Some days it sucks to be a crane

After a few wonderful days in the high 60s and low 70s, it is snowing here again and will on and off all week. Quite frankly, it is driving us all nuts.



At least we don't have to sit out on a nest keeping the eggs warm. I paid a quick visit to my Sandhill Crane nest and took a shot or two. What dedication. Then again, I guess the bloodlines of the ones who weren't terribly dedicated ended long ago. Darwin at work.



Brrr.



There is another crane nest in town that has gotten some interest. It is located in the Swaner Nature Preserve. Some people who live close by have set up a long distance "nest cam". You can watch them do their crane things, which yesterday included the eggs hatching. The picture quality is poor today because it is shooting a long distance through a snowstorm.

I haven't seen the chicks yet, but occasionally they have come out to play. Tough first day. Should have waited to be born next week.

This gives me some hope that the nest I am photographing may have chicks soon!

Today's blurry picture

Can you guess what this is?



It is a butt-view of this red winged black bird flying away faster than I could focus.



Just seemed like a cool picture when I pulled it off the camera.

Sandhill Crane

I recently found this Sandhill Crane sitting on her nest.



My goal over the next few weeks is to get some good photos (without disturbing her). Hopefully I can get some as she hatches and raises here chicks. I haven't seen the nest without her in it, so I have no idea how many eggs are there.

Snow Canyon in St George

The last step in our trip through southern Utah was St George. We stayed at a very nice spa/resort, the Red Mountain Spa. One of the best features of the resort was its proximity to Snow Canyon State Park. This park is about 6 miles long and is full of trails, both single track and paved.

When we were there, it felt like we had the park to ourselves. We did a 6 mile hike and probably ran across six or eight other people.



Like so much of southern Utah, the scenery is all about the rock. Red, yellow, orange, pink, and white, all mixed together in layers. Here you can see Julie hiking on the appropriately named White Rocks Trail.



There were a number of different cacti growing in the park. Some were blooming in pretty pinks and yellows, but these were my favorites. You wouldn't want to fall into one.



When you got into the white rock and the sun went behind the clouds, you lost all the color. No problem, just start looking for texture.



This is the view from just outside our hotel room, looking back towards the state park at sunset. In addition to the glowing red rock, you can see lots of black lava rock in the field. There were active volcanoes around the park as recently as 10,000 years ago. You can actually climb down into some of the old lava tubes that run through the park.



Snow Canyon is a wonderful little park. To see the best colors, go sometime close to sunrise. Most of the big, colorful walls get morning sun and afternoon shade.

Zion National Park

This makes more sense if you first read the Bryce entry below. Blogs always seem a bit broke if you have one event spread over multiple days.

After two very nice days in Bryce Canyon, we took off for Zion National Park, about two hours to the east. When we arrived, it had clouded up and looked like it might rain soon. The bad part was the howling wind, gusting up around 40 mph. So much for hiking.

Fortunately we have found a wonderful hotel to stay in when visiting Zion. We visit the Cable Mountain Lodge in Springdale. It is a very nice, comfortable, spacious place to stay and is a two minute walk from the entrance to the park.



The Virgin River runs through the park and right behind our hotel. After a night of heavy rain, it had transformed from a swift current to standing waves and big rapids. I was glad to see the water still had a ways to go before filling our parking lot.

Another day of no hiking. We decided to head to St George where the weather was supposed to be better.



Since we stayed at the Cable Mountain Lodge a year or two ago, they added some new high tech toilet seats. Here is the remote. Yes, this is the remote for the toilet seat. I was a little uncomfortable sitting on a toilet seat that was plumbed and had an electrical cord. I was going to take pictures of the auto-bidet in action, but I never could get our to work.



The timeline gets a little confusing, but a few days later, we drove the hour back to do some hiking in Zion. We will keep the organization by park instead of time.

This day brought gorgeous weather. It was sunny and warming into the mid 70's.

One thing you lose in photographing Zion is the scale. This picture looks up at a sheer rock wall. Hard to tell that it is about 3,000 feet high.



Our big hike for the day was up to Angel's Landing. This hike is about 5 miles round trip and is one of the more interesting mixes of hiking you could put under one name. It starts with a 2 mile walk up about 1,000 feet of vertical. We were expecting a decent trail. Instead we got a concrete sidewalk. Some poor guy was building a concrete sidewalk two miles and 1000 feet up from the nearest road. Have you ever seen how heavy a small bag of concrete is?

When we get to Scout Lookout, they actually had a pair of outhouses. I can only imagine the conversation between the manager and the workers. "You want me to build what? Way up there?"



From here, the last half mile got very interesting. Instead of a nice paved sidewalk, you had a trail that wandered along the narrow edge of a long, steep ridge, with thousand foot sheer drop-offs on both sides. They lose about one person each year to falls. At least you don't hit much on the way down.

There were big metal chains bolted into the rock for you to hold on to, but if you had any fear of heights, this could be a miserable experience. Julie and I both ventured part of the way, to a nice overlook. Julie stayed there while I went on to the top.

It was a game of attrition. The further you went up, the harrier it got, and more people decided that they had ventured far enough.



This is a view from part of the way up the last climb. If you double-click on the image, you can see two small buildings. Those are the outhouses we just left.



And if you get to the top of Angel's Landing, here is the view you get. It's pretty spectacular, but I was bummed that it had gotten cloudy. Of course, 30 minutes later, heading back down the hill, the sun was out in all its brilliance.



Chipmunks and squirrels are everywhere in the park system. Even when people don't feed them intentionally, there is nothing like a stiff breeze blowing a half full bag of potato chips down the hill. None of these animals looked like they had just struggled through a long snowy winter.



For our last hike in Zion, we walked down towards the mouth of the Narrows. In drier weather, you can walk up the Virgin River through a 16 mile slot canyon. With the river running so hard, the Narrows were closed.

There is a little beach area at the mouth and several people had decided to decorate it with rock art. They built carefully balanced Zen-cairns out of rounded river rock.



We got robbed of our first day exploring Zion because of the high winds and rain. We were very glad we did the one hour drive back from St George to get a good day of hiking in. The cliffs and canyons of Zion are amazing.

A trip to Bryce Canyon

Julie and I were going to make a trip to St George, Utah back around Thanksgiving to celebrate Julie's birthday. Unfortunately, we had blizzard warnings throughout Utah for both of our travel days. We put the trip on hold.

Now that mud season is upon us, we decided to do our trip to St George and add on two days in Bryce Canyon and one day in Zion National Park. As always, I take a lot of photos, so I am breaking down the trip into chunks. Here's Bryce Canyon.

If you haven't been to Bryce Canyon, you should add it to your must-see list. The main attraction is a giant amphitheater (not really a canyon at all) full of rock spires called Hoodoos. The rock is a gorgeous mix of whites, pinks, yellows, reds, and everything in between.



If you travel further south into the park (18 miles long) you can see another amphitheater, but this one is a bit less spectacular.



It is such an interesting mix of shapes and colors that it is hard to capture. Even if you sat in one place, shooting in one direction, your photos would change dramatically with the sky and the position of the sun.



Some of my favorite areas had interracial hoodoos, with the light pinks and the reds living hand in hand. Of course, they don't actually have hands, but you get the point.



The south end of the park is around 9110 feet above sea level. For those who have skied Park City, that's pretty close to the top of Deer Valley. So, even in mid-May, the hiking trails at this end were all closed because of snow. We got lucky and had two gorgeous days. Right after we left, they had another big snowstorm. So much for being 50 miles from Arizona.



The hoodoos wear down over thousands of years, leaving sand. Sometimes you find patterns of sand that look like they were created by an artist. Is Bryce a Christo project?



Other times it is the hoodoo's shape that is interesting. They range from sheer walls to tiny, thin towers. If you were ever at the beach and made drippy towers with wet sand, you could be a hoodoo master.



Others were almost like giant knife blades, thin towers and walls with edges honed by the years of wind and water.



Every shape and color and yet they all looked beautiful.



And on to another favorite of mine, the trees. It is hard for a tree to grow at elevation. It's harder to grow at elevation in barren soil that was just recently a rock. Now imagine that barren soil is always disappearing, washing down hill. It makes for a tough life and some interesting trees.

This little guy was growing in a big hill of sand from eroded hoodoos. I wonder if it was ever standing up or always just drifted down the hill.



At the top of a hill, you get little water and your roots are always getting exposed.



And some just look like a Charlie Brown Christmas tree. I would guess this poor thing was 20+ years old.



We didn't see a lot of wildlife in Bryce. There were a fair number of Pronghorn, but I never got a great picture. There were the deer that you felt like you might have to kick out of the way. Beggars.



But my favorite animal was the endangered Utah Prairie Dog. We only saw one of the bigger colonies as we were leaving and we didn't stop, but this one guy was quite the ham. Here his is doing the well known "on alert" pose.



And more relaxed, but still not trusting me.



OK, now we are getting relaxed enough the drag along the ground for a good belly rub.



Bryce Canyon is a fantastic place to visit, especially this time of year. It is warm enough to get good hiking in, but the crowds are still two or three weeks off.

On to Zion.

The last of a generation

This past weekend my grandmother, Julia Dunn, passed away. She was 91 years old and was living with her daughter Nancy when she died. She was the last of my four grandparents alive and it's very sad to think that for me, this is the end of an entire generation of knowledge and experiences.



This is a shot of my grandmother and grandfather, Tyler Dunn, outside their house in Hamlet, NC. Most people don't know where Hamlet is, but it's close to the old Rockingham Motor Speedway. Hamlet was a big railroad town decades ago, before such towns withered away, losing to trucking and passenger cars.

I enjoyed the differences of a small town. On a visit as a young boy, I walked downtown and stopped in a store to buy some candy. The store owner looked at me and said "You must be Tyler and Julia's boy. I heard you were coming to visit." That wouldn't happen in the Baltimore/DC area where I grew up.



My grandfather died years ago, but it was amazing he lived as long as he did with a three pack-a-day smoking habit. After many decades of smoking, he quit cold turkey. It wasn't a consideration of his lungs, which were as torn up and clogged as the ones you see in the "stop smoking" ads. They told him that if he kept smoking around the oxygen tanks he needed for breathing, he would burn the house down. All it took was the right motivation and he simply quit, right then.


It's sad to think about my four grandparents all having died, but they were all wonderful people and if there is a heaven, I know they are all safe and sound there.

It's also a reminder that when you get up around 50, it means your parents would be getting old and you grandparents would be quite so.

Well finally...

No big news, but we finally hit 60 degrees here. It's the first time this year.

Julie and I are off to Bryce Canyon, Zion, and St George. Should be a ton of good photos!

The wildlife comes alive

Now that the snow is starting to melt and the weather is warming up, the wildlife is beginning to appear, and sometimes in unexpected places.

We have had a fair amount of fox visits lately. We've seen them and heard them. Up on the hill behind our house, there was a nice, clean line of fox tracks. He clearly knew where he was headed. In contrast, Jasper's tracks run every which way.



Not far off were a different set of tracks. They were too small for fox, so I am guessing raccoon or skunk, but I haven't bothered to get out my tracking guide book.



Meanwhile, the moose are showing up everywhere. This one is wandering down past our local radio station, one block off Main Street. Last night there were three about 200 yards from our house, but it was too dark for pictures.

Most of the moose look like crap right now. As they switch from their winter coats to a lighter, breezier summer wardrobe, they all look like they have mange.



I've driven over an hour to grab photos of the Sage Grouse doing its courtship dance. Other than those adventures, I almost never see one. Even if you are close, they often hunker down and become nearly invisible. Last night, driving home from a Friends of Animals board meeting, I saw four males, all meandering along the road. One wouldn't get out of my way. I finally got Jasper to give him a "Woof" and he walked off the road. I wonder if there is a lek anywhere near our Rescue Ranch.



Mud season is a crappy time around here, but at least the local wildlife provides some entertainment. It won't be long before they all start producing babies. I really want to grab some shots of a fox family this year.

Single cup coffe makers

Even if you haven't used one, you have almost certainly seen them. These coffee makers use little pre-made cups (pods) of coffee, tea or hot chocolate to make one cup at a time. When we were staying with Ken and Jennifer in Raleigh, we used their Tassimo brew system and liked it.


This seemed like it could be the answer to one of our problems: I like a strong, black cup of coffee (yeah Starbucks!) and Julie likes a lighter, flavored cup of coffee or a latte. I came back and did some research.

Seems like it is always something. In this case, the Tassimo counts on heating the brewing water up to 200 degrees, well below boiling, and then pumping it through the grinds. Here in Park City, because of the altitude's effect on air pressure, water boils at about 197, 15 degrees below the "normal" 212. This means that the coffee maker gets upset because boiling water damages its insides and because the sensor never sees the water hit the required 200. Hence, no coffee and a damaged coffee maker. The manufacturer says no higher than 6500 feet, which is about 1000 feet below here.

Go figure!