From the Grand Canyon - For Becky, Vicky, Rachel, Missouri, Ben, Susie, Joe, Zach, Cole, Jake and Lucy

We're told that our nieces and nephews in Arkansas and Texas watch our blog from time to time because their moms and dads find it educational.  So, this is about something we learned here at the Grand Canyon that we thought they would find as interesting as we did!

WHAT HAPPENS TO A FOREST AFTER A FIRE?

As we drove toward the Grand Canyon,we saw miles and miles of burned forest.  Someone asked a ranger how long ago it happened and when the forest would grow back.  The fire happened in 2006, but it looked like it happened a year ago, no more.

Here's the answer the ranger gave us and a couple of pictures:

Almost all of the trees in the forests around the Grand Canyon are made up of Ponderosa pines.  (They're the dark green evergreens in the photos below.)  They live for about 250 years.  After a forest fire happens, like you can see in the two pictures below, however, they are not the first trees to come back.  It takes quite a while for a ponderosa pine to germinate and come up as a sprout. 

HOWEVER, the quaking aspen (the light green tree with the white trunks that you see in the photos) come in easily, and they spread very fast.  In fact, only the first aspen in a grove has to grow from a seed.  The rest of them are simply an extension of the root system of the first tree!  That is, when you see a stand of aspen, you are looking at a large number of trees that all share exactly the same DNA; that is, they are virtually all the same tree!

Anyway, the aspen come in quickly and crowd out the ponderosa pines, which are slow to grow back.  The aspen tree has a life expectancy of about 150 years.  So - for about 150 years, all you have are big stands of aspen in the place where the wild fire took place.  They are very beautiful.  After 150 years, they die and make room for the ponderosa pines again, which now come back and re-populate the forest.

In two of the pictures below, you will see areas where there there have been good-sized forest fires.  Can you see the small light green aspen trees coming up on these almost-bare hillsides?  (You can click on each picture and it will come up larger on another page.)  They're going to take over in a few more years.  There are a few dark green ponderosa pines in the pictures, but they are the ones that survived the fire.

In addition to the pictures of the burned forests, there's a picture of Uncle Harold and Gaby who say "Hi!"   They're sitting on the rim of the Grand Canyon, sunning themselves.  It's a little cold here right now.  In fact, last night it snowed a little!

Hope you enjoyed this story.

Love,  Aunt Barbara

Grand Canyon is grand!

We have been in a very windy Grand Canyon for nearly three days and have already done a lot.  The following photos will not do the beauty and grandeur justice but we did our best.

This is our sixth visit to Grand Canyon, all at the North Rim.  The first visit was on our honeymoon twenty five years ago and we later walked across the Canyon (24.2 miles) on Harold's 50th birthday.  (Did you know that of approximately six million visitors every year, only 1% actually go down into the Canyon beyond the rim?  We don't know what percent of that 1% walk it, but we feel privileged to have had such an intimate relationship with this international treasure).

The above photo shows the size of the formation with the people on top as a comparison.

Here is a quote from Theodore Roosevelt, who had a lot to do with the preservation of the Grand Canyon back at the beginning of the 20th century:  "Leave it as it is.  You can do nothing to improve it.  What you can do is keep it for your children, your children's children, and for all who come after you, as the one great sight which every American should see."

 

 

The Grand Canyon is the granddaddy of all national parks.  If you haven't seen it, you owe it to yourself to get here one day.  It is impossible to adequately describe, either with words or pictures, its grandeur.

Zion National Park and Snow Canyon: Biking and Vistas!

Here we start our day of hiking in Zion, a magnificent national park of canyons, waterfalls, lava mountains, and vast limestone formations of many colors.  The following five photos give you an idea of the natural beauty. 

Now we start a day of bicycling in Snow Canyon, which is a volcanic mountain area that exemplifies the desert the Mormons discovered.  Close to Zion, a really great, sunny day of exercise and photography.

Catching Up - Sequoia National Park, Calico Ghost Town, Peggy Sue's Diner

It's been a while since we posted, mainly because we haven't been where we had easy access to wifi for several days.  So, we're catching up. 

The fat tree in the middle is the world's largest living thing (not just largest tree) - and also world's largest sequoia, the General Sherman tree.  There are taller trees (like the redwoods), but none with larger mass.  It's 100 feet in circumferance at the base!

Here's puny Barbara standing in front of the General Sherman tree.  It is estimated to be about 2500 years old!  By the way, when sequoias die, it's never by disease or old age.  It's because they fall down!  Massive as they are, they don't have very big root systems which eventually can't handle the mass above.

Here's how the typical tourist winds down after a tough day looking at trees in the Sequoia National Park.

Here's where we had breakfast near the Calico Ghost Town near Yerno, Calif. where we spent a couple of nights.  It's Peggy Sue's Diner and below are some scenes and Peggy Sue's words of wisdom scattered around the diner. 

This seemed like a cute saying until the tornado that hit Joplin.  Maybe one day it will seem cute again.

Old hotel from the Calico Ghost Town.  This really was an old gold-mining town back in the mid-1800s which was eventually abandoned when the price of silver dropped from $1.31 an ounce to $.65 an ounce.  In its heydey it had a total population of about 1200 and had more than 10 taverns!  Mr. Knotts of Knotts Berry Farm gave money to the local county a few years ago to rebuild the town (there are a few original ruins and one or two original buildings) and turn it into a tourist attraction.  Lots of cute stores selling leather, wood items, quilts, ceramics and general tourist curios like we haven't seen since the 50s and 60s.

This is the typical happy tourist in Calico Ghost Town after downing a 24-oz. jar of black cherry soda.

Chilling out at Kaweah RV Park - Near Sequoia NP

How about this for a charming RV park?  That's our RV in the background, Barbara in the foreground, and a fork of the Kaweah River rushing by on the right.  Not a bad place to pass time mellowing out. 

Sequoia NP is only 8 miles away, but to get to the Sequoias you have to drive almost an hour up a very twisty winding road, up into the snow.  There are an enormous number of the sequoias to be seen in what is called the Giant Forest and more in other stands in the park.  We went briefly yesterday because we had to be back at the RV park by 2 p.m. to get a flat tire on the RV fixed!  (Turned out not to be a serious problem.)

Another piece of data about Sequoia NP:  Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the continental U.S., is located at the edge of Sequoia NP.Today is rainy and we're doing grocery shopping (Walmart, of course) and other errands in the nearest town.

Goodbye to Yosemite

We did a lot of hiking in Yosemite and constantly met interesting people.  Last night at our camp we invited a couple walking their dogs over to our coach and we had a glass of wine and shared stories.  They are from the U.K., are traveling all over the U.S. for a year, and had a dog that looked exactly like our Sooner.  We gave him the butt rub and made the same gestures Sooner did.  This is Gabby and me at Mirror Lake (see below).

This is Mirror Lake in Yosemite, you can see why it was named that way.  We walked around it and took a lot of great pictures.

Yosemite consists of 1,200 square miles and is not for people looking for McDonald's and a video store.  You have to be quiet and enjoy the sights, sounds, and smells of the park.  Here is a mountain river we sat next to on the way back from Mirror Lake.  Those big boulders in the river are part of a major rockfall that occurred in the area of the river (just below Half Dome) in 2009.  To give you and idea of size they are taller than a person.  Some of the trail around Mirror Lake was still closed because of this rockfall and boulders this size and larger litter the area.. 

This afternoon we arrived in Three Rivers along side a beautiful lake, three convergent rivers, and just eight miles away is Sequoia National Park.  Our motor home is parked facing a roaring river (for those who don't know, a 35-foot motor home has a huge windshield like a Greyhound bus).  We start another week of adventures.  We are all healthy and really enjoying all the things our great national park system offers.

Barbara Painting Yosemite Falls

Part of Barbara's "job" on this trip is to paint regularly.  Today was her second day working on a painting of the lower Yosemite falls.  It rained for the whole two hours she was painting!  And it was cold, too.  However, painting in oils in the rain is no problem.  Oil and water don't mix. Smarter than Barbara, Harold sat this one out and stayed home in the motor home.  Tomorrow is supposed to be sunny and warmer. 

Yosemite National Park - Day 6

We spent today enjoying a lot of Yosemite's beauty, but especially enjoyed the upper and lower falls seen here.  The crashing water sounds like thunder on a tin roof and the mist is like standing in a cold, blowing rain.  We recommend that all reading this blog rent the DVD series by Ken Burns (a ten-hour documentary) titled "America's Best Idea: The National Park System" which was a major reason we are taking this trip.  One really appreciates the visionary Americans who dedicated their careers and fortunes to creating our national park system.  We spend six more days here before moving on for another week at Sequoia National Park. 

Day 1 - Leaving Salt Lake City, Utah

As we left the western edge of Utah from Salt Lake City, we passed through the famous Bonneville Salt Flats, where annual time trials are held.  We recommend a great movie filmed here starring Anthony Hopkins - "The World's Fastest Indian" which recounts the actual story of a man's quest for the world record on an Indian (motorcycle brand name).

Fifth Day - From Tahoe to Yosemite Pines RV Park

Today we drove from this....

to this: 

 75 degree weather, green trees, blooming iris and roses and fresh fruit stands featuring the first picked sweet cherries of the season.

We topped off our visit to Lake Tahoe last night with dinner at a restaurant we visited last year, where the same singer performed. He remembered us from last year and sat down to talk with us for a while.   He's a 59-year-old ex-counter culture type with a 12-year-old daughter and strong opinions on everything from politics to child rearing.  It's fun to talk to originals like him.  You don't agree with everything he says, but he's not a boring guy.

At least he's not the closed-minded types we ran across in Nevada:  one guy, a truck driver we chatted with when we stopped to look at the Bonneville Salt Flats, strong implied he would have been just as happy if Obama had been killed instead of Bin Laden!  Later on in the evening, a waitress pooh-poohed the notion that Bin Laden had been killed.  She said, in a know-it-all voice, "The government's known where he was all along and if they really wanted him dead, he would have been dead a long time ago."  Yikes.  Now we know where Sarah Palin's base lives.

Tomorrow we go into Yosemite to start exploring.  Our RV park is about 20 miles outside the park itself.  We couldn't get reservations inside the park because they wouldn't accept dogs. 

Fourth Day - Biking at Lake Tahoe

We've been in South Lake Tahoe for 2 days now.  Went on a biking trip along the lake this afternoon, for exercise and fun (Gabby, too).  Tomorrow we head to Yosemite for a week.