My Life and Travels
Spending most of the day in camp reading and enjoying the sun. This morning Hank spent his time digging a series of holes to lay in. As the sun was moving west his hole would get into the direct sun and he’d need a new hole a little farther east.
The picture is hole two in a series of four.
Here’s our location from one of my GPS programs.
I am here: 37 2.060 N 112 44.054 W http://maps.google.com/maps?q=loc:37.03433,-112.73424
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.
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.
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.
Got to Zion at 12:45, 80 degrees and rained most of the afternoon. Didn’t do much in the afternoon mostly read and stayed out of the rain.
We left Massacre State Park at 10:30 and headed south. Stopped at Golden Spike Natl Historical Site in Promontory, Utah for three hours. They had the steam engines out today and I got a bunch of pictures. We are in Springville just south of Salt Lake for the night. Get to Zion tomorrow. In keeping with taking a picture of all our campsites, here’s where we are tonight.
Here’s the walk Hank and I took Sunday morning.
We are at Walmart’s RV park in Springville, Utah just south of Provo. We’ll get to Zion tomorrow only 264 miles to go.
This is the view from the RV park.
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Been at Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada for the last couple of days, 100 high 80 low. In Mesquite NV for breakfast heading north to Palisades State Park, Utah. Well post more if we have cell service tonight.
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Saturday September 18 Tanya and I went on a Zion Institute guided walk up the Zion Narrows.
We got on the 8:00 a.m. tram for the 40 minute ride to the end of the tram road and the beginning of the River Walk which leads to the starting point of the Zion Narrows river trail. There is tons ofinformation about the Zion Narrows (plan a visit) already on the net so I’ll skip most of the Narrows details. We started the day’s walk at 9:00 am and returned at 3:45 pm. Went up river to the first Y, turned right and up Orderville Canyon to the turn around point, returned to the Y and up main river to Wall Street. At Wall Street we turned around and headed down river. I’d say about 80% of the time is spend walking in the river.
It was a great day with a really nice group of people. I scheduled the hike with the Zion Institute so we’d have the opportunity to learn something and I thought it would be more enjoyable going with someone who knew what they were actually doing. We could have walked up river on our own however going with someone who had done this a couple of hundred times was much more enjoyable. Gene could read the river and picked the easiest and fastest route up and across the river 99% of the time. I didn’t see how really good Gene was until the trip down river. We didn’t encounter many people early in the morning however on the trip down river we saw hundred’s of people. Watching them stuggle to pick the route up river showed Gene’s understanding of the river.
Our Zion Institute guide was Gene (as I mentioned above). He is in his 70’s and volunteers to lead programs for the institute all year round. Gene said his wife’s father was actually born at the same location as the current Zion Museum.
We had a great day. I’ll include a couple of pictures now and maybe some more later.
This is one of the 191 pictures I took during the day.
This is most of the group.
Have a Great day, Harry
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.