Grand Canyon
 

...coming soon. I'm about to leave for a trip to New Mexico and Arizona, so expect no posts from me for a week, and some pictures when I get back!

You're so lucky! Looking forward to the pictures.

The Grand Canyon and the redwood forests in Washington state are two of the things I abosolutly have to see sometime before I leave this world.

HM, if you can swing it, check out Grand Canyon National Monument, downstream, on the north rim. At the Park the river is 5k ft down but also 25k ft "out". At the Monument the river is 3k ft down but only 1k ft "out".
Have a safe journey. :biggrin:

Ditto

I'm back, but it may take some time to sort through, resize, and post pictures - I took 326 . It was a pretty cool trip. The weather wasn't ideal, which affected the colors on the pictures, but also made some good clouds in the canyon.

We didn't make it to the north rim, which I believe is closed in the winter anyway.

I got a little time. :)

If you get Irfanview, which is freeware, you can batch all 326 images and tell it to cut down the size and adjust the quality. To create 326 smaller images will probably take less than 10 minutes. You can even stack them on top of each other into filmstrips.

Bruce - heh, cool!

Rich - Thanks, on someone's (perhaps yours) suggestion on a different thread, I picked Irfanview up, and have been using it for resizing. I haven't played with all the options yet. But since I don't plan on posting over 300 pictures, I still need to sort them into "cool" and "crap" piles by hand. Then I can play with batch resizing.

Let me know what the file size is on average. If you want to post them online for a few weeks so everyone can see them, I can probably spare you some web space.

Wow. I dream to see it.

we visited the north rim in the early 90's. i have a really cool pic of jinx in the mist on my desk at work, but i guess i never scanned it. here's another one, tho:

Wow, great pics!

I have a few of the Copper Canyon in the north of Mexico from last summer if anyone wants to see them...

Yes, I've seen ads for Copper Canyon in magazines. Wondered what it looked like. Start a Copper Canyon thread. :thumbsup:

Hee... I'll try to put a few more up tonight. I've got 'em all resized and ready to go as soon as I have a bit of time to spare.

Our first day, we went to Tent Rocks, an amazing little site without even a sign on the highway. Luckily, my brother went to college in Santa Fe, so he knew about it. It is essentially a huge hill made of extremely soft sandstone which erodes very quickly. Rocks and boulders would protect the sandstone under them from the rain, creating a cone or pillar with a rock on top. Eventually, the rock falls off, leaving a teepee-shaped formation. Hence, Tent Rocks.

On the way to Tent Rocks, we got hailed on, and by the time we got there (several miles on a gravel road) it was raining a bit, so we didn't go far, and resolved to come back later in the trip.

So the next day, we made it to the Painted Desert and the Petrified Forest. There's a segment of road parallel to the highway with a bunch of overlooks and trails.

More desert...

A trail down into some clay hills. It had rained recently, so these hills were soft to the touch, and felt somewhat like pudding.

And then to the petrified forest.

That afternoon we made it to the canyon, and I got my first view.

The next day, bright and early, we headed to the Bright Angel Trail for a day hike. The trail had suffered a rockslide a month earlier, and had only recently been reopened. It was extremely icy at the top, and muddy most of the way down, this being an unusually wet winter.

The second picture shows our goal: the point of that triangular green plateau in the middle of the picture. You can see the trail faintly.

Down to the plateau...

When we got to the end, this guy was waiting for us. He wasn't particularly worried about our presence.

The river was still quite a long ways down. It wasn't in the cards for us to make it all the way, since we hadn't been able to reserve a place at the bottom, and we weren't prepared to camp.

Time to head back. The way back was a bit harder.

Great pictures, HM! :thumbsup:

I so have to go there. I just have to stock up on camera batteries and CompactFlash cards.

The next day, I wasn't up for much walking, so we drove down the rim trail, and visited the overlooks. That first photo was from one such overlook. Here are a few more:

The weather got progressively worse. By the time we got to the end, visibility was zero. Later in the day, we wandered up to the gift shops and galleries, and saw many tourists who hadn't been lucky enough to be there before the fog rolled in.

The next morning, the fog had cleared somewhat, so we went to an overlook that looked over the Bright Angel Trail we had walked two days before. We started at the little building you see at the top left.

The trail, continued...

We hit one more overlook on our way out of the Grand Canyon area. By this point the fog was rolling back in.

Back on the road, we eventually came across the Little Colorado River. If this canyon weren't so close to the Grand Canyon, it would be a natural wonder in it's own right.

The next day was spent skiing. No interesting pictures pictures there. But the day after that, we headed back to Tent Rocks. It was snowing this time, which was preferable to rain, so we made it all the way to the top this time.

More Tent Rocks.

An imposing "villiage" of Tent Rocks:

Absolutely amazing! Sounds like an awesome vacation.

And a lone, dessicated tree marks the top, and the end of the journey. We headed home the next day.

Thanks! I brought with me two 256MB cards and one 128MB card, and had to buy another 256MB while I was there. At the shopping center on the rim they were $140! Luckily, we went by a Best Buy in Santa Fe a few days later, and I picked it up for $40. I ended up with 806MB of pictures.
It really was. I'll be sore for a while...

I'll bet!...and skiing Too. :eek:
I found going down Bright Angel tore up my feet. Blisters on the tops from being jammed into the front of the sneakers. I didn't want to wear boots because we were going down the river by boat.

I'm going to steal your pictures of the trail. They are the best I've ever seen including the Park Service. :thumbsup:

Thanks! I just wish there hadn't been quite as much washout in the brighter areas.

Until late in the planning stages I was planning to go down in sneakers. I'm really glad I sprang for boots the day before we left. Luckily, modern boots don't need much breaking in. I only had one hotspot on my heel which became a small blister the next day, and healed up without popping pretty quickly.

That's why god gave us Photoshop. ;)

I see all these beautiful pictures and then ponder the god-a'mighty river that cut the ground. It boggles the mind.

Awesome, awesome.

Accentuating the red on that second one almost makes it look like lava on the fading monitor I'm using right now. :thumbsup:

Think how many snowflakes had to melt to make that river. :rollanim:

Would just like to add my compliments to the list - great pictures hm.

Thanks!

I love that tree. It almost looks like it's wearing gloves.

Heh. It sorta does.

It straddles a narrow point on the cliff, so many hikers have probably used it to hold on to as they passed, and the thicker the branch, the more likely someone would use it, rubbing the bark off in the process.

Someone on Flickr has informed me that it's a California Condor. Wow.

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/happymonkey/10835297/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://photos6.flickr.com/10835297_c706a290e9.jpg" width="500" height="375" alt="Condor" /></a><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/happymonkey/10835114/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://photos5.flickr.com/10835114_fd14ae0692.jpg" width="500" height="375" alt="Condor Canyon" /></a>

Um...aren't California Condors like the most endangered species in North America or something?

Yup... http://hoppermountain.fws.gov/cacondor/

Slightly over 200 in the wild now. This one would be a juvenile owing to the fact that its head is black instead of that scary red.

After doing some reading on the US Fish and Wildlife site, I now know that you, HM, were privleged to see an incredibly rare sight that day. Did you report this encounter?

According to what I've just read, the captive bred condor population (which accounts for all but nine of the surviving birds) are known for being curious and unconcerned around humans. In fact, they apparently were known for this behavior even when there were ample numbers in the wild prior to their endangerment.

I thought it was a vulture of some sort, with the featherless head. It never occurred to me that it could be a condor. It certainly was unconcerned about me, spending more time facing away from the intruding humans than facing us. After 10-20 minutes, it hopped down to a slightly less accessible spot.