Month: June 2013

After a short drive from our hotel near Aspen, we arrived at the western entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park.

The views along the highway during our drive were impressive.  Though shot through the windshield of the car, you can see in this picture that I-70 running eastward was at one level and running westward was at another level.  At some points this height difference was as much as 100 feet.  At one point, we went around a mountain, but I-70 westward, high above us, went through a tunnel.

We had actually visited this park three years ago, and we’re trying to not repeat sites until we get to all 50 states; however, Rocky Mountain was on the way home from Arches.  The last time we visited we hiked sites on the eastern half of the park.  This time the plan was to drive the western and northern roads, ending in Estes Park on the eastern side.

We began our visit with a short hike to Adams Falls.  The picture shows the upper half of the falls as they approach the overlook.  The falls then curve 90 degrees and continue to drop.

We could have continued this hike another five miles to some mountain lakes but only took it as far as this first mountain meadow.  We wanted to get up into the mountains.

On the way up the mountains from the visitors center, we saw quite a bit of wildlife.  Like in Yellowstone, it’s easy to determine when someone has spotted an animal, because a traffic jam forms.  In this picture you can see a moose grazing in the meadow.

Moose are typically active at dawn and dusk and tend to stay in tall foliage.  The other moose we saw on this trip were standing in tall grass and were difficult to see.  This one was right out in the open.

Not far up the road from the first moose we encountered this pair by the side of the road.  While they did not seem overly concerned by the cars passing them, they did keep a wary eye on us.

 

We took a nice short hike through another mountain meadow.  There were nice descriptive signs along the marked trail that explained different aspects of what we were seeing.  In this picture, Tom, Sam, and Candy are testing just how cold this mountain stream really is.

Along the road we passed this group of mountain sheep.  They were actually quite some distance away, but I happened to have the long lens on the camera.

 

Along the drive we stopped at a number of scenic overlooks.  This one, at Gore Range, is soon after we crossed the continental divide but just before we reached the highest point along the road.  We had just passed a sign saying that we were two miles above sea level.

 

We stopped at a parking area with a trail that led to this rock formation.  It was a short, but surprisingly difficult, walk at that altitude. The marked trail passed through terrain classified as arctic tundra.  We saw a few large marmots running across the path during this walk.

At the top of the rocks we found this dial.  The marks on the dial are used to aim your view in a particular direction and then indicate the number of miles (sometimes several hundred) to another mountain peak.  We were at 12400+ feet above sea level.  Note that even in late June, we could still see snow.

While we certainly weren’t at the highest mountain peak, we were at the highest easily-accessible peak.  The views were terrific.

 

After a couple more hours at Disneyland, we got on the road for a grueling drive through the Mojave to Moab, UT, to see Arches National Park.

Along the way we passed by Barstow, CA, the site of the National Training Center, and Victorville, the site of the DARPA robotic car Urban Challenge.  We also had a chance to overdose on chili dogs at Weinerschnitzel, one of our favorite fast food restaurants when we lived in Texas.

Despite a very late arrival in Moab, we get started bright and early at Arches National Park.  This was the first stop on this Summer’s trip where we had a lot of heat.

The famous arches of this park are formed by snow and rain eroding the sandstone of the mountains and hills.  Over time, “fins” are formed in the mountains.  The fins often erode to from arches, and then over time the arch becomes so thin that it collapses.  The park offered several opportunities for short hikes (1 to 3 miles) as well as longer, more-serious hikes.  Due to the heat, we only took the short hikes.

One of our first stops was the trailhead for a short hike through the “Park Avenue” formations.  They have this name, because the series of rock formations look a little like a city skyline.  This one looked to me a little like an Easter Island head.

This was a one-way hike.  Candy dropped off Tommy, Sam, and me and then drove to the other end of the hike to pick us up.

One of the more famous formations in Arches is the Balanced Rock.  You can walk pretty close to this formation, but there are signs everywhere to stay on marked paths.  What looks like just sand and gravel is covered by a microscopic “biocrust” that is damaged by footsteps but is essential to minimize soil erosion and as part of the food chain in the region.

We took at short walk to see the North and South Window arches.  Not far away are two more arches, called the Turret Arch.  A disappointing aspect of this park was the huge number of people.  It’s not too obvious from this picture, because I waited until the crowds had passed to snap the shot, but everywhere we went, we were fighting crowds.  We did take the “primitive trail” around the back side of these two arches.  That might have been the only time all day that we weren’t in a big crowd.  The people in this picture help provide some sense of scale for the size of these arches.

After a picnic lunch we took a short hike to the observation point to see the famous “Delicate Arch,” the unofficial state symbol for Utah.  The walk was hot and dusty.  The arch itself was a bit of a disappointment.  While impressive, unless you want to take a six-mile hike to its base, you cannot get very close.

I think what makes Delicate Arch interesting is that it seems to be standing all alone.  The other arches are still part of massive fins.

While driving to see the Landscape Arch, we passed Skyline Arch, which might have been the most picturesque one we saw all day.

Landscape Arch (toward the left of this shot) has an interesting story.  The arch stretches over 100 yards across.  In 1971, when tourists were allowed to walk up to and under this arch, tourists heard cracking sounds and pebbles began to fall.  The cracking provided warning for the tourists to flee just before 180 tons of rock fell from the underside of this arch.  This is as close as you can get now.  At its thinnest, Landscape Arch is around six feet thick now, and it’s unclear how long it will remain an arch.

About 1600 we got back in the car and headed to Colorado to position ourselves for touring Rocky Mountain National Park the next day.

 

 

After a short interlude in our vacation for me to attend a work meeting, we continued to Anaheim, CA, for a couple days at the Disneyland resort.  While Walt didn’t like the hotels, t-shirt shops, and other commercialization that built up around Disneyland (which is why he purchased so much land in Florida), a nice aspect of Disneyland is the ability to stay in a hotel right across the street from the parks and walk.  You can walk from our hotel to Sleeping Beauty Castle in about 10 minutes, depending on the number of people waiting to get through the turnstiles.

The first day we spent the morning and a little of the afternoon at Disney’s California Adventure park.  While this park has a few interesting rides, it just doesn’t seem “Disney.”  The whole Paradise Pier area seems more “Three Flags” than Disney.  We really enjoyed the Toy Story attraction (hitting it five times), which is like the one at Disney Studios in Florida.  We also enjoyed the Grizzly River Rapids raft ride.  New since our last visit to Disneyland was the Cars Land, themed on the Cars movies.  The Radiator Springs Racers ride combined aspects of Test Track (Epcot) and Splash Mountain (all the Magic Kingdoms).  I thought it was a little short for the amount of time spent waiting.  Disney seems to be spending a lot of time developing splashy rides that are too short and are not “people eaters.”

Then we went over the the Magic Kingdom for the rest of the day.  We had intended to just hit a few rides this first partial day, knowing that we had a whole day the next day.

We beelined for The Matterhorn.  This has always been a favorite of mine, being one of the many rides at Disneyland not found at Disney World.  It was closed during our last visit.

The next day we went to The Magic Kingdom as the park opened, heading straight for Fantasy Land to hit all those rides before the crowds got bad.  We also had a chance to see all the new parades and many of the new shows.  We stayed late for the fireworks.  Sam really wanted to go on Splash Mountain, which was closed all day.  It opened about 2130, and after a 20 minute wait we were finally able to go on this ride.  We finished just in time to watch most of the Fantasmic water, light, and fireworks show and then hit a few more rides before the park closed.

The third day we spent just a couple of hours in the parks before beginning our death drive to Utah through the Mojave Desert.  We took this time for a little last-minute souvenier shopping and to hit the Toy Story and Indiana Jones (another Disneyland exclusive, deemed “awesome” by Sam) rides before bidding a sad farewell to the “happiest place on earth.”

One last note.  The last time we visited Disneyland and sat through Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln we were sorely disappointed.  They had modified the show — not for the better.  In fact, I wrote a letter to the company, entitled “Cheap Technology Tricks at the Expense of Mr. Lincoln.”  Great news!  They have gone back to the original show and added the most advanced animatronic figure to date.  The show was terrific, and Mr. Lincoln’s words about the nation only being defeated from within, not from external enemies, is a poignant and timely today as they were when he first uttered them.  I wish our national “representatives” could watch this attraction and take his words to heart.

 

We began this leg of the trip with a visit to Cape Meares state park in Oregon to get a view of the Pacific ocean and to see a light house and the Octopus Tree.

From this view, we were all convinced that this is where they filmed a couple of the scenes from the movie Goonies.  See those rocks in the background.  Well, we were close.  The movie, including all of the exterior scenes, was shot in Astoria, OR, which is about 25 miles north of here.  According to a Web page we found, only one of the rocks in the movie was real; the other two were added digitally.

At Cape Meares there was also this eight-trunked tree a short hike from the parking lot.

We spent all day in Oregon and California (the next day) on Highway 101.  A few miles south of Cape Meares we stopped at the beach to stretch our legs.  The views of the Oregon and California coasts were really impressive.

Just about every time we could see the Pacific Ocean, we could see huge rock formations near the coast.  Here the kids put their feet into the frigid water.

On these trips we like to mix national parks with old-time tourist traps.  Once such tourist attraction is the Sea Lion Cave, which has been operating since the 1930’s.  Here Tom and Sam took a tour down an elevator to a naturally-formed cave where seals and sea lions gather.

Sam’s verdict:  the sea lion cave was “awesome.”  In this picture you can see a bunch of sea lions gathered on one of the rocks in one of the caves.  Screens were used to keep the sea lions from traveling up the pathways built by the owners — and to prevent idiots from going for a swim with the sea lions.

The next day’s journey began in northern California at Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park.  This state park, which is full of giant redwoods, was where the speeder bike scene in the Star Wars movie, Return of the Jedi, was filmed.

We took the hike around Stout Grove at around 0700 when there was only one other person there.  It was quite, peaceful, and amazing.

This picture gives you some sense of scale.

I thought we might see a few redwoods, like in Yosemite, but there were thousands of redwoods in this area and the combined redwoods national and state parks that travel at least a hundred miles down the California coast.  In this view, just about every tree you see is a giant redwood.  Here we learned a couple of interesting facts.  When a redwood grows a branch, that branch remains at that height as the tree grows; all the growth is from the top.  At some point, those lower branches no longer catch light, so the giant redwood self prunes those lower branches.  That’s why the redwoods have few branches at the lower heights.  There are at least two species of giant redwoods, one that grows very tall and the other that grows less tall but much thicker diameter.  These woods are full of banana slugs that are about six- to eight-inches around.  These slugs eat everything except redwood seeds and seedlings.  These redwood forests actually need forest fires from time to time.  Those fires do little or no damage to the redwoods, but they clear out the underbrush and small threes that compete with the redwoods.

Did I mention that these trees are big?

Continuing down the California coast we stopped at a couple of tourists traps to look at things carved from fallen redwoods (e.g., bird houses, wind spinners, picture frames, book marks, coasters, etc.) and other stuff.  One place we stopped included this huge redwood, called the Grandfather Tree and the One-Log Home.  The one-log home is a mobile home trailer built from a single, hollowed-out redwood log. You could see the Grandfather Tree for free and were invited to visit the nearby gift store.  The one-log home cost a dollar, and you got to it through the gift store.  It was lunchtime so we had a couple of one-log home burritos and hot dogs before continuing down the road.  I bought a coaster made from a piece of a redwood, and we squished a couple of pennies for the kids’ collection.

 

 

It’s hard to tell from this picture, but the roof with the words rests on a single redwood log that was hollowed out to make a trailer home.  The trailer is still under the home, making it possible to move it again if desired.

The interior is very 40’s or 50’s, adding to the charm of this one-of-a-kind vehicle.

After these stops we continued southward on 101, stopping seldom along the way.  About 60 miles from the San Francisco area the terrain along 101 changed from amazing, continuous, primeval forests of redwoods to terrain that looked more like North Dakota.  We got caught in terrible, rush-hour traffic in the San Francisco area and didn’t get to Gilroy until around 1900.  Gilroy is the garlic capital of the world, so loving garlic, I stopped at the Garlic City Cafe for roasted garlic, garlic soup, and an entree with lots of garlic.  The food was quite good; although, the service and ambience were only passable.  We finally arrived in Santa Barbara a half hour after midnight.  It had been a grueling day.

In Santa Barbara, I reverted to work mode for a three-day conference while Candy and the kids relaxed at the beach and hotel pool — but I did get to have a burger from In and Out Burger for dinner the first night of the conference!  This is my favorite burger joint and a must-do every time I’m on the left coast.

Next stop:  Disneyland.

We finally reached Mount Rainier about 1130.  Mount Rainier was the fifth designated National Park.  The United States has 59 national parks, which are operated by the National Park Service, an agency of the Department of the Interior.  National parks must be established by an act of the United States Congress. The first national park, Yellowstone, was signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant in 1872, followed by Mackinac National Park in 1875 (decommissioned in 1895), and then Sequoia and Yosemite in 1890.   Mount Rainier was the first to be designed specifically as a national park, so the roads are laid out to enhance enjoyment of the park rather than just the most efficient transit.  According to the video at the visitors’ center, when you go around a bend in the road and see a majestic view, that was intentionally designed into the road system by the architects and engineers.

Soon after entering the park we took a hike near the Ohanapecosh Visitor Center (closed due to sequestration) to see the hot springs and the Silver Falls.  According to the National Park Service, there is so much vegetation in Mount Rainier National Park that there is more biomass here than in most tropical rain forests.  I can believe that from this short hike.  We saw huge, tall pines that were more than a couple of hundred years old.

Part of the area we hiked through had initially been developed as a rest camp with 30 cabins where visitors enjoyed the “restorative” powers of the hot springs.  Today the cabins are gone and the area is returning to its natural site, but you can get close enough to touch the hot water coming out of the ground.

This was a 3.5-mile hike over hilly terrain, but it was well worth the walk.  The falls were quite impressive.

Those two little specks at the top of the falls are Tom and Sam.

After a couple of hours in the Ohanapecosh area we continued driving to the Paradise Visitors Center on Mount Rainier itself.  We came around a corner and were greeted by our first full view of the mountain.

Along the way to Paradise, we stopped to see this “box canyon.”  On this very short hike we saw where the river has carved itself through the rock and also where glaciers have smoothed out the rock around the top of the canyon.  The river is about 115 feet below us where I took this picture.  Just a little farther away it was 185 feet down.

Finally we made it to the Paradise Visitors Center.  After an obscenely-priced meal at the cafeteria, we walked a little way up the Paradise trail.  When the snow melts you have to stay on designated trails, but while the snow is four or five feet deep (as it was this day), you can wander freely.  Way up to the right we could see people body surfing down the steep hillsides.

 

From the Paradise area, Tom, Sam, and I took a hike to the Nisqually Vista, from which we could see the Nisqually glacier.  The trail was invisible other than the poles stuck in the ground.  We “power walked” the two miles along the icy trail.

Sam had some trouble staying on her feet, but her falls were quite acrobatic.  Tommy was laughing so hard the tears in his eyes made it hard for him to walk.

This is the view that greeted us at the end of the hike.  Behind the kids you can see where the glacier has carved out parts of the mountain.

The last thing we stopped to see before heading to Oregon was the Narada Falls.  This was an unplanned stop, but well worth the time.

This picture doesn’t really do justice to these Falls.  They were enormous.  Where the water crashed below, a dense mist billowed up to twenty or thirty feet above where I took this picture.  That’s why the picture looks a little foggy.

Tomorrow we’re off to explore the Oregon coast.

Yesterday morning we left Spokane for a two-and-a-half hour drive to Mount Rainier National Park.  Initially we drove through a lot of desert-like terrain until we crossed the mountains at White Pass and entered central/western Washington.

Once we got to the “green” part of WA, the views were spectacular.

We stopped at a roadside turn off to see these falls.  For something that’s barely marked on the map, it was impressive.

This day was mainly a travel day to get us from Glacier to striking distance of Mount Ranier, but to break up the monotony of the drive we stopped to spend 90 minutes at the Crystal Gold mine in Kellog, MT.

The mine was opened in 1879 and closed in 1881.  It was lost until about 10 years ago.  When someone bought the land to develop into a trailer park, he found water coming out of the ground.  Thinking it might be a hot spring, they dug a little and found the flooded mine.  After pumping it out, they found there was still a lot of gold in the mine, stuck between veins of white quartz and hard rock. After mining enough gold to get rich, he turned it into a tourist attraction.

In the picture (above) Tommy is looking at how copper is leaching from the rock and forming grass-like fingers.  We thought it was some sort of moss, but in fact it was copper.  We saw quartz, iron, gold, silver, and platinum in the rock.

After the underground tour, the folks running the mine take everyone out for an hour of panning gold.  They make sure there is real gold in the dirt to be panned.  The kids found small flakes, the guys called flower gold.  We could have spent all day finding enough of the flower gold to amount to anything, but the kids had fun.  It was a nice way to break up the drive before continuing to our hotel in Spokane, WA.

The second phase of this year’s vacation involved two days in Glacier National Park.  Like many of the places we visit on these multi-state vacations, we could easily have spent a week here if we wanted to see all the sites and take all the hikes.

We had to travel through most of Montana to get to the park from North Dakota.  We had accomplished most of the drive the day before, but we still had a couple of hours of travel the first morning to get to the park.  The picture (above) is just one of hundreds of long expanses of grassland we passed through.  It’s hard to capture in a photo just how far you could see into the distance.

Almost immediately upon entering the National Park we came across a sign for a one-mile hike to Apikuni Falls.  A mile?  How hard could that be?  Well, it was real mountain goat country, but it was quite impressive once we got there.  This picture (above) is just the base of the falls.

This picture is a wide shot that shows the full extent of the falls.

This is what we passed through to get to the falls.  All of these trees were over 40 feet tall.

This is the Glacier Park Lodge where we stayed.  After our first hike, we continued to the lodge and checked in.  When the hotel was rebuilt in the 1930’s it was styled on Bavarian or Swiss architecture, because they were billing the area as “America’s Alps.”

We then took at four-mile hike to Redrock Falls.  It was a pleasant, mostly-level hike.  These falls (only partially shown here) might be my favorite of the many we saw on this trip.  The water churned in and around large rock formations, and you could get close enough to touch the water — which was quite cold!  You can see from this picture why the are called “red rock.”

This picture is out of order.  It shows a view of Glacier from the Many Glacier entrance road.  This is how we were greeted upon entering the park.  The views were amazing.

One of the appealing things to me about staying in the old, majestic hotels inside the national parks is that they do not have televisions.  People gather in these common areas.  This picture (above) is the lobby of our hotel.  There was always a fire in the fireplace in the center of the room.  The weather was in the 50’s and 60’s most of the time, but the fire was nice.  In the evenings people gathered here, on the expansive back porch, or other common areas to chat, have a snack, and enjoy the views.  There was an enclosed “breezeway” that connected this main building from another building of hotel rooms.  The staff had partially-assembled jigsaw puzzles on many of the tables in these common areas for people to work.  There was a cupboard full of board games for people to use.

As is our tradition, we brought our dominoes with us.  We found an unclaimed table in the breezeway and played dominoes until the sun nearly set (probably 2200 hrs) while snacking on huckleberry licorice and sunflower seeds.

 

The next day we left Many Glacier and re-entered the park at East Glacier.  Driving up the “Going to the Sun” road to Logan pass, we stopped to take a hike that should have taken us to three waterfalls:  Barring, St. Mary, and Virginia; however, the path from Barring to St. Mary and subsequently Virginia, was closed.  Bears were on the trail feating on an animal carcass, so the park service closed the trail.  We did get to see Barring Falls, however.

The views on the Going to the Sun Road were as impressive as those from the Many Glacier area.

We ran into some politicians along the way.

Another view on the Going to the Sun road was Wild Goose Island.  There can’t be five trees on this small island in the middle of water, but the brochure said that this is one of the most photographed spots in the park.

Logan Pass was still closed to vehicle traffic, but it was open to hikers and bikers.  They are still clearing snow and ensuring that there won’t be any late Spring rock slides.

We did hike a little beyond where the road was closed.  Since we couldn’t continue on Going to the Sun Road to West Glacier, we had to leave the park and drive two hours around the southern end to re-enter and see the other side of the pass and the areas around Lake McDonald.

While West Glacier was much more “woodsy” and much less mountainous, we took a hike from the northern end of Lake McDonald toward the Sacred Dancing Cascade.  Along the way, we stopped to cool our feet in the numbingly cold water.

As is our tradition, we generally avoid chain hotels and opt instead for mom and pop places.  Here is our cabin in Lone Wolf Resort about ten miles outside of Glacier National Park.  The cabin had electricity but not much else.  We used shower and bathrooms in the nearby comfort station.  Amusingly, you needed to put $0.50 into a coin box to get 10 minutes of water in the showers.  The women’s showers worked fine, but when I put my two quarters into the box, my shower didn’t turn on.  As I had no more quarters, Tom and I split 10 minutes.

The kids enjoyed the upper bunk, particularly finding novel ways to get into it without using the provided ladder.

Off to Washington State via an 1880’s gold mine in northern Idaho tomorrow.

Two weeks after moving into a new house, the Surdus began their annual multi-state romp.  I was on a business trip to the left coast the early part of the week, but instead of flying home, I flew to Minneapolis and met Candy and the kids there.   After linking up and getting the rental car, we went to the Mall of the Americas to nose around and have dinner.  While many of the stores and restaurants are the same as those found in other malls, they did have some things that seem to have disappeared, like GOOD game stores and stores with interesting “stuff.”  We enjoyed the huge Lego store.  The picture (above) is of Tommy looking at a “pointillist” picture made of Legos.  We played miniature golf in the mall and found the indoor amusement park interesting, though we didn’t go on any of the rides.

The next day we headed northward to Lake Itasca state park.  The Mississippi River flows some 2500+ miles, but you can wade across the Mississippi at Lake Itasca, where the river begins.

Within the park we took a several-mile hike to an old fire watch tower, which provided a terrific view of the area.

We were attacked by mosquitos and ticks during this trek.  The next day I had over forty mosquito bites on my legs.  Despite staying on the marked trails, we each had six or seven ticks on us, and we were still finding ticks in the car the next day.  We also hiked to the headwaters and waded across the river.

The water was cool and clear — quite different than at its other end in New Orleans.

After several hours at Lake Itasca, we began a LONG car ride to Bismark, ND, to position ourselves for the next day’s activities.  Towns were few and far between, but when the GPS noted something called “Pizza Ranch,” Tommy decided that we couldn’t resist checking this out.  We got off the highway in the small town of Casselton, ND.  Pizza Ranch turns out to be a small chain with a pizza buffet, a nice salad bar, “famous” chicken, and other food items.  The price even included an ice cream  bar from a freezer.  On a big sign in the restaurant, they list their vision statement as: “To glorify God by positively impacting the world we live in,” so they appear to be like Chic-Fil-A in their management style.  We try to avoid a lot of chains on these trips, but this was an unexpected gem.

The next day we visited Theodore Roosevelt National Park in Medora, ND.  In a previous trip we’d visited the Bad Lands of South Dakota.  This park includes the Bad Lands of North Dakota.  While none of the “mountains” are particularly tall, the views are amazing.

We went on four hikes during our visit.  Each hike had a brochure at the trail head with descriptions of points of interest that corresponded to marked points on the trail.  None of the hikes were too strenuous, but they were fun and interesting.

I expected North Dakota to be pretty flat, but most of the state that we drove through was very hilly.  Of course, the Bad Lands are very hilly, but most of the state seemed to consist of rolling, grass-covered hills that looked more like pictures of parts of China than the “great plains.”

This was one of the shorter hikes, out to a point where you could look down into the Bad Lands almost 360 degrees.

After being nearly eaten alive by mosquitos the previous day, the higher, dryer terrain near Theodore Roosevelt National Park seemed cool and windy, which made the day nearly insect free.

The hikes tried to limit hikers to the marked paths in order to control erosion.  Along many of the paths, we could see numerous animal tracks and signs of Bison, but we saw no animals during our hikes.

One of the interesting hikes took us through an area were a close-to-the-surface vein of coal had burned for nearly 30 years, beginning in the 60s.  It was interesting to see how the underground fire had changed the landscape.  These underground coal vein fires are started by lightning, brush fires, or spontaneous combustion.

After several hours in the park, we ate at the Cowboy Cafe in Medora (shockingly overpriced and underwhelming food) and got on the road for Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana.

It’s hard to see in this picture, particularly after I down-sampled it to upload it to the blog, but the bison hoof mark is almost 10 inches across.

We saw herds of buffalo along the road leading to the park, but we only saw five or six buffalo inside the park.  The first few we saw appeared to be sleeping in the tall grass.  This one was actively grazing.

This is a panoramic shot taken with an app on Candy’s phone, which proves that I can be in multiple places at once.

Next stop Glacier National Park.