Road Trip ! - Southwestern US (Part 3) - Zion National Park

I think that Zion National Park has to be one of the most amazing places I've seen in the US.  It's a very narrow canyon with very steep walls.  This time of year the canyon floor doesn't get a lot of sunlight, but since the elevation is only about 4,000' it doesn't get all that cold (relatively speaking anyway).  We spent 2 nights at the Zion Lodge.  There are lots of good reasons to visit Zion in the off-season, including the lack of crowds and the fact that you can drive your own car into the Park.  The food and rooms at the Zion Lodge are great, and quite a bargain this time of year.  On our first day there we hiked the Emerald Pools trail.  It was cold and a little dark at times with all the clouds, but we got some great views.

There can be a lot of water flowing from the Middle Pool over the edge of the cliff to the Lower Pool.  Most of it misses the trail, making for a nice little waterfall, but enough gets through to make one stretch fairly muddy.  

We woke up Saturday morning to a light dusting of snow in the canyon, and even more up in the higher elevations.  We walked the Riverside Trail in the morning, up to the start of The Narrows, the point where the Virgin River fills up the gorge, and the only way through is to walk in the river itself.

In a sort of last minute decision, we decided to see how far up the trail to Angel's Landing we could get.  It was 3:00PM by the time we finished the 2-mile climb up to Scout Landing, so we decided to save the last 1/2 mile to the top of Angel's Landing for another time and head back down.  Maybe when there is not as much ice on the trail.  Here are some shots from the way up and back.


The trail starts down by the river and works its way up the sandstone cliffs.  It's a well maintained, mostly paved, mostly shelf trail that switchbacks its way up.  I'm still wondering who got stuck hauling all that concrete up there.

The last portion of the trail before Scout Landing is a 1/4-mile stretch of 21 short, steep switchbacks called Walter's Wiggles. It's too steep to get all of it in one picture.

We turned around at Scout Landing, a little past this point.  What a view.

Looking down, about halfway back down the trail.

At one point I found a convenient rock to rest my camera on.

As we were walking back to the Lodge at the end of the day we caught a glimpse of the Moon rising over the canyon wall, as the Sun set in the opposite direction.

Zion National Park is a pretty amazing place.  Anyone who has not been there really should get there at least once.  We would like to go back again.  In speaking with the staff at the Zion Lodge, it sounds like early November would be a great time to be there, with a lot more color in the trees.  That said, early December was still a great time, as it didn't get uncomfortably cold, and the light dusting of snow was beautiful.


To be continued . . .


Click here to see more images from Zion National Park.
     

Road Trip ! - Southwestern US (Part 2) - Valley of Fire State Park (NV) and Southern Utah

When we pulled out of Las Vegas on Thursday morning the temperature had dropped about 25 degrees from what it was the day before, it was raining off and on (mostly on) and it was very windy.  Our end point for that day was St. George, UT, about 150 miles north of Las Vegas, NV.  We planned to take most of the day to get there, stopping off in Valley of Fire State Park along the way.


The drive north on I-15 from Las Vegas was pretty ugly, but after about 50 miles or so we turned off on to NV 169 and things got a lot better really quickly.  You can't see any of the red rocks that give the park its name, but this shot pretty much sums up how Heather and I do our road trips.

Valley of Fire is Nevada's oldest State Park, founded in 1935.  The visitor center is very well done, with lots of informative displays.  The park gets its name from the red sandstone formations that jut up from the surrounding desert, making it look like a red island in a sea of brownish-green desert.

No trouble spotting the black Xterra in the sea of red sandstone.

This area has been inhabited for many years. We visited several pictograph sites in the park.

We followed the hiking trail out to Mouse's Tank. At some points along the walk the soft sand was as deep as what you would find at the beach, except that it was the same red color as the rocks. 

We got to St. George a little after dark.  The headwind was so bad going north on 1-15 up through the Virgin River Gorge that I think we dropped down to maybe 12-13 mpg. 


On Friday morning we set out for Zion National Park on UT 9.  Some great views along the way.

At Rockville we took a little detour south on an unpaved road known as the Smithsonian Butte Scenic Backcountry Byway. We only drove a short portion of this, but found some spectacular scenery along the way.

We arrived at Zion Lodge in time for lunch, and then went for a hike on the Emerald Pools trail.


To be continued . . .


Click here to see more images from Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada.  There will be a link to the Zion pictures in the next post.
     

Road Trip ! - Southwestern US (Part 1) - Mojave Preserve, Las Vegas, Hoover Dam & Bridge

We recently finished up a 10-day 1,600-mile road trip around the Southwest, from 29 November to 8 December. Starting and ending in San Diego, we drove northeast to southern Utah, then back south through Arizona.  Our overnight stops were Las Vegas, NV - St. George, UT - Zion National Park - Grand Canyon National Park - Scottsdale, AZ.  Along the way we visited the Mojave Preserve, Hoover Dam, Valley Fire State Park (NV), Grand Staircase/Escalante National Monument (UT), Glen Canyon Dam, Horseshoe Bend, Bedrock City (AZ), Walnut Canyon and Montezuma's Castle National Monuments, the Heard Museum in Phoenix and the Desert Botanical Garden in Scottsdale.


Most people make the drive from San Diego to Las Vegas in just over 5 hours.  We took considerably longer than that, by detouring through the Mojave National Preserve. Our first stop was the old train station in Kelso. The National Park Service has done a beautiful job of restoring the old 1920's-vintage station, including the lunch counter, which serves a very good sandwich.

The late afternoon light along Morningstar Mine Road was pretty nice. Even though we planned to stay in hotels the entire trip, and stick mostly to paved roads, we took the Xterra. It's nice to be able to just take off on some little side road, paved or unpaved, when we spot something interesting along the way.  We had food, water and camping supplies for 2-3 days in case it was needed.

We got quite a variety on our first day out. After we checked into our room at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas we made our way over the Venetian, where we had dinner in the bar area at Zefferino's so that we could visit with old family friend Joe Vento while he played the piano. Joe and my father were the best of friends - they met when my father came to the US from Sicily in 1937.

The hotels were all decorated up for the holiday season, but the crowds were pretty thin. More people started showing up as we were leaving town on Thursday morning, but those first few days of the week immediately following Thanksgiving are really quiet. That makes for some real bargains in room rates though.

While we were in Las Vegas I took a side trip over to see Hoover Dam and new US 93 bypass bridge.  The bridge, which is known as the Mike O'Callaghan - Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge, was only recently opened in late 2010.  It now carries all through traffic on US 93, and the roadway over Hoover Dam is now only open to tourists, and you have to turn around and come back the same way after crossing.  The new bridge has a very nice pedestrian walkway, complete with panels describing how it was built and who it is dedicated to.  The road bed sits about 900' above the Colorado River at the center of the span, and the view of the dam from that point is pretty impressive.  The bridge is only about 1,500' downstream from the dam.

They really did a nice job on the pedestrian access to this bridge. You can walk from a specially designed plaza on the Nevada side all the way across (1,600') to the Arizona side. This next shot is taken from partway across, looking back towards Nevada.

Wednesday was a bright, sunny, calm day, which made for a great shadow of the bridge across the narrow canyon looking back from the Arizona side to Nevada. You can just see the dam on the far right side of the frame.

Straddling the Nevada-Arizona State Line, partway across the bridge.

Back on the Nevada side after walking across, here's the view looking over towards Arizona.

Here's one shot to help put this all into perspective. Taken from near the center of the top of Hoover Dam, looking downstream. The first shot in this series was taken from near the center of the bridge looking in the opposite direction.

I didn't take the tour of the interior of the dam - it was such a nice day that I decided to just wander around outside instead. Here's a shot of a sculpture dedicated to the men who built Hoover Dam in the early 1930's.

That giant wind storm that hit the whole southwestern US came through Las Vegas starting just after sunset on Wednesday night (just as I was getting back to the hotel).  On Thursday morning we set out for St. George, Utah.  It was almost 25 degrees colder than it was the day before, very windy, and with intermittent rain.
   
To be continued . . . 
   
Click here to see more images from our drive to and our stay in Las Vegas, Nevada, on the first part of our southwestern road trip.
    
Click here for more images of Hoover Dam and of the new US 93 bridge.
    

A Few New Tiger Photos (and a Red Panda) - San Diego Zoo

Since I was up early on Saturday to watch the lunar eclipse I was able to get to the San Diego Zoo not long after it opened. The Malayan Tiger cubs and their mother were out.

Here's mom Mek - she seems to be giving me a somewhat suspicious look.

After a while little (well, maybe not so little any more really, he's up to about 100 lbs. now)  Christopher came up and started nuzzling and licking her.

There are actually a few more in this series, you can see them by clicking on the link at the end of this posting.

Here's a shot of Lily, the red panda.

   

Click here to see a few more images from the San Diego Zoo on Saturday, December 10, 2011.

  

Lunar Eclipse in San Diego - Saturday, December 10, 2011

I got up at 4:00AM on Saturday and drove down to the coast at La Jolla where I met some friends from our photo club to get some pictures of the moon in a full eclipse just before sunrise. As I was driving west I could see the moon in the sky ahead of me going into the eclipse. I actually had a pretty good view from the car as I was driving. I got to La Jolla and, along with a bunch of other folks, set up my tripod and took a couple of shots, just in time to see the moon disappear into a rather dense fog bank. Here's the one shot that is even halfway decent. At least I got a little of the orange color that happens when a full lunar eclipse is this low in the sky.

I didn't want to have the trip out there (and the effort to get up that early in the morning) be totally wasted, so I snapped a couple of shots of the waves crashing over the sea wall at the Children's Pool.

After that I wandered off to breakfast with one of my friends, and then headed down to the Zoo. Even if I didn't get any great pictures of the lunar eclipse, it was still fun to be out with a few friends enjoying the sunrise at the shore. There is supposed to be another eclipse like this in three years.
   

The Living Desert - Palm Desert, California

The Living Desert is a zoo and botanical garden located in Palm Desert, Califonia. We stopped there on our way home from our Thanksgiving weekend visit to Palm Springs.

Not all of the animals are native to the desert, or even to California for that matter.

They do have a few local animals as well, like a whole herd of Peninsula Bighorn Sheep.

There is also a great model train exhibit, with lots of interesting detail.

Click here to see more images from our visit to The Living Desert on Sunday, November 27, 2011.