Re-Surfacing

Well, it was a busy last week with packing, cleaning and trying to get a few more paintings off the ground. So, I haven't been too good at the blogging. . Anyway, we took one last off-road adventure with Bill and Sarah to one of our favorite loops through cattle ranches, up into some little canyons near Sycamore Canyon and back over to the Red Rocks near the Hunanki ruins. It was a great day and I took many photos of things I had already photograhed. Just so many photo-ops. We finally got to see a reasonable sized snake in our travels. We think it is a gopher snake and Judy saw a few Javelinas before we left Sedona on Monday morning. We left Northview Rd at 7:45 with a destination of Moab, Utah. We wanted to explore Arches National Park and do some more Jeep'N before settling down. We arrived in time to spend a number of hours touring the park and visiting some of the many natural arches. What incredible scenery.

The next day, we took the Jeep over the Gemini Bridges trail. This was a relatively easy trail but we took a few side trips to play a bit on the slick rock. Remebering I had about 3000 miles to cover, I didn't do anything drastic, just a little fun. Here is a photo of the Gmeini Bridges. From there we stopped at a few interesting sites in Canyonlands National Park before taking the Shafer Rd trail back to Moab. Here is the Mesa Arch in Canyonlands NP. The trip down from the very top of the mesa was pretty scary. The swithbacks were very tight and VERY steep. It was the most nervous I had been on any trail, but once through that first 30 minutes of terror, the scenery was absolutely breath-taking. Here is brief video of the landscape after dropping down from the top of Shafer Rd.

We tried to get up early to head for Yellowstone today. It was a long drive. We crossed Utah from south to north, then a bit of Idaho, Wyoming and stopped in Montana. We passed through parts of Yellowstone on our way to our lodging in Gardiner, Montana. Parts of the park are still closed. I never thought of that. The bad news is we can't go all over the park, the good news is that there are very few people here. We almost have it to ourselves. Have seen lots of wild life already and some beautiful rainbows. This is the first thing we saw upon entering the park. Then this guy appeared. There are elk and bison everywhere.