Hiking and Adventures Here and Beyond…
Up until 2008, our adventures were retained only as memories and on 35mm slides. While our memories may have faded (just a bit), the slides haven’t – and we have a lot of them. So we’re digitizing a select few to bring some of our past adventures into the 21st Century. The photos below are some of those old slides.
Continue reading “Rafting the Colorado River (September 1994)”
Palo Duro Canyon is located in the West Texas Panhandle just east of Canyon and south of Amarillo. It’s the second-largest canyon in the United States – roughly 120 miles long, with an average width of 6 miles, and a depth of between 820 and 1,000 feet. It’s been called “The Grand Canyon of Texas” both for its size and for its dramatic geological features, including the multicolored layers of rock and steep mesa walls similar to those in the (real) Grand Canyon. Despite all this grandness, we’d never heard of it until The LovedOne stumbled upon it during one of her internet rambles. Backpacker magazine then ran a story on it in their March 2017 issue. Looked fascinating. So we made plans for a hiking roadtrip to go see it for ourselves.
Continue reading “Lighthouse Peak ~ Palo Duro Canyon (Texas) 16-May-2017”
We spent the last part of September and the first part of October on a rafting / hiking trip on the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon (Lees Ferry to Diamond Creek). Needless to say it was an utterly amazing / awesome trip of a lifetime and I’m not going to even try to put it into words. There was, of course, rafting and lots of big water rapids. But one reason we chose to do a longer trip was to have time for some hiking. Most of our hikes were up slot canyons only accessible from the river. However two of them, Tapeats Creek and Deer Creek (Thunder River), are accessible to backpackers (or stunningly fit day hikers) from the North Rim during the summer.
Continue reading “Rafting the Colorado River 18/30-Sep-2014”
I’d made more than a few trips over the years to the South Rim of Grand Canyon National Park but never one to the Canyon’s much, much less crowded North Rim. So when Wayne and Diane proposed a friends and family outing to the north side of the park, we went for it. We could only manage a week free of the corporate leash (i.e., paycheck) so we flew to Las Vegas and drove 4 hours from there to the Rim via Jacobs Lake. Weather conditions were unsettled due to the onset of summer rains but that made for some amazing sunlight, cloud, and lightning effects. Despite some high clouds and an occasional thunderstorm, conditions on the Rim – at around 8,000 feet – were great for hiking, with high temperatures only into the high 70ºF to low 80ºF range (as opposed to 100ºF+ along the Colorado River some 6,000 feet below). Our visit also coincided with a “supermoon” event, which was great for us but not so much so for the astronomy buffs who’d come for the supposed light-free skies.
Continue reading “Grand Canyon~North Rim 12/14-Aug-2014”
BOOTS on the TRAIL 