Heading east to Vegas on the 15 from LA one spends hours driving through the desert. What seems like a empty wasteland from the freeway is actually full of little hidden Gems a long the way. The Mojave National Preserve has tons of offroad trails, camping, ghost towns, mines and geological oddities to explore. However that’s for another post.

I’ve always wondered about Zzyzx. A sign on the 15 in the middle of the desert conveys its existence. This time around I finally had to initiative turn off the freeway and follow the sign. Zzyzx has a pretty colorful history but nowadays exists as a desert research center. Being that we were traveling during the Christmas break, the town was almost completely deserted, which made it all the more cool and eerie. We strolled down the boulevard of dreams and found a pool house, a salt flat and some abandoned housing in the back.

Zzyzx

Getting closer to Vegas and Henderson, we stopped by Seven Magic Mountains. This place is blowing up on instagram and we wanted to check it out. Driving there you can see the glints of parked cars on the side of the road from a distance. As we got closer we found that it was pretty crowded with tourists. This happened a lot during our trip actually. Places that wouldn’t have gotten a lot of attention before are now filled and packed with people. We were among them also.

http://sevenmagicmountains.com/

Since we left for Vegas pretty early in the morning, it wasn’t long before we arrived. We spent the night there and left early next day to continue our journey.

An ostrich farm on the way to Zion.

Before entering Zion, we made a quick detour to Grafton. Grafton is often cited as the most photographed ghost town in the west, its not hard to see why. Sitting at the edge of Zion you can see the towering cliffs all around the town. One can also imagine the kind of life people had here in this bewitchingly beautiful and desolate place.

A few of the buildings were restored in Grafton, some were also open to visit. We spent some time walking around in and out of the buildings.

Grafton

It seemed like some of the graves are still being maintained by the locals around the area.

Finally we got to Zion National Park. However, there was a lot of traffic due to road construction. So we got to spend some extra time viewing the majestic cliffs from the comfort of the car. After a while we finally got to the visitor center and decided to do a short hike, as we were only passing through. A quick browse on the Alltrails app (excellent btw) netted the watchman trail.

The watchman trail is a short 3 mile out and back hike up the side of the canyon and puts you on top of a plateau. We set out a little bit late because of the traffic, by the time we got to the top the sun was already setting. We took our pictures and watched the sun set from the edge of the plateau.