TravelStream™ news feed for member pbdaniel on TravelPod's free travel blogs service http://www.travelpod.com/syndication/rss/pbdaniel en-us Copyright ©2010 TravelPod.com Sun, 28 Sep 2008 00:22:01 -0400 http://www.travelpod.com http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/pbdaniel/2/1222579020/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/pbdaniel/2/1222579020/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/pbdaniel/2/1222579020/tpod.html Sun, 28 Sep 2008 00:22:01 -0400 Go west, young(ish) man!

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Springdale, Utah, United States

Argh... miscalculations of when the peak of the season is continue. Really need to spend some time tomorrow booking for the grand canyon and Yosemite to keep from having to spend $150 for a hotel room again because it's literally the last room left within 30 miles of where I want to stay.

Looking forward to Zion tomorrow!
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Moab, Utah, United States

Very cool couple of days - Had to scramble around for a campsite, and ended up at a spectacular little 11-site campground in a canyon, and right smack up against the Colorado river. Hiked to Delicate Arch at sunset the first day, then did Landscape and Partition arches the next day, and then took a bath in the river and slept out under the stars.

Another interesting factoid.... miles travelled so far: 4,328. Yowza.
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Longmont, Colorado, United States

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Grand Tetons National Park, Wyoming, United States

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Green river, Utah, United States

The last few weeks have been filled with somewhat less energy, time, and network connectivity than previous, so I haven't been able to keep up on the blog. I stil intend to go back in and fill in the details for Yellowstone, Grand Tetons, and Rocky Mountain national park, but the pictures probably won't go in until later.

I spent the last week and a half at my brother's, in Longmont and had been planning on updating things while I was there, but I had failed to count on the Toddler Factor: he has a 4 year old son and a 15 month old daughter, and it is frankly exhausting even being around them for any length of time. I love the kids to death, but honestly, I have no idea how they do it. So Dave, Kathy - kudos on doing this 24/7 for the last 4 years and not ending up with your mugshots on CNN. Enjoy your vacation this week. :)

I'm headed into Arches NP today, hoping to find a vacant walk-up campsite - all the bookable ones are booked, as are all the hotels in Moab - The closest thing I could find last night was a Super 8 in Green River... hopefully I'll have a little bit better luck today.
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Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, United States

Last night was not the best time to discover I'd left my fleece hat
behind. Plus, at 7700 feet, there's not enough oxygen in the air to
breathe properly when completely retreated inside the sleeping bag...
Plus my air mattress has sprung a slow leak.
Waaaaaahh.
I'm currently warming my bones at the Grant Lodge restaurant, trying
to decide what to do with the day. Did I mention it's also raining
what feels like liquid nitrogen?
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Custer state park, South Dakota, United States

Visited Wind Cave and Crazy Horse today, and got there along some very scenic drives - the Needles Highway is particularly picturesque (I'll be exploring it in more detail tomorrow; today it's just a conveyance).

Wind Cave is a pretty interesting feature - it's one of the few large caves in the world not formed by an underground river. It's also home to the only known formations of what's known as 'boxwork' - a honeycomb-like latticework of minerals jutting out from the cavern walls. I took a bunch of photos in the cave, but unfortunately none of them really came out. The lights in the cave were too dim to get good definition without a flash, and the flash was so bright that all the detail got washed out. I've got one semi-decent shot of the boxwork, but the rest aren't worth uploading.

Went on from there to Crazy Horse, which as the name suggests is a monument to the Lakota chief of the same name, murdered by a US soldier under a flag of truce. Good heartwarming stuff to stoke the fires of White Guilt. Seriously - if you don't know the story of Crazy Horse, read up. We seriously boned this guy.

Anyway, the Crazy Horse monument is a mountain carving like Mt. Rushmore, but it's only just beginning to emerge -- the face is pretty much done, and you can start to see the outstretched arm and horse's head. Also, it's on a much grander scale than Rushmore - something like 10x larger overall. More info here.

On the way back to the campsite I dallied briefly at the extremely picturesque Sylvan Lake, and then almost hit a buffalo.
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Keystone, South Dakota, United States

Left the Badlands this morning and moved on to the Black Hills.  On my way to the campsite, I stopped off at Mt. Rushmore.  There's a nifty little concession in the nearby town of Keystone, where you can take a chairlift up to a nearby peak and get a decent view of the faces, have a hamburger than take an Alpine Slide down (http://www.presidentsslide.com/).

I hadn't been on one of these slides in ages, so I figured it was worth the nine bucks to give it a go.  Plus I was hungry and there was a burger place at the top.  Epic win!

Once I got back down to the bottom in Keystone, it was back up for a trip to the monument itself.  One of the things that surprised me was how high up the carving actually is - In most of the photos and Alfred Hitchcock action sequences that involve the faces, you don't really get a sense of their true location.  I had always thought that the monument was carved into more of a butte that rose from relatively level ground - not so.  This thing is really up there, which makes the achievement that much more impressive.
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Interior, South Dakota, United States

Today was my last day in the Badlands, and I decided to cap off this park visit with a nice long hike. I took the Castle/Medicine Root trail, which is about 7 miles through fairly flat terrain. While it is relatively flat and therefore lacks any significant physical challenge, this was one of the most enjoyable hikes of the last few days because of the intense isolation and quiet on the trail. Over the entire 6+ miles of trail I passed a total of 4 people, 2 of them within the first half mile from the trail head.

This walk also provided an interesting contrast to my previous sojourns into the park: on all the other significant trails throughout the Badlands you tend to be navigating your way through a never-ending series of peaks and valleys, never reaching a top or a bottom. No matter how high you get, there's always some spire above you that's impassable; no matter how low you get there's always some treacherous ravine you can't enter (well... you could... but the return would be problematic).

The fractal nature of the peaks and valleys also lends itself to a loss of scale - it's actually quite difficult to judge how far away a given feature might be, because there are so many like it in shape in the immediate vicinity, but scaled drastically up and down.

These landscape features combined to give me the feeling of being permanently suspended, never reaching a state of equilibrium. After 3 days of this, the long and meditative trek through parched plains and prairie was just the tonic I was looking for.

Plus, as I came close to the original trail head, I stumbled across a small herd of Bighorn. I got a bunch of clear shots, but most of them were of sheep butts so I picked just the ones that showed something a little more interesting.
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Buffalo, Wyoming, United States

I'm done with the Badlands, through the Black Hills, and on my way to Yellowstone... Significantly, I'm also out of about a week of almost total comms blackout. I'm in the process of filling in some of the blanks from Aug. 27-31 now. Stay tuned for more fun photos!
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