the amazing grace

On our way to our friends house in Firth, NE, just south of Lincoln, we stopped at the They Also Ran Gallery in Norton KS.  This small gallery located inside the First State Bank of Norton, displays pictures and information on the candidates that lost the election!  A very timely stop the day before Election Day!  Because of the upcoming election, there was a frame on the wall displaying a large question mark!  We were told that they would have a live camera focused on the picture frame the right of the election so that people could see who went into the frame.  We found a picture from during the streaming of who will be going into the frame on Inauguration Day!

After leaving the gallery, we stopped at the Geographic Center of the Contiguous United States in nearby Lebanon KS!

After leaving Park City, we headed towards Colorado Springs, CO, following our uncle Conrad.  We decided to split the trip into two days, so we stopped for the night on a ranch outside of Baggs, WY.  We were planning on sleeping in a fith-wheel trailer parked at the ranch but when we got there we decided to sleep under the stars (without our tent because it was still in Salt Lake City getting repaired!) Before bed Conrad drove us out on the alfalfa field to look for deer.  As we were driving along we sam a big animal that looked a little like a skunk running along the ground!  Upon closer inspection, it turned out that it was a porcupine.  The moment we got out of the car, Conrad started chasing the porcupine!  My mom and I though he was nuts because we were under the impression that porcupines shot quills at you!  After a little while, Conrad asked us why we were staying so far away from the porcupine. We told him about the shooting quills and he told us that you had to get hit by their tail to get quills in you.  With this new information, we approached the porcupine and got close enough to take a good picture!  We headed back, and as I was laying in bed I saw a mouse scurry across the fence in front of me.  He kept scurrying for quite a while but I eventually stopped watching and fell asleep.

On our way to Park City, UT, we made a spontaneous stop at Arches National Park.  We planned to just stay for a couple of hours then keep going to Park City.  We decided to camp overnight though, because we wanted to retake some pictures we had lost last year when we drowned a phone whitewater rafting. Except for wind gusts over 40 mph, which kept us up most of the night, the weather was gorgeous and we had the chance to see a sunset and a sunrise!

This arch picture was taken from our amazing campsite!

These remarkable stone formations are called “fins”….like giant sandstone sharks!

Arches has been one of our favorite parks on this trip and last year!

After seeing the sunrise in the morning we packed up, ate a delicious lunch in Moab, UT, and went Geocaching!  We drove along the Colorado River and found 3 Geocaches.  The one pictured below was our favorite.  It took us a good 25 minutes to find!

Just outside of Cortez, Colorado  is Mesa Verde National Park.   We were eager to get here and take the Balcony House tour.  This is one of three or four tours in which you can actually get into the native ruins.  This one had a special draw in that it’s the only one in which you can climb the ladders and crawl through the tunnels that were used 800 years ago as part of daily life.  We made it just in time for the last day of all tours.  Our Park Ranger was giving his last tour before transferring to Channel Islands National Park.   He was a bit choked up at the end as he had really loved his time at Mesa.  We found him,  like all of the other Park Rangers  we met, to be amazingly interesting and “heartfull” about the National Parks.  He was enjoying speaking with Charis about how she could be a ranger too if she chose.  We had a funny moment that night in the tent as right before falling asleep the thought, “we should buy Junior Ranger Hats” popped in my head and gave Charis an enduring case of the giggles!

After seeing the painted desert in Petrified Forest National Park, we drove through Arizona to Canyon de Chelly National Monument (pronounced Canyon de Shay)  This park is co-run by the National Park Service and the Navajo Nation, so it is located on a Navajo Reservation near the town of Chinle.  The ruin above is “White House,” the ending point for the park’s only public trail.  In addition to doing this hike we drove along the scenic South Rim.  The photo below is Spider Rock, seen from one of the overlooks.

We enjoyed the park and our camping experience there, except for a large pack of reservation dogs barking loudly in the night.  In addition to these dogs, we also saw one or two walk through the campground!

This Thursday we went to the Painted Desert side of Petrified Forest.  The pic above is a gorgeous view from one of the overlooks there.  This overlook was also the relative location of a geocache which I had to walk a lot further into the desert than I expected to find.  It turns out that the Geocache was located on the now overgrown roadbed of the historic Route 66.

On our way to the painted desert we stopped and did the half mile trail loop at Crystal Forest.  This was a very worthwhile stop, because though we had seen petrified wood the day before, the logs here were much larger and more colorful than the ones we had already seen.  While there, I completed my Junior Ranger booklet by measuring this large log!

Our next stop was Newspaper Rock, a rock covered in Native American Petroglyphs.  As we approached the overlook, my mom was surprised because when she had visited in 1980 she had been able to get very close to the rock.  Now the only way to view it was from the telescopes at the overlook above it.  We asked a ranger about this  and he said that in 1985, a huge slab of rock had detached from a cliff and fallen on the steps leading down to the rock!

We were browsing through the blog and realized we forgot to post about Lassen Volcanic National Park!  This was our last stop before Redding and we were getting tired.  Lassen is one of the great surprises of this trip.  Neither of us had ever heard of this amazing place until we began our trip planning.  This park is only 45 minute from our friend’s house, so we knew for sure we would make it here.  As it turned out, we camped here for two nights.

Interesting things that happened in Lassen are, first,  we ended up hiking Lassen Peak with the crew that films and hosts “Rock Your Park!”  This group is a bunch of folks who are sponsored by Subaru and make Television Episodes meant to turn kids and families on to the National Parks!  How timely!  We spent some time swapping stories of our National Park Adventures and being influenced in our itinerary.  We had not planned to go to Death Valley until we met these folks and heard their ravings.  We have not yet checked the show out, but will soon when we rest a few days in Park City, UT with a friend.  I believe they can be found on NETFLIX.  The above picture is from Lassen Peak.  We climbed to over 10,000 feet and the winds were fantastic.  It was difficult to keep our balance at times.  It might have been our most difficult hike of the trip.  We found snow!

Second interesting thing about Lassen is that we found ourselves back in an intense “Bear Aware” environment.  We kicked up a conversation with a Park Ranger about this and learned that they had not many bears there until this year.  Apparently a family who was camping in the NP  early in the season, was purchasing a daily rotisserie chicken and setting it out to draw the wildlife.  The bears came and since were reluctant to leave.  The family unfortunately was fined heavily and expelled from Lassen for sure but I believe all of the National Parks.  Don’t do it!

Lassen was created as the result of a volcanic eruption and a massive mudslide.  This is so visibly evident to the naked eye that it is beautiful and terrible at the same time.  It was so easy to imagine the terror to the local people as this was happening!  We could see the route that the mud slid at a ferocious speed as it ripped away an entire forest and leveled the side of a mountain!

After going to Petrified Forest, we spent a while Geocaching in Holbrook, AZ.  We found 5 Geocaches in all.  My favorite was inside the Holbrook Library.  The hint was the Dewey Decimal Number for the “book” that was actually a geocache log!  What a creative idea!

We also found a cache near this sign showing the distance to a number of different cities along route 66, including Chicago.

There was also a Cache in this sign.  The hint was… S!

My goal is to find 100 Geocaches before we get home.  I’m currently at 77, so 23 more to go!

Petrified Forest, the largest concentration of petrified wood in the world, was amazing.  At one point on our hike my mom said, “this place is a mess!”  Small fragments, stumps and even whole logs were scattered at random around the flat landscape.  It looked a bit like Legos or Lincoln Logs scattered on a bedroom floor.  The wood itself was beautiful, hard as stone and colorful from minerals, but still looking like wood.  You could even still see the rings and grain!

We also hiked to Agate House, a Native American dwelling made of petrified wood.