Los Angeles whirlwind

I spent the day touring Los Angeles. Fortunately I was traveling by rail, after leaving my bike at a warmshowers host in Long Beach. Much easier way of traveling, I must say. It was a very brief overview of the city, since I only had a day, but I packed a lot into that day, starting at Union Station.





One of the rail stations, I forget which one, had a bunch of flying people in it. No idea why, but that seemed to be the decoration theme for the area




A few other highlights:

...some nice fountains in the Grand Park area


...and the Space Shuttle Endeavor


... and ending the day at Watts Towers, a huge pile of artistic scraps

CHDK

Last spring I got. New camera, a just released Canon model with a built in gps function. I had held off buying it until the new model was released because it was supposed to fix several problems from the precious model. The only problem with the new model is that I use additional add on software called CHDK which wasn't available for the new model.

Fortunately an updated release of the software just recently came out, which works with the newer model. Basically this adds a bunch of features on to the original functionality of the camera. The major features that I have uses before are HDR auto bracketing, long exposures, and lightning motion capture. There are a bunch of other useful features, but those are the main ones I make use of.

Bryce Canyon National Park

Once I got to Bryce I found out something really cool about the park which helped me out a lot. Apparently the park is too overpopulated during the summer months, so the park runs a shuttle bus along all the tourist points in the park. This gave me a break and saved some time and effort.

The major attraction at Bryce is the hoodoos which are tall rock spires. Basically it is part of the side of a plateau that has eroded strangely, not really a canyon at all.

I decided to use the shuttle bus a bit, but also take advantage of not having the bike to go hiking along the rim trail to see a bit more of the park. I have to say there is an amazing variety to the people in the parks. Most of them don't seem to be very much the outdoor type, but instead just the general tourist. There are a huge number of foreigners as well, some with large tour groups and others not. Most people also have gigantic cameras, many of whom probably also don't know how to even take it off of the auto setting.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/61247038@N02/sets/72157631685089764/

Canyonlands National Park

Today I got to the Canyonlands Visitor Center right in time for sunrise. The sun rose just over the La Sal mountain range, with an interesting tint due to the smoke in the air. The smoke is from a large fire north of here, it's not enough to smell like smoke, but it does obscure the views from farther off.

After the sunrise I went to the Mesa Arch, which is supposed to be a nice short hike to another arch. The really cool thing about Mesa Arch is that it stands on the very edge of a cliff, so looking through the arch you can see an awesome backdrop. It would have been a good spot for sunrise, but by the time I got there it was a bit later, so a lot of the features were a bit ghostly. This made for a few really cool photos too.

After that I went to a bunch of different overlooks, and a few side hikes to different points. Along with a bunch of views off the edge of cliffs I also visited one spot that was a large collapsed dome area. This area is supposed to be either an old salt dome that burst and eroded, or the site of a meteoroid hit that burst the area and the subsequently eroded away to blast junk.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/61247038@N02/sets/72157631685519221/

Arches National Park

Today I spent the entire day touring Arches National Park. I had camped two or three miles from the entrance so I got there early in the day and was able to devote the entire day to the park.

There was a pretty good climb just to get up from the entrance, and then several other good climbs throughout the day as well. The main route was 36 miles round trip, plus I took a few side hikes as well as an extra five mile detour to see a few more things in the park.

The main attraction was obviously the scattered arches throughout the park, with the most impressive being the landscape arch, which is one of the longest and is very skinny. What was really cool was that a tourist had been on scene when part of it collapsed and had actually caught a photograph during the collapse, which is on display at the arch.

Towards the end of the day I was getting tired, and it started to seem that the landscape was more of the same. One arch seemed just like the next, and the hills seemed bigger on the way out. It was definitely even worse because I knew I had to get back to Moab for the night to pick up more food and water, so I had to do an extra 5 or 10 miles at the end of the day, since I hadn't stocked up for enough days when I went through town the day before.

Conclusion at the end of the day, lots of cool stuff to see, but too many hills.


http://www.flickr.com/photos/61247038@N02/sets/72157631591615488/

Mesa Verde National Park

I spent a day and a half touring the Mesa Verde National Park. The first half day I spent within the front portion of the park, where the focus is more on the natural environment, like a normal national park. There were several short (1+ mile) hiking trails that I explored, to get views of the surrounding peaks, mesas, and valleys. Then I left the park for the night, so I wouldn't have to spend $25 for a campsite in the national park.

The next day I got up early to spend the whole day going around the back side of the park. The closest interesting portion of the park is roughly 20 miles from the entrance, so I had a full day of pedaling, especially given how hilly the park is.

The first archeological site I went to was the Spruce Canyon Tree House, which is one of the cliff dwelling sites, right near a museum. This was one of the cliff dwellings that you could do a self guided tour for free, so I was able to go pretty much right to the dwellings, which were stone houses built into the side of the cliff, in hollowed out sections of the wall.

Then I did a 6 mile loop going through roughly 600 years of Pueblo history. This included several mesa top sites, such as pit houses and village sites on the flat portion of the mesa. The cooler stuff was the long distance views of several more cliff dwellings on the opposing cliff faces. Theses dwellings are several hundred feet from the top of the mesa, and are again carved into the side of the cliff face. Some of them held multiple buildings in a single alcove, so an entire village could survive on the side of the cliff. Then the villagers would climb to the top of the mesa with toe-holds on the cliff face, so they could farm along the top of the mesa.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/61247038@N02/sets/72157631590635320/

Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park

Today I took the first side trip to a National Park, the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park. I hit the park pretty early in the day after doing a particularly nasty climb up to it. I ended up buying an annual pass to all the national parks, since I am planning on hitting quite a few of them over the next year or so.

The park itself was a lot smaller than I was expecting. I was comparing it to Letchworth State Park, in NY, which is roughly 20 miles long along a gorge. The National Park was only 5 or 6 miles going in one direction, and the other direction was at 16% grade, so I didn't want to hit that. The overlooks were also pretty short, averaging about 200 yards from the road to the overlook.

However, the really cool thing about the canyon was the extreme depth and steepness of the canyon. The Gunnison River drops quite a lot of elevation in a very short time, so the water is very fast moving, cutting away at the banks. Pretty much all of the overlooks would caused problems for anyone with a fear of heights, since they drop off more than a thousand feet.

I also got to see the Painted Wall, the largest cliff face in Colorado. Apparently rock climbers sometimes spend several days doing a single ascent. One particular route was Hallucinogen Route, which was climbed in the early 80's by the son of the owners of a store in Cimarron, CO. He spent 8 days on the face of the cliff working out the route, and named it for the fact that you would have to be hallucinating to see a way up the rock.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/61247038@N02/sets/72157631590623974/

Lightning storm

There was a lightning storm last night, and I took the opportunity to try to get some good pictures. Most of them didn't turn out, and it seemed like a lot of the good strikes were when my camera was processing the previous picture. I still did manage to get a few relatively good ones. These were all straight out of my bedroom window, with long exposure, but no tripod.

New Camera

In 2011 while hiking on the Florida Trail my camera broke. I was using a Canon A480, which I had also used on my Appalachian Trail hike.

I was hiking in Ocala National Forest, and wanted to take a picture of a pond and sunset. When I was pulling the camera out of the case, I hit the on button, and the lens tried to open while in the case, which broke something. The camera was still usable, as long as I pushed the lens in by hand each time. I've been using it for the past year like this, but on the recent hike of the Florida Trail, a bunch of sand got in the lens, causing dark spots on the pictures. I finally decided to upgrade.

My new camera is the just released Canon SX260HS. I have been eyeballing the SX230HS for a while now, and this is just an even better version. The main useful features are the built in GPS, 20x optical zoom, and 12 megapixels. No really exciting pictures yet, but I've been trying the camera out around the house, and I'm definitely liking it. The GPS is going to be really useful for documenting future trips.