Category: Zion National Park

Belfair State Park, Zion Poster – Saturday February 4, 2012

I just opened the Zion Institute program schedule for 2012.  Tanya & I are on the schedule side, they do have pictures of other not so important people on the other side.
Two years in a row, we’re a hit.

BELFAIR STATE PARK

Weekend in the sun. Site T22 at Belfair State park playing with my new 150-500 mm Sigma lens.  This actual goes with my new Canon 60D.
Software updates can be good.  This wordpress program I use on my phone will now let me to put more than one picture per post.

Here’s a second picture.

Zion Natl Park – Thursday September 8, 2011

Another great day at Zion.

Tomorrow we move to Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park.  We have reached the maximum of 14 days at Zion between March and October.  We’ll be at Coral Pink for Friday and Saturday.  Sunday we’ll drive to Canyon de Chelly National Monument with a goal of Monday being at Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site.   Jean wants to see this trading post and we have not spent much time in northeastern Arizona.

We may not have internet access for a while so this may be the last post for a couple of days.

Here’s a bit a information that may useful in the future.

One – don’t leave your door open when you’re not home.
Two – If you’re going to bring the kitty be sure it’s as least as big as the squirrels.

Yesterday I didn’t mention that the two condors were number 52 and 99 ( that’s the only numbers I could see on the tags).  I spent some time and here’s what I found out about them.

99= is number 299, age 8 Male, born 4/17/2003, released 3/20/2004, note on National Park Service Condor information site,  ( http://www.nps.gov/grca/naturescience/upload/condor-chart20110713.pdf) ’11: Seemed likely to nest near Angel’s Landing in Zion NP, with 343F/A3. But sent to V.C. for chelation due to high lead levels, instead.

52= is number 352, age 7 Female, born 5/29/2004, released 3/1/2005.

Have a GREAT day, Harry.

 

 

Zion Natl Park – Wednesday September 7, 2011

8:00 p.m. setting outside at the picnic table, another great evening at Zion. I got up early this morning and caught the 5:45 hiking bus up the canyon. This bus leaves early and is focused on people who want to get an early start hiking. It doesn’t stop at a regular bus stop unless someone is there. During the day it takes 45 minutes to get up the canyon, on the morning express bus it takes 20 minutes.

My plan for today was to hike up the west rim trail past Scout Pass and Angels Landing and spend most of the morning out on the open rock enjoying the country. Sunrise is after 7:00 a.m so I needed a flashlight to hike to first half hour. I could see trail however I could not see the high spots in trail used to divert water. Enter this ( 37.27938-112.95127 ) into Google Earth and you’ll be able to see where I went.

It was a nice day and got back to camp about 2:00.

I spent some time photographing the attached dragon fly.

On the way back down I saw several condor flying along the ridge line of Scout Pass and Angel’s Landing. I could not read the wing tag numbers until I downloaded the pictures.  Here a a few of the pictures I took.

Some of the pictures I took at our stop at the Golden Spike National Monument are here.

Zion Natl Park – Tuesday September 6, 2011

We had a nice sunny day at Zion, well mostly sunny.  A couple of hours from 3:00 to 5:00 p.m. a very large cloud moved over the valley and we got 43 rain drops in our campsite.   This morning Hank and I went for a walk.  The cardio GPS tracker said 4.77 miles, anyway we had nice walk and he is getting better on a leash.
Wednesday is supposed to be a little warming with no afternoon clouds.

Zion Natl Park – Sunday June 5, 2011

Last September when we were here Tanya and I took a day hike up the Virgin River.  This area is known as the Narrows of the Virgin River.  This hike was though the Zion Canyon Field Institute zionpark.org.  While we were on the hike Bill Boswell took a group picture and submitted it to the institute to use as they saw fit.

The picture was used for the 2011 counter card to promote the institute’s annual hike schedule.

Here is Bill’s picture, his website is boswell.ca.
It’s nice southwest afternoon 91.6, 13% humidity.

 

Zion Natl Park – Friday June 3, 2011

oday was the warmest day so far, 85+.

Hank and I went for a morning walk and man it was cold.  Cold down canyon wind only had us out for an hour.  Jean and I took the shuttle bus up the canyon for first time this trip.

Here are some of the pictures I’ve taken this year.

LINK

Google has changed a couple of the setting since the last time I published an album, please let me know if you can not view this album, it has 58 pictures.

Zion Natl Park – Thursday June 2, 2011

It’s Wednesday afternoon and I’m doing a little catch up.

We left Richards on Monday morning at 6:00 a.m. heading east on I-80. We took I-80 rather than Hwy 50 because of the weather. Saturday evening we had enough snow at Richards to turn the grass white and with several of the passes on Hwy 50 over 7000 feet I decided we’d take the longer but lower and more traveled I-80. The drive was uneventful until 6:00 p.m. the motorhome got a rock chip in the driver’s side wind shield.

Tuesday morning we found a rock chip repair place 3 miles from the Walmart we had spent Monday night. After the rock chip repair we headed south again.

We stopped to pee hank at a combination state rest stop and Flying J gas station in Beaver, Utah. After I pee’d hank we were just starting to pull out when the guy who had been emptying trash cans waved at us. I got out to see what he was looking at, when I started to move he saw a small flat spot on the outside tread of one tire. The short story is about 90 minutes later we left the Cooper tire dealership with 6 new tires.

Had a great birthday, Jean got me a book, “1001 songs you must hear before you die.” She’s already planning on me dieing, or at least setting some goals as to when.

It is now Thursday afternoon. I went for a 3 mile ranger lead hike up to the Watchman Lookout point this morning. Left at 8:45 and got back at 12:45, took 225 pictures.

It is nice day 79 and sunny.

Here are some pictures:
Hank is in vacation mode.

Here is some of the damage from last winter’s flood.  The river was to the left of this tree last summer with a nice trail along the river.  In September when Tanya and I hiked the Narrows the river flow was at 42 cfs (cubic feet per second).  The Narrows is open for hiking when the flow is at 100 cfs or below.  Today it’s at 623 cfs and at the height of the flood it reached 8000 cfs ( eight thousand is not a typo).

 

Here are a couple of flower pictures I took today.

We are having a great trip.

Vacation – Friday September 17, 2010

It’s Friday and vacation is a great thing. We should do this more often.

It is warm as in the lower 90’s and Hank is uncomfortable. He’s not grouchy as he was the first couple of years he’s just can not get comfortable. He’ll lay in one place for about 10 minutes and then he has to move.

It’s the couch

chair

floor

under the table

different spot on the floor

chair

couch

he’s a warm puppy

In as much as Hank is a warm puppy Jean is ecstatic. She loves the heat and it’s actually quite nice this sunny and warm in September.

On a non vacation topic since I got this new laptop I’ve been working with OpenOffice for word processing and spreadsheets. MsOffice is just to expensive for a non work related activities. I think I’ll continue use OpenOffice for a while. One of the driving forces is my version of Office is Office 97 and it will not work with 64 bit Windows 7, at least I don’t know how to make it work.

OpenOffice wants to save text as ODF whatever that is however I’ve been saving text documents as rtf’s. Not really sure how odf’s will paste into wordpress blogs so I’ll stay with rft’s for now, may try odf’s later.

Got to go get a picture or two for today.
Our campsite for the week.

View of the west rim valley about half way up to the rim.