Chilling on the California Coast
The Devil’s Garden loop trail at Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument passes beneath a collection of hooded hoodoos located at the end of 15 miles of suboptimal gravel road. Bring an AWD vehicle.
Devil’s Garden Trail (Sept. 21, 2021), 1 mile
Continue reading “The Devil’s Garden Less Traveled at Grand-Staircase Escalante”
We stopped at Zion National Park on a late September drive from San Francisco to Estes Park, CO. Unfortunately, we booked late and could not find a satisfactory hotel room within 50 miles of the park. Instead of back-country hiking, we settled for a drizzly stroll above Kolob Canyons and the scenic drive on Utah State Route 9.
If visiting an uplifted riverbed choked with 150-million-year-old dinosaur bones isn’t enough of a thrill at Dinosaur National Monument, be sure to hike the gouged and twisted landscapes of the Sound of Silence Trail. Continue reading “A ‘Wall of Bones’ and Tortured Landscapes at Dinosaur National Monument”
Chill air, an icy trail and high wind beneath blue skies greeted us at 10,400 feet as we stepped off to take on the Lookout Lakes Trail in Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest. No problem. But an earworm of the classic “Smokey Bear” song nearly drove us nuts. Continue reading “A Rather Blustery Lakeside Hike High in Wyoming’s Medicine Bow Mountains”
Scotts Bluff National Monument is named for Hiram Scott, a fur trade clerk who died nearby in 1828 after taking ill on the trail home to Missouri. We visited this fall on the road home to California with considerably less drama. We hiked to the top. Nobody died.
Continue reading “Westward Ho on the Saddle Rock Trail at Scotts Bluff National Monument”
Roadside attractions were plentiful on our drive across the American West this fall. Most were quirky, some historic, a few disappointing. But our favorite was Carhenge in Alliance, NE. We visited at sunrise.
Continue reading “Sunrise at Carhenge: Nebraska’s Nod to Stonehenge Revs Our Imaginations”
Context can make a hike. While the trek to Scott Lookout Tower in the Nebraska National Forest is rather ordinary, the concept of walking through a 20,000-acre forest engineered in the middle of the Great Plains makes it special. Continue reading “Hiking the Sandhills of Nebraska in America’s Largest ‘Man-Made’ Forest”
Neither of us are poets. Yet our hike on a blustery fall day through trembling Aspen groves in the Gunnison National Forest at Crested Butte, CO, inspired us to give poetry a try. And so, with a nod to junior high English teachers everywhere, we present: “Ode to Autumn at Crested Butte.”
Continue reading “‘Ode to Autumn at Crested Butte’ – A Fall Hiking Adventure in Verse & Images”
The sheer walls and stone towers of the narrow, half-mile deep gorge at Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park in Colorado are breath-taking. But once you catch your breath, then what?
Continue reading “Night Sky Brightens a Visit to Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park”
Capitol Reef isn’t very big, as national parks go. But you can view magnificent desert vistas and ancient petroglyphs. You can hike up a narrow wash or beneath a stunning stone arch. You can lose the trail on a ledge 300 feet above a canyon floor. Yikes!
Continue reading “That Time We Lost the Trail High on a Ledge at Capitol Reef National Park”
No billboards. No brochure. No web site or Twitter feed. We had to do some sleuthing to track down Pando, the 106-acre aspen grove that ranks among the oldest and biggest living things on Earth.
Continue reading “Finding Pando: Utah’s 80,000-year-old Aspen Grove Hides in Plain Sight”
How far would you travel to commune with some of the oldest trees on Earth? We traveled via “the loneliest road in America” from The Coastside on the San Francisco Peninsula to Nevada’s highest peak to have a look. Continue reading “Strolling among Nevada’s Bristlecone Ancients at Great Basin National Park”
Sometimes less is more. Consider the drive through Nevada on US Route 50, a stretch of highway Life magazine once dubbed “The Loneliest Road in America.”
Continue reading “Getting our Kicks on Route 50 in Nevada – ‘The Loneliest Road in America’”