Travel with Sherpa

Visiting Mesa Verde was a great, if short, experience, and novel during this trip in that the focus was much more heavily on the people that called this area home for over a thousand years, up through today. The museum in Mesa Verde is the oldest in the NPS, and openly admits that until very…

I had a little bit of employment stuff to do this morning, and I was low on groceries, so I headed in to Torrey for breakfast and power for my laptop, maybe even WiFi. I fortunately I found d out that my laptop is apparently in a death spiral, not holding any charge in the…

The clouds and the radar cleared up early afternoon, and I found the website where NPS lists flash flood risks, and Capitol Reef was low/non-existent, so I decided to head back to do more of Sulphur Creek, this time starting from the “top”. The entire trail is 5.9 miles, and I covered 2 of those…

The plan this morning was to hike Sulphur Creek Trail. It is about 6 miles one way with waterfalls along the way. I didn’t want to mess with a one-way hike, so I decided to start at the bottom and see how far up I could get. You more or less walk along and through…

So after 19 days of near constant motion and recovery I took this afternoon for a massage and taking it easy with dinner and a movie. A massage at Red Sands Hotel was decent, but they were having plumbing issues, so no steam room or hot tub. Sigh. Dinner was a spinach salad and leftover…

Sunrise was nice, as was climbing back into bed afterwards… Once I got up for real I finalized plans for the day, which unfortunately did not include ,y first choice for slot canyon hike. Peek-a-boo and Spooky slot canyons require a 26 mile drive on a dirt road where multiple people noted seeing more than…

So first of all, I was curious about the name of the park, but it is pretty straight forward, being named after the Navajo sandstone cliffs with dome features that look like capitol buildings, and reef in recognition of it blocking travel. Nothing to do with fossils or marine biology – so disappointing. Oh well. …

I added pages for Arches and Bryce, and copied all of the appropriate posts to those pages to pull everything back together, hopefully that makes things a little easier to navigate for some, particularly those looking to catch up on things. Otherwise, I had a quick call this morning and am getting ready to head…

I started today a bit later, not finishing breakfast and posts until about 9:00. After breakfast I headed out to explore more of the local area. I started with a quick hike to Mossy Cave and Tropic Ditch Falls. The falls were neat, and some history to boot. In 1889 Mormon pioneers started digging this…

Getting night shots at Arches was one thing, there were plenty of other people out doing similar things in the area, so I never felt alone. And the hike was flat and short. Last night was a completely different thing. I started my hike down Queen’s Trail just after sunset, stopping to evaluate different views…