Great Sand Dunes National Park, San Luis Valley, CO.
The San Luis Valley is a land of superlatives. It’s the size of Connecticut. It’s a vast bowl surrounded on all sides by high mountains—the Sangre de Cristo on the east and the San Juans to the west. Yet it’s as flat as the Great Plains. There’s […]
The Four Corners region of the Southwest is the place where the Architect did something different. After he was done chiseling the vast gorges all over the Colorado Plateau, when he was finished letting his spit fly into the Colorado, the San Juan, the Green and the Little Colorado, when he was bushed after a […]
I have to go back home tomorrow and face a bunch of brushfires that grew into full-fledged firestorms in my absence.
I walk east of Grand Canyon Village along the South Rim, away from the bustle of the tourists at El Tovar. I follow the Rim Trail and stumble upon a rocky outcropping. Well, really everything […]
Know what a ringtail is? I didn’t either, until New Year’s Eve, 1998. That’s when one checked in to my pitch black hotel room on the floor of Zion Canyon in Zion National Park. A ringtail is a southwestern relative of the raccoon, though the only resemblance in my book is that they both have […]
The DSM IV, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition, published by the American Psychiatric Association, diagnoses someone with a Specific Phobia, animal type, when they have a “marked and persistent fear that is excessive and unreasonable, cued by the presence of or anticipation of a specific object or situation (e.g., animals).” […]
After a day’s hike of eight hours, I walked with tender feet down to Bright Angel Creek to see what all the rushing was about. I climbed onto a flat boulder three-quarters the length of me, got down on all fours, and soaked my head in the creek. Twice. I slipped off my boots and […]
I drive into Monument Valley from the north. I’ve tracked the misty rain all day down 191 through southeast Utah. Near the Valley of the Gods, the sun breaks free of its chains and laps just the face of a red, sandstone cliff in silvering varnish. Farther off, the mummified monoliths which imbue the valley […]
I hiked into Clear Creek Canyon this morning. I squatted down in an alcove to watch the lightning strikes on the South Rim. Later I learned that sheltering in a natural alcove isn’t the best protection against lightning strikes because the rock is conductive. You’re supposed to minimize contact with the ground by perching on […]
THUNDERHEAD
Have you ever seen a thundercloud from above? You don’t have to be a test pilot or an astronaut to do it. All you need do is hop on an airliner in July and fly across the middle of America. You’ll see their heads smeared like bug juice on the basement floor of the stratosphere. […]
I hike the North Kaibab Trail down from the Grand Canyon’s North Rim, following the still active Bright Angel Fault. I slip down a narrow side canyon, flanked on either side by Ponderosa pine, with forested buttes in front of me. Eighty miles southeast broods all 12,000 feet of Humphreys Peak, an old stratovolcano the […]
