Tag: national-parks

Perseids at the Pinnacles

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Darlene and I camped out on the east side of Pinnacles National Park this past Sunday to watch the Perseids meteor shower. We had some fairly dark skies as Pinnacles is in a somewhat remote location. The glow of lights from Hollister and Salinas (about 25-ish miles away) were apparent to the north but the Milky Way was still quite visible. And the crescent moon set nice and early. We spotted probably several meteors per minute.  There were a few clusters of four or five.

I made a little video of some time lapse images I captured during the night:

As it was a Sunday night, getting a campsite was easy – most of the sites were vacant — not so on a Friday or Saturday night!  There was lots of wildlife though… of the more natural variety.  We had multiple visits from human-habituated deer, rabbits and a coyote in our campsite.  (I don’t count the yellow jackets!)  We went for a hike to see the nearby talus caves and saw a couple of bats but part of the caves were still closed to protect the bat colony.  (Talus caves are formed by rocks and boulders falling into a narrow area to form a ceiling and block out the sky.)  On Monday, we hiked the High Peaks loop and happened to run into an old coworker from FileMaker.  We also saw some turkey vultures and possibly some California condors.

 

Exploring Southcentral Alaska

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This is a collection of images from a three week trip to the southcentral portion of Alaska.  The first six days were booked with Alaska Wildland Adventures to explore the Kenai Pennisula and involved a series of separate guided day excursions while staying at a couple of lodges. (This flexibility was helpful since a different outfitter cancelled a week-long group trip at the last minute.) The middle ten days were arranged through REI Adventures and handled by Alaska Alpine Adventures. This guided group trip passed through Prince William Sound, visited McCarthy/Kennicott, traveled the Denali Highway, and included three days visiting Denali National Park. The final three days (and a couple of intermediate days) were on my own.

Click through to view the galleries:

  

Backpacking in Zion National Park

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Narrows1

This was a backpacking trip in July with Hoan, Huy, Corey, and Jason into the Kolob Canyons in the northeastern part of the park.

I arrived a few days earlier and so I wandered up the Zion Narrows for a few hours. This incredibly deep and narrow canyon runs for many miles and the river itself is the trail.  You spend most of your time wading the river to follow the Narrows through. It’s very much fun. It’s also very difficult to photograph — so I want to go back and try again.

You can arrange to backpack from one end to another and stay overnight at one of several designated spots midway through.  I’d love to come back here and backpack the whole length of it someday.

Some views from a couple miles upstream into the Zion Narrows:

Narrows2

Narrows3

These are the grasslands several miles to the northeast of Zion Canyon proper:

Zion-Grassland

One of the many towering walls in Zion Canyon:

Zion-Central

Lunch stop in Bear Trap Canyon in the Kolob Canyon area. No bears encountered but this canyon probably could trap one.  It ends abruptly in a tight space with a nearly free-falling creek:

Kolob

Falls