Denver and the home stretch

After Utah, aside from a few hastily shot photos of the Rockies, I stopped taking photos. But there isn't much to see after the Rockies anyways.

After a delicious lunch at the Three Lions, Becca had to get to the airport and jet off to NYC for a job fair. I spent a couple nights in Denver and had a good time. If you haven't seen it yet, check out the Three Lions Facebook page. There are some great photos on there.

The rest of the driving was pretty dull up until the Appalachians. I stopped in Topeka for a night and then met my Mother in Evansville. Spent the night there and had a nice visit with my Grandma, Aunt Becky, and Uncle Ric before driving the last twelve hours to Virginia Beach.

It was an amazing trip. We didn't have enough time at any of the stops to fully appreciate them, but we were able to see many incredible places. And next time we go, we will know exactly what we want to do.

Thank you all for reading. I enjoyed being able to share my experiences with you. Hopefully you enjoyed it as well.

The photo at the top is from the Three Lions, and I believe it was taken by Ian.

Canyonlands and Arches

From the Grand Canyon we drove northeast toward Utah. This was the best day of driving for sure. It featured the sunrise over the Grand Canyon and a nice meander through Monument Valley. The landscape of southeastern Utah is amazing - beautiful red rock monoliths everywhere.

Below is a bad picture of monument valley taken from the car.


Our first stop was Arches. It was too hot to do a great deal of hiking, but we did a couple of the shorter loops around balanced rock, double arch, and delicate arch.

Balanced Rock:


Delicate Arch:


And here are a bunch of other arches for which I do not know the names.




In the afternoon we headed to the Island in the Sky district of Canyonlands. Island in the Sky is a broad, flat mesa set among the canyons, and is the portion of the park best suited to casual visitors. Much of the park requires a four-wheel drive vehicle.


The canyons surrounding the mesa are very impressive in size. Not as wide or as deep as the area around Grand Canyon National Park, but still quite impressive.




It was about 98 degrees at Arches and Canyonlands, but our campground was amazing. It took about 45 minutes of driving a mountain on a bumpy gravel road, but it was worth it. The site was located on a mountain just outside Moab. It was in a birch forest near tiny Warner Lake. The altitude gain was sufficient that as soon as we got out of the car we both donned pants and jackets, which felt amazing after a day of extreme heat.

Grand Canyon

The Grand Canyon is exactly as awe-inspiring as you have heard. Even with all of the times I've seen photos of the Grand Canyon throughout my like, I had no idea just how large it was. It is hard to comprehend the 18-mile wide and 6,000 foot deep canyon until you see it.


In the morning, we went for a hike. We decided to hike down a few miles of the Bright Angel trail, one of the most popular trails at the Grand Canyon. We didn't start quite as early as we should have, so it was already pretty hot out. We hiked about a mile and a half down into the canyon and then back out.

The hike was good, but I think the Canyon is better suited -- at least on a short trip -- to a scenic drive. It is around 13 miles to the river on the Bright Angel trail, so unless you have a few days, you can't really hike the whole way. Some day I would like to do that, but with our one very hot day we decided to go for a drive instead.

There are many overlooks along the Canyon, each with a stunning view.

After our drive we went back to the campsite and cooked up a fine meal. Wood-grilled steaks, roasted lemon garlic asparagus, and herb roasted baby red potatoes.

With full bellies we headed back out to watch the sun set over the Canyon. The changing shadows and colors of the sunset were amazing.


There were some terrifying precipices as well.

Las Vegas

Las Vegas is a pretty bizarre place. It felt more like an amusement park than a city. We stayed at the Stratosphere. The hotels are pretty cheap in Vegas -- in the middle of the week, at least. Below is the view from the top of the Stratosphere.


The Stratosphere's gimmick, on top of the nice view, is thrill rides. At the top of this tower, way above the city, they have a few rides that look absolutely terrifying. The worst of these is essentially a tethered fall. It begins as a free-fall, but a cable attached to a harness slows your descent as you near the ground. I had absolutely no desire to try any of these things, but they did make a good spectator sport.

We tried to have, in one day, an authentic Vegas experience. We gambled a bit at the Stratosphere, a bit more at Caesar's Palace, saw a bit of the strip, and ate at two hotel restaurants, one of which was a buffet (and was actually pretty good).

It was an interesting place, and I had a good time. If nothing else, a shower and a soft bed was nice after four nights of camping.

We stopped at the Hoover dam on the way out of town the following day. It was about a thousand degrees out, so we didn't stay long.


The water level in Lake Mead was pretty low.



Becca informed me that this bridge didn't exist a few years ago. Apparently, prior to 9/11, to get to Arizona from Nevada one simply drove across the top of the Hoover Dam. This was determined to be a national security threat, so a bridge was built to bypass the dam.

Sequoia

The size of the giant sequoias is pretty awe-inspiring. When we first arrived I was taking pictures of practically every tree. It is just amazing. Unfortunately, the photographs do not convey this very well without some sort of reference point.


The above picture gives you an idea of just how enormous these trees are. Look at how tiny Becca looks at the base of that tree.

The picture below also gives you some idea of the scale. The tree pictured is General Sherman. It is neither the thickest tree nor the tallest tree, but it boasts the greatest volume of any tree in the world at 52,508 cubic feet.

The top of the tree is dead, so it no longer grows upwards, but it does still grow outwards. If you look closely at the base of the tree in this photo, you can see people, which will give you a reference point with which to judge its girth.


We never found the place where you can drive your car through a fallen sequoia, but walking through one is pretty neat too.

Becca standing inside the hollowed trunk of a Sequoia.

Sequoias are very resilient to fire. Many, perhaps most, of the giant sequoias in the park had some signs of fire scarring at the base. I am not sure, but I believe that this is intentional. There are a few reasons why fires are beneficial to the giant sequoias.

First, it is one of only a few ways in which the seeds are released. The cones need to be destroyed or dried in order to free the seeds. In addition to fires, squirrels free some seeds. There is also a species of beetle which is responsible for freeing some of the seeds. It lays its eggs on the cone. When they hatch, the larvae bore into the cone. This allows it to dry and the seeds to come free.

The other reason that fire is important to the giant sequoias is that for the young sequoias to grow, they need a great deal of sunlight and little competing understory vegetation. Historically, this situation was created by wildfires.

Due to fire-suppression from the Park Service, for an extended period of time there were no significant fires in the area, and there were also no young sequoias. In the 1970s they began to correct this by instituting prescribed burns as well as allowing natural wildfires to run their course.

This is a picture of Becca climbing up the fire-hollowed trunk of a fallen sequoia.

I like this pair of photos because these look like normal trees until you put a reference in.


And then they look pretty giant. Or it looks like I photoshopped a tiny Becca into the picture. And these aren't even sequoias.

Here's a picture of the Senate. Along the Congress trail there was also a President Sequoia and a larger grove called the House.

Sequoia was full of bears. At Yosemite we saw a bear from the bus, and we were pretty excited. While walking the Congress trail at Sequoia we had five bear sightings. Apparently the only bears around are black bears, but their fur was pretty light in color. And they are all pretty docile and accustomed to people walking around. They just ignored us.

This one was snoozing forty yards or so off the trail.

This was my favorite of the bear sightings. This guy was tearing the bark off of this fallen tree, I imagine he was looking for bugs to eat.

At the end of the day we stayed at a campground located in the park. We had the prettiest campsite I've ever seen. On one side we had no neighbors, and behind us was a little gully with a creek. Below are a couple pictures of the campsite.

Yosemite

Our next stop was Yosemite. It was about six hours from our campsite, so we had to get underway pretty early in the morning. We arrived at the park around midday. Nowhere else that we went, not even the Grand Canyon, had this many other tourists. In the picture of the Lower Yosemite falls above, if you look closely near the bottom, you can see tons of them.

The first part of the day I was in a pretty bad mood. We'd come to Yosemite, this amazing, gorgeous valley, and I couldn't enjoy it because there were just so many damn people everywhere.

Eventually we managed to separate ourselves from the masses by climbing about 1300 vertical feet and getting drenched by the spray from the waterfall pictured below.

As soon as we were at the top and able to find a little bit of peace and quiet, my mood completely changed. We took our shoes off and dipped our feet in a calm eddy of the river that fed this waterfall, and I was elated. I have never seen a landscape more beautiful. The tall trees, fast rivers, and exposed granite were stunning. This is my new favorite place.




The river we were dipping our feet in made the news recently. We didn't realize it when we chose our hike, but the waterfall we climbed up was the same waterfall that three hikers were swept over a few weeks prior. I believe they jumped the guardrail and waded out into the water for a photo before they were swept away by the current. There were signs all over the trail because they were never able to locate the bodies.

After hiking down from Vernal falls, we decided to make one last stop at Mirror Lake. The name is a bit deceptive, as the "lake" is no wider than a river and only a few feet deep. It was getting to be pretty late in the day, so most of the crowds had gone, and we had a nice way through the icy waters.




By the time we picked up postcards and beer and got back to the car it was nearly sundown. We left the park, continuing south, to the campground we had booked. To our right, on the way out of the park, was this gorgeous sunset over the mountains. Photographs never really do justice to a sunset, but this one turned out alright.

I saved the best picture for last. On our way out of the park we stopped at one last overlook. It turned out to be the site from which Ansel Adams took his iconic photograph of the Yosemite valley. Just on the brink of sunset, it was truly breathtaking.


We saw as much as we could, but it was nowhere near enough time. I can't wait to go back.