// Adventures and Photography from the Colorado Plateau, Rocky Mountains & Beyond
Saturday & Sunday, December 14-15, 2024
Well, it’s that time of the year when the crowds have finally started to thin and I am ready to begin spending more time exploring the lands surrounding Moab until they start to return again later in February. This weekend I headed over toward Moab early on Saturday morning so I could hike with a friend and visit a bunch of rock art sites that were all new to me before returning home on Sunday afternoon. These are some photos of what we saw.
1 CommentFriday – Sunday, December 6-8, 2024
Things didn’t quite go as I had planned this weekend. I was originally planning to spend the weekend along the western end of the White Rim Trail in Canyonlands National Park and had reserved campsites for both Friday and Saturday nights. However, when I arrived at the top of the Mineral Bottom switchbacks on Friday afternoon I found that they were covered with ice and snow and I really wasn’t feeling like sliding down the road, so I called an audible and headed down to Indian Creek Country and The Needles instead. After making my way over to the Lockhart Basin Road and finding a campsite for the weekend, I then spent the rest of the weekend hiking some new canyons, driving a few new backroads and revisiting some rock art sites that I’ve wanted to re-photograph or that I hadn’t been back to in over a decade. Here are some photos from this unplanned weekend.
Leave a CommentCedar Mesa Chronicles: Chapter 13 | Thursday – Sunday, November 28 – December 1, 2024
This year for the extended Thanksgiving holiday weekend Diane and I returned to the landscape surrounding the Bears Ears and spent all four days wandering a selection of canyons and rims carved into Cedar Mesa and beyond. Our time was split between searching for new sites and revisiting sites that I hadn’t been back to in over a decade but were mostly new to Diane. We saw quite a bit more rock art this time around with only a few ruins scattered throughout our hikes. In the end we had another great weekend exploring one of our favorite places together and look forward to returning again and again. These are some photos of what we saw.
1 CommentLost in the Land of Enchantment | Friday, November 15, 2024
After our brief detour into Texas to explore Hueco Tanks State Park, we returned to the Land of Enchantment on Thursday evening and spent the night in Alamogordo, which is a favorite stopping place for us whenever we are in the area. Then we were up early on Friday morning so we could spend the majority of our day wandering through the boulders found on top of the ridge at the Three Rivers Petroglyph Site. This would be our third visit to this amazing ancient site and it seems that we find quite a few new petroglyphs every time we are here! Although we couldn’t stay all day this time because we were going to be meeting up with the family of one of Diane’s friends who live in nearby Carrizozo, I think we might have finally begun to scratch the surface of what can be found here and we are already looking forward to our next visit, whenever that might be. Below are just a small selection of all the interesting and unusual petroglyphs we saw on this visit to Three Rivers.
1 CommentWednesday – Thursday, November 13-14, 2024
After leaving Carlsbad Caverns on Wednesday and driving into the state of Texas for the very first time, we made our way west towards El Paso and detoured into the Hueco Mountains later in the day where we made a quick stop at Hueco Tanks State Park & Historic Site to verify that their campground was actually closed this night like their website had stated, and it was. Since we couldn’t camp in the park and there wasn’t any public lands nearby, we drove a few miles to the east and found a site to setup our tent just before sunset at the Gleatherland Ranch Campground, which was mostly empty this evening. We ate dinner as the temperature dropped rather quickly, read in the tent for a while and then went to bed early. This would be our first bag night in Texas, too!
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