Tag: hiking

Exploring Sweden

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View from Skulebergets nature reserve along the High Coast

Continuing our extended Europe trip, Darlene and I crossed over from Copenhagen into Sweden in mid-May.  We had two weeks to explore a bit of Sweden, starting in Malmö.  We visited several connected museums in Malmö before venturing out to the southern coast to see the standing stones at Ales Stenar.  After Malmö, we made our way north along the west coast, stopping in Helsingborg, staying overnight in Falkenberg, visiting Tjolöholm Castle and an automobile/aviation museum before reaching Gothenburg where we spent three days exploring the city via foot, bicycle and canal tour.

4–minute video montage of our trip

After Gothenburg, we left the west coast to traverse across the country and north to the more remote High Coast region of Sweden, stopping along the way at a castle, Läckö Slott (apparently just missing the one daily midday tour) but then overnighting in Skultuna.  Our destination was the city of Örnsköldsvik, from where we went hiking in Skuleskogen National Park, kayaking in the bay, climbing up Skulebergets and touring the coast.


Our last five days were spent in Stockholm, walking and/or electric scooting around the city, visiting several museums, including the spectacular Vasa museum which houses the world’s best preserved 17th century ship – raised and recovered from the harbor sea floor.

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White Sands National Park

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Onward to White Sands National Park in New Mexico – the world’s largest gypsum dune field.  We spent a few hours hiking around and taking pictures.  The fine gypsum feels nice and cool underfoot – it doesn’t heat up in the sun like sand.

I had hoped to also visit the Trinity test site but it’s open to visitors only two days each year (once in April and once in October) due to the site being part of the active White Sands Missile Range. We left the park an hour or two before sunset to find a nice dispersed campsite beyond the next little range of mountains:

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Carlsbad Caverns

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Continuing on our return trip, next stop was Guadalupe Mountains National Park in Texas near the New Mexico border.  We checked out the visitor center and went for a hike in the afternoon before continuing on to camp on some BLM land in New Mexico near Carlsbad Caverns National Park.  The following day was of course to visit Carlsbad Caverns.

We bought tickets for the self-guided tour and spent several hours enjoying and following the extensive walking paths of the cave system.  There are ranger-led tours to some more isolated portions of the cave but these are very limited and get booked up well in advance.  After exploring the cave at our leisure and having lunch back in the van, we waited around to join the ranger-hosted twilight event to learn about the bats that use the cave for much of the year and to wait for their grand, swarming, evening exit from the cave.  No photography allowed (or any devices or talking for that matter) but we did get to watch many hundreds stream out.  Apparently at later times of the year, you can see many hundreds of thousands of bats exit the cave.

We camped on some more BLM land that evening but woke the next day to a forecast for severe high wind and dust storm expected for hundreds of miles in every direction later that day.  We had already planned to restock food in the town of Carlsbad so we ended up just renting a hotel room in Carlsbad to sit out the storm.

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Big Bend National Park

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On our return trip from watching the eclipse in Central Texas, Darlene and I first headed to the southwest edge of Texas to spend a few days exploring Big Bend National Park along the Mexico border.


We didn’t have campground reservations and of course everything in the park was booked out for weeks but we were able to snag backcountry sites which you can only reserve in-person 24 hours in advance.  These are a handful of very dispersed but specifically designated sites along some of the unpaved back roads.  Know that some of these roads require high clearance 4×4 vehicles and some of the sites are very remote, requiring hours to reach.  We actually chose not to take one of these sites because we didn’t want to have to spend so much time to get to it and from it.  As it turned out though, we spent over an hour trying to get to a camp area outside the north end of the park.  In hindsight, we should have looked to find a campground out the more built-up west entrance of the park.

Anyway, we spent three full days hiking, biking and touring very different areas of the park, from desert to mountains and along the Rio Grande.  If you go, make sure you don’t skip out on the really well done Fossil Discovery Exhibit.

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Petrified Forest National Park

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On our way to Texas to see the eclipse, we enjoyed an afternoon checking out the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona: lots of wide vistas and pretty landscapes, some pueblo ruins and petroglyphs, Triassic era fossils and of course lots of colorful “rockified” (okay, petrified) tree remains everywhere.

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Red Rock Canyon

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We reached the final destination of our road trip down SR95 on New Year’s Eve: Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area. The area is full of scenic trails, grand vistas, gorgeous rock formations and lots of bouldering and rock climbing opportunities. As usual, we found places to camp along dirt roads on nearby BLM land.

Due to Red Rock Canyon’s popularity and close proximity to Las Vegas, you have to purchase a timed entry reservation online to access the scenic loop road and its associated trailheads but the system works well.  One thing I’d recommend to make the most of your time is to spend a day exploring the Calico Hills area from the other side – from the free-to-access Calico Basin area – so that you can have more time for other trails on the day you reserve entry to the scenic loop.

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Rhyolite Ruins, Desert Art and Wild Burros

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Continuing south on SR95 from Tonopah and Goldfield, we came through Beatty and reached the Goldwell Open Air Museum a little before sunset:

We spent the next two nights in a spot in the hills outside Beatty and ventured out on our bikes to explore and visit the remains of the mining town, Rhyolite.  We also encounter some wild burros both out in the desert and in the middle of the town of Beatty.

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Carson/Ebbetts Passes

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One year after the camper van was rear-ended and a very long time at a body ship plus several more months getting rebuilt and outfitted, Darlene and I (and Hera) were finally able to head out in the van again for some exploration. We ended up camping out in four different dispersed spots we found over not quite two weeks in an area of the Sierra Nevada between Carson and Ebbetts Passes (often near the Pacific Crest Trail), going exploring by mountain biking, hiking and geocaching.

We had nice weather the whole time except for some wildfire smoke that started to blow in on the last couple of days.  We cut the trip a couple days short to avoid getting caught out in a bit of snow forecast for the higher elevations.

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