was the base for the San Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad which had track rights with Union Pacific which eventually took over operation of the line. Kelso itself is more or less a ghost town, although there are some newer looking structures which may or may not be occupied. It was a boom town during the World War 2 era when troops were traveling to and from deployments by train and also there were numerous mining operations to the southeast of the town for raw construction materials that were shipped out via the Kelso Station. There is a historical site of interest in Kelso; the Kelso Depot, and a geologic point of interest, the Kelso Dune Field located just southwest of town.

The Kelso depot was constructed in 1923 and was actively undergoing restoration when we drove through. It was built as a hotel and restaurant for railroad travelers as trains had to stop in Kelso for water and to have a helper engine attached to pull the steam locomotives up the Cima Hill. The depot was designed to directly compete with the Harvey Houses built along the Santa Fe Line.

The Kelso Dune Field covers about 45 sq. mi. of the Mojave Desert and is the third largest dune field in the US. The dunes are stacked in that they were deposited over five different periods over the last 25,000 years during periods of climate changes. During dry periods, vegetation would decrease and sand would be contributed from the existing dunes and also from the original sand sources, the Soda Lake and Silver Lake dry lake beds. As dry periods subsided, vegetation would take hold in the dunes and would more or less stabilize them until the next climate cataclysm (what a great word!). One of the advertised features of the dunes is that they “sing” when the sand moves. Some reports are that it is more of a booming sand than a singing sound. We will have to visit them and hike up the dunes to make our own decision– or at least Joni can hear what they sound like.

The active dunes sort of put is in the right frame of mind to visit Zion which is dominated by the Navajo Sandstone which is one of the prime example of wind born sediment deposition.