The Stuff We Do
Oh, 2020. You seemed so nice when we first met. You were fun for two months, then you turned ugly. Real ugly. A plague and a recession and wildfires and an election and continuing drought. Yes sir, you threw quite a bit of hurt at us! Yes you did! But we survived. And The LovedOne remained photogenic while social distancing from others kept her within camera range.
Years ago, I was working at what was then the Nevada Test Site and we briefly contemplated moving to Las Vegas, Nevada. That was before it became the massive urban sprawl it is today. But even then we were looking at places out of town, up north near Mount Charleston. I recall leaving the Vegas city limits and driving north on I-95 through actual open desert before we reached the turn-off for Charleston. Well, those days are gone. I-95 now bisects a solid sea of beige box houses (with more being built) all the way out to the turn-off.
Continue reading “Tule Springs Fossil Beds (Nevada) 22-Jan-2020”
A broken foothold, and subsequent back injury, brought last year’s hiking adventure outside Las Vegas to an abrupt – and painful – halt. Now, with my back working again, we decided to return to Nevada to finish some of the hikes we missed last year. It should be noted that none of this year’s hikes involved climbing on wet, weak sandstone. 😡
Continue reading “Historic Railroad Trail (Lake Mead NRA) 20-Jan-2020”
Another year passes and The LovedOne remains unconvinced as to her photogenicity. Her attempts to out-hike the camera were working…until…I bought a telephoto lens! Ha! Another (probably temporary) victory for technology!
For our fourth (and last) hike in the Las Vegas area, we drove northwest out to Valley of Fire State Park. The park, being a state enterprise, was not shutdown by the federal foolishness but a local power outage had disabled the visitor center’s gift shop. So we pressed on – to a hike we’d found on the Hiking Project that started at the Mouse’s Tank Trailhead and looped around cross-country to the Silica Dome parking area, with some interesting scrambling enroute. There’s an established trail through Petroglyph Canyon to Mouse’s Tank, a depression in the sandstone that collects water. Along the way we passed four big horn sheep that were so indifferent to people that they actually “posed” for us.
Continue reading “Fire Canyon Wash Loop (Nevada) 21-Jan-2019”
BOOTS on the TRAIL 