ramblings of a Seattle travel, food and photography hound
Kodachrome Basin State Park is a curious name. What does a popular slide film from Kodak have to do with a state park? It turns out that in 1949, the National Geographic Society did a story and took photographs of the area and named it after the new film that Kodak introduced. Never mind that... Continue Reading →
At 1.9 million acres, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (GSENM) is the largest park in the Southwest, but one of the least visited. This is one big mother of a park, complete with all the geologic wonders that make the Southwest so visually stunning—hoodoos, slot canyons, buttes, mesas, towering cliffs, all in brilliant colors of vermillion, burnt... Continue Reading →
No trip to the Southwest would be complete without a visit to perhaps the most beautiful (and over-hyped) slot canyon in the world: Antelope Canyon. The breathtaking photographs are everywhere, in travel magazines, on the internet, and virtually anywhere you come across the subject of Southwest travel: narrow sandstone slots flanked by radiant walls of... Continue Reading →
Fraught with controversy from the beginning, the construction of the Glen Canyon Dam was undertaken to provide a cheap source of hydroelectric power and to regulate the flow of water to downstream areas of the Southwest that needed a more consistent supply during drought years. Even to this day, there are environmental impact studies to... Continue Reading →
The Southwest is famous for its slot canyons, narrow passageways carved out of sandstone by the erosive power of fast, flowing water. These canyons typically have very high, vertical walls, making them shadowy and dark for most of the day. They become illuminated to the floor only when the sun is directly overhead. Some passages... Continue Reading →
Just east of the Mt. Carmel Tunnel lies Checkerboard Mesa, a remarkable example of crossbedding in Navajo sandstone, a mesa which you can't help but notice along the highway. Over eons in what used to be a great desert, shifting sands deposited one layer after another, their orientations determined by winds, all eventually cemented over... Continue Reading →
You reach a point somewhere on Scouts Lookout when you have to decide if you’re going to finish the last one-quarter mile of the Angels Landing hike that ascends a narrow fin of rock over a saddle and hogsback. On either side, the trail drops off precipitously over a thousand feet to the Zion Valley floor, with... Continue Reading →
What started out as a hike to Weeping Rock turned into a much longer, splendid hike toward Hidden Canyon. Instead of turning left at the interpretive panel as we should have, we mistakenly turned right. After an hour of hiking that severely tested our legs and lungs, the trail became progressively more challenging, a portion of... Continue Reading →
After our tour ended, we had a few days left before we had to board a flight from Malpensa back to the States. Outside of an extra day in Rome, we chose Bologna as our one and only destination before Milan. One big reason for coming here was its sometimes designation as the "food capital... Continue Reading →
From the Colosseum, our guide led us on a walk through the Roman Forum, an area between the Palatine and Capitoline hills that served as ancient Rome's commercial area. All the buildings now lay in ruins, with only pediments, partial columns, arches and fragments of floors remaining after 2,000 years. The state of the ruins,... Continue Reading →
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