Don’t worry, I’m not posting all 589 photos, just some highlights. I thought the pictures from my Palm Treo phone were looking OK until I saw the shots from Mark’s ….what is his camera? Lucent? Geez, I don’t remember and he’s not here to ask. Rest assured, it’s a mucho better camera than mine.

2 shots from Nevada, the Shoe shrine–and this is just one tiny part of the whole tree which was covered in various shoe configurations. The Backyard Traveler offers a few myths on how the allegedly biggest Shoe Tree began.

The red door, included only because I think it’s a rockin shot.

Now to Utah and some shots from Canyonlands which is south of Moab on the eastern side of the state. All of the ranger-types with whom we spoke with were, quite possibly, the nicest people ever. Patient, cheerful, helpful–truly lovely people.

Except for the one guy showing us trail possibilities in the Visitor Center. He was just, I don’t know, too dry for words. When he finished pointing out one route, he finished up with, “there are postcards of this area over there on the rack.” I couldn’t help myself. I dead-paned back to him, “Oh, we don’t have to go on the hike if we can get the postcards.”

This first shot is of Newspaper Rock, several miles before the actual park entrance. The tourist info sign said that some of these etchings on the rock were thousands of years old, though they had no way of telling exactly which were from when.

The evening we arrived, we went for a 3 mile hike to stretch the legs after driving across Utah. The silence of the canyons was incredibly calming after a day in the VW.

The next morning we went on an 11 mile hike (didn’t buy any postcards) from Elephant Rock down into Joint Trail which are deep, narrow fractures in the rock. Some of them you can walk through, some you can shimmy through (one of which I think is called “Fat Man’s Misery”), and some are filled in with rock and sand. The weather that day was in the mid to high 80’s, but between the tall rocks (where Mark is standing below) the temperature must have been in the 60’s–it was like air conditioning.

A shot from the trail somewhere near Chesler Park.

Next post will be a few shots from Colorado’s Flatirons in Boulder.