on the way

I’m tired from uploading eight bazillion photos, so for now I don’t have a lot to say about Yosemite except (1) it was absolutely gorgeous and (2) man, humans have really screwed up the place. Honestly. The road system in the valley had to have been designed by a four-year-old on methamphetamines. It’s the only explanation that makes sense.

I’ll come back and rewrite this post at some point with more commentary. In the meantime, check out me with the rainbow!

All photos here

You know, I really thought that no road into a park could be more switchback-y than Mesa Verde, and that no view from a campsite could possibly be better than this, and that Zion is the most beautiful place on earth.

I was wrong on all three counts.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Sequoia and King’s Canyon National Park. (Unfortunately, many of the photos are on their side… gallery’s rotate-photo function does not appear to be functional.)

I drove into the park from the south. (It’s worth mentioning at this point that although the two parks still retain their individual names, they are administered as one park — and no one really seems to know why they’re still called two separate names. ) There are four distinct climatic regions in the park: the foothills, which are desert-y, the sequoias, the high sierra, and the canyons. If you drive the length of the park from south to north, you get to experience all four. It’s a gorgeous drive — winding up the mountainsides, watching the flora change from yucca and other desert scrub to trees.

Then, without really any warning, the trees suddenly get rather large.

Sequoia and King’s Canyon have the largest and the third-largest living things in the world growing within their borders: General Sherman Tree and General Grant Tree. (No one knows what the second-largest is, either. I suspect I may find it in the sequoia grove at Yosemite.) Photos can’t convey the mass of these trees. They’re huge. The sign at the base of the Grant tree says that it would take twenty-two people holding hands to encircle it. That’s a big tree, yo. And it’s not even the biggest!

The drive from Grant Grove up to King’s Canyon is amazing. It parallels the King’s River a good deal of the way, meaning that I passed waterfalls and rapids and other cool stuff.

Oh, and I saw a bear. A baby bear. It was adorable. Unfortunately, my camera chose that particular moment to jam. Of course.

(No, Mom, it was not in a tree.)

I realized that I’ve been terribly remiss in posting whose music I’ve enjoyed so far… so here is the complete list.

Amy (1+2)
Rise
Leia (1+2)
Heather
Andy (1+2)
Sarah/psu
Erik
Sarah + Erik
Bekah
Sully (1+2)
Sarah/sis (1+2)

You know what the best part is? Out of all those CDs, only one song has been a repeat.

What song, you ask?

Why, “The Pandas Must Die,” of course.

(You both know who you are.)

My laptop is dead. I think the motherboard is fried. As a result, posts may be more infrequent until I get a chance to have it looked at (probably sometime next week).

In the meantime, feast your eyes on Navajo Lake (alt. 10,000 feet — still frozen), nifty windmills, and your moment of zen. (How would YOU pronounce that? Leave a comment.)

Bryce Canyon was cool. Literally. It was rainy and cold. Consequently, there aren’t as many photos as there are of the other parks. I hope to come back someday when the weather is nice.

(But if the weather was cool, the people made up for it. The shuttle drivers were as nice as could be, and the KOA campground that I stayed at had an ice cream social and live music from a local country and western singer! How neat is that?)

Zion National Park is the most photogenic place in the world. Really. It may actually be impossible to take a bad photograph there.

And if anyone tries to disprove that statement by pointing to the blackish photo with a big splodge of white in it towards the end of the album, let me just say that that is one of five windows blasted in the side of a 1.1 mile tunnel that was used for dumping out the debris from the drilling of said tunnel in 1930, and I was traveling at about forty miles per hour when I stuck the camera out the window to try to capture the experience, so don’t give me any lip. You’re lucky it came out at all.

(Those who know me well can imagine the relief I felt at seeing those periodic windows amidst the blackness. 1.1 miles is a long way, y’all.)

Anyway, back to the park (of which the tunnel is, admittedly, a part)…

Zion is gorgeous… the cliffs, the trails, the wildlife (well, maybe not the giant black beetles as big as my thumb… but the rest of it was cool), the campground (right in the shadow of the Watchman — what a cool back yard!), the lodge, everything. What was most interesting to me is that, although it is in the desert (and, in fact, the cliffs are basically fossilized sand dunes), there was so much water…. look through the photos and probably half of them involve water in the form of the river, a waterfall, a seeping rock, etc. The Southwest has been in a drought for about eight years, but this winter and spring are making up for it in spades — 28 inches of precipitation since October, when the norm is 12-14 inches in an entire year! While everything was lush and green, it did have the unfortunate effect of making the cottonwoods produce huge amounts of cotton-wrapped seeds — it was piled in foot-high drifts all around the campground. Made my eyes itch a bit.

It was also hot. 100 degrees F on the first day I was there. Slightly cooler the second day, which isn’t saying much. Of all the campgrounds I’ve stayed at so far, this is definitely the one that needs showers… and doesn’t have them. As it turns out, I can, in fact, wash my hair in a bucket. Just in case anyone was wondering.

(Oh, and here’s your moment of zen.)

If I had to make them up, they wouldn’t be moments of zen.

The North Rim couldn’t be more different from the South Rim. (Yes, that is snow in the photos. And standing water.) At 1000 feet more elevation, the North Rim is less developed than the South Rim, but just as enjoyable. You have to drive through miles of the Kaibab National Forest to get to it, which is what those shots of pine trees reflected in the water are from. I’m sort of out of descriptors after the past few blog entries, so just check out the photos for yourself.

Photos from the drive between the South Rim and the North Rim. The first couple are from the Navajo Bridge over the Colorado; the last two are of the information station for the Coronado-Escalante expedition in the absolute middle of nowhere. The stuff the National Park Service sees fit to document never fails to amuse me.

What this world needs is more moments of zen.