Posted in Nature, Travel, tagged Albert Schweitzer, glen canyon national recreation area, pat bean, postaday2011, Utah, weekly photo challenge: texture on September 10, 2011| 1 Comment »
“The true worth of a man is not to be found in man himself, but in the colours and textures that come alive in others.” Albert Schweitzer
Textures abound in this photo. Rock both slick and pebbly rough, grasses both silky and prickly and sky and clouds that one can imagine being as soft as Maggie’s fur.
Posted in Nature, Travel, Weekly Photo Challenge, tagged Angel's Landing, climbing, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, hiking, postaday2011, Utah, weekly photo challenge: up, Zion National Park on August 28, 2011| 4 Comments »
Looking UP to the journey’s destination
Up high looking down
These photos were taken in 2007.
Posted in Travel, tagged 25th Street, change, City Club, friends, Ogden, postaday2011, Sonora Grill, Utah on May 22, 2011| 2 Comments »
“He who rejects change is the architect of decay. The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery.” — Harold Wilson
The looks nothing like the 25th Street I was first introduced to in the early 1980s. -- Photo by Pat Bean
*Travels With Maggie
Some say you can’t go home again. That of course is not true. What you can’t do is go home and find things exactly how you left then
For example, on March 31 of this year, I blogged about returning to my grandmother’s rural home on the outskirts of Dallas, where I lived as a young child. I found the small two-bedroom home condemned, the gardenia bushes outside her front door no longer there and another dilapidated house where her garden used to be.
It was exactly the opposite in Ogden, where I lived for 23 years before retiring seven years ago. I’ve returned yearly since and every time things have changed upward.
The downtown site where a mall was torn down, and which remained obscenely vacant for many years, is now a thriving hub of restaurants, theaters, small shops and bustling activity.
My friend, Kim, and I, and some of her friends had dinner this evening at the Sonora Grill, one of those chic new restaurants. Afterward we walked down the revived 25th Street, which when I first moved to Ogden, was a hangout for the homeless, motorcycle gangs, scary bars and a liquor store.
Colorful horse statues are now a common sight in downtown Ogden in recent years. -- Photo by Pat Bean
The bars have mostly up-scaled, the liquor store moved, restaurants and small business opened, and the street spruced up with fresh paint, charming statues, fresh facades and colorful flowers.
Our group ended up at The City Club, a private club serving food and booze that once had been one of my let-down-the-hair places I occasionally visited after a frustrating work day.
It was both the same and different. Beatles’ photos and memorabilia still covered every inch of the walls, but the place was no longer a private club where you had to be a member to enjoy a quiet drink, and I didn’t know half the people there this night.
It felt a little strange, but here I was sitting with my old and dear friend, Kim, and fast getting to know five new people whom I had only met earlier in the evening.
Life’s like that. Things change. Buildings come and go and people move on and new ones take their places. Even the people who stay in your life, like my friend, Kim, change with time.
Thankfully, although differently, the two of us had grown in ways that had enriched our friendship bonds. If either of us had not grown, we probably wouldn’t still be friends.
Life never stands still. And if you do, you get left behind.
*Day 19 of the journey, May 7,201
Posted in Favorite Hikes, Nature, Travel, tagged aging, Angel's Landing, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, hiking, Parus Trail, postaday2011, Utah, Zion National Park on May 18, 2011| 3 Comments »
“Age is opportunity no less
Than youth itself, though in another dress
And as the evening twilight fades away,
The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Me in April, 2007, with Angel's Landing in the background. I made it to the top that year and two more years since then. My heart tells me I'll yet be up there again, just not this May. -- Photo by Kim Perrin
*Travels With Maggie
I walked the Parus Trail today. This paved path that crosses back and forth across the Virgin River was just what my body, which has been trying to heal a sprained shoulder since March, needed.
Although dogs are allowed on this one trail in Zion National Park, I didn’t take Maggie because I wanted to walk farther and faster than she prefers these days.
While I’m certainly no just-hatched bird, Maggie is 13, which in human years makes her about 91. The vet says she is in pretty good shape for her age, for which I’m thankful. It’s the same thing my doctor said to me at last year’s annual checkup.
Maggie’s been my faithful but spoiled traveling companion now for seven years, and just my spoiled pet for five years before that. I rescued her from an Ogden, Utah, animal shelter when she was a little over a year old.
Back then she was timid, too submissive and frightened at the sight of a broom. The shelter said she had been abused. Today’s she not afraid of anything and expects to be treated like the queen she thinks she is.
While I was never abused as a child, I did survive some rough times, including growing up in an alcoholic family, being frequently accused of having cooties by school mates in elementary school and a disastrous too-young marriage.
Daisies growing along the Parus Trail brightened my walk this day. -- Photo by Pat Bean
But it’s not who you were, or how you were treated growing up, that counts. It’s you are today. And if you’ve survived past your 20s, then the only person responsible for who you are is you.
Not sure why my mind got going in this direction. Maybe because I walked the easy 3-mile flat Parus Trail today instead of hiking the 5-mile steep and strenuous Angel’s Landing Trail that I always do when coming to Zion.
I could whine about disappointing myself, or be grateful for what I can still do. I’d like to say I was grateful, and I can certainly do that.
But I whined, too. Who I was today, physically speaking, wasn’t who I wanted to be.
I guess age and health get a say in who we are at some point in our lives.
Dookie! Dookie! Dookie!
*Day 16 of my journey, May 4, 2011
Posted in Nature, Travel, tagged Glendale, Highway 89, Highway 9, John Dryden, Mormons. Southern Utah, Mount Carmel, Orderville, Polygamy, postaday2011, Utah, Zion National Park on May 12, 2011| 3 Comments »
“Happy the man, and happy he alone, he who can call today his own; he who, secure within, can say, tomorrow do they worst, for I have lived today.” John Dryden
My RV site in Watchman Campground offered views of canyon walls in all directions. -- Photo by Pat Bean
Travels With Maggie
While leaving what many consider America’s most beautiful road behind me, this didn’t mean an end to the scenic landscape.
Highway 89, from its junction with Highway 12 south to Highway 9 continued to be an awesome rural drive with views of mountains, cliffs and roadside streams that this day were full and broad. .
The highway briefly passed through another section of Dixie National Forest and through the small towns of Glendale, Orderville and Mount Carmel, all early Mormon settlements begun at the command of the religion’s prophet, Brigham Young, between 1862 and 1875. Historic rock structures from those early days can still be seen today.
Each morning and evening I watched as the sun lit up the cliffs like a neon sign. -- Photo by Pat Bean
Orderville was the Mormon church’s failed attempt at communal living and Glendale and Mount Carmel, the earlier settlements, were abandoned because of Indian attacks. Many of Orderville’s men, meanwhile, were arrested because of their continued polygamous way of life after it was banned in the United States.
I left 89 at Mount Carmel Junction, where sits the Thunderbird Motel and Golf Course, and headed west on Highway 9. Thirteen miles later I entered Zion National Park, and traveled its winding road lined with colorful sandstone formations that boggle the eyes another 13 miles to the Watchman Campground.
The drive included passing through a 1.1-mile long tunnel that cuts through a mountain. The tunnel, built in the late 1920s, is narrow and dark. My very first drive through it took place in the 1960s, when one could park in a pullout and get out and look out one of the tunnel’s vast windows to a view of the canyon below.
My dog, Maggie, tried to chase a lizard into this cactus. Fortunately she was on a leash and I pulled her back. -- Photo by Pat Bean
Those pullouts are now blocked, and traffic is often regulated to one-way because today’s larger vehicles, like my RV, Gypsy, Lee, need to keep to the center line to keep from scraping the lower sides of the tunnel roof. I paid $15 for this center-line driving privilege.
I have visited Zion National Park over 30 times. This Southern Utah landmark, where peregrine falcons nest, mountains glow at sunrise and sunset, and the Virgin River tumbles downward in gurgling splashes, is my special place in the universe.
Hooking up my RV to electricity in Loop B in of the Watchman Campground, with the guardian mountain looking down on me, filled my soul with peace and contentment.
I was thankful that the coming week’s journey in my life would all be spent right here.
Continuing day 11 of the journey, April 29, 2011
Posted in Favorite Hikes, Nature, Travel, tagged Bill Clinton, Calf Creek Falls, Escalante, Franciscan missionary, grand staircase-escalante national monument, Highway 12, land issues, Norma and Scott Mattheson, postaday2011, Utah on May 10, 2011| 3 Comments »
“I have a theory about the human mind. A brain is a lot like a computer. It will only take so many facts, then it will go on overload and blow up.” — Erma Bombeck
Looking down from the Hogsback, the Escalante River snakes a path of greeness through the rocky landscape. -- Photo by Pat Bean
Travels With Maggie
Heading southwest out of Boulder from Highway 12’s junction with the Burr Trail, you’ll pass the entrance to Utah’s Anasazi State Park and Museum.
It’s a protective home for an Indian village occupied between approximately AD 1050 and AD 1200. It’s a fascinating place to visit for archeological and history buffs and shouldn’t be passed by. While that’s exactly what I did this day, I had spent time in the museum and in the Coombs Site Indian ruins here on previous visits to the area. Check it out at: http://tinyurl.com/3wzmn6z
Just a little ways farther down the road and I was on the section of Highway 12 known as the Hogsback, although some people refer to it as Knife’s Edge, which seems quite appropriate.
Looking back as Highway 12 leads onto the Hogsback. -- Photo by Pat Bean
This section of Highway 12, which 70 years ago opened up Boulder to the more civilized world, travels along a high narrow ridge with steep cliffs on both sides. There is not a single spot along the highway that doesn’t offer magnificent views.
But since it’s narrow enough in some places to see down both sides of its 2,000-foot high cliffs at the same time while driving, for safety’s sake I did most of my gawking at pullouts.
The first time I crossed this amazing landscape was when I was visiting Escalante in the late 1970s and a local was showing me the sights. I was quite impressed – and the amazed emotions haven’t dimmed with the years.
Since leaving Boulder, I had been traveling through the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, which is spread across nearly 2 million acres of Southern Utah.
Its creation in 1996 by Democratic President Bill Clinton, who announced the gigantic news in Arizona with the widowed wife, Norma Mattheson, of Utah’s former Democratic governor, Scott Mattheson, did not sit well with the state’s then Republican administration, nor the state’s large anti-environmentalist segment.
The controversy was a boon, however, for this environmental reporter who was thrown into the thick of the battles.
In the end, at least in my opinion, the protection of these awesome lands has benefited the state greatly with increased tourism in an area where jobs were scarce, and with transfer/trades of lands elsewhere to the state that have been more profitable in providing income for Utah’s school system.
Calf Creek Falls, worth the 6-mile round-trip hike. -- Photo by Scott Catron
Escalante had certainly grown since my last visit about eight years ago, I noticed as I entered this town named after a Franciscan missionary who was the first to explore the area. And why not? It’s situated in some of the best scenery and hiking trails you’ll find anywhere in North America.
One of my favorites is the six-mile round-trip hike to Calf Falls,whose trailhead I had passed before entering Escalante. It has been a long time since I had seen the falls, but I could still recall the thrill at the end of three miles, mostly on a sandy path, of coming upon the 125-foot waterfall beneath which lay an inviting pool and shade trees.
Egads! Here I’ve covered only 27 miles of driving in today’s blog, and already I’m in past-and-present landscape brain overload.
Highway 12 will do that to you. And there’s more to come – tomorrow.
*Continuing Day 11 of the journey, April 29, 2011
Posted in Birds, Nature, Travel, tagged Boulder, boulder Mountain, Burr trail, dixie national forest, grand staircase-escalante monument, henry mountains, Highway 12, postaday2011, Torrey, Utah on May 9, 2011| 2 Comments »
“You cannot be wimpy out there on the dream-seeking trail. Dare to break through barriers, to find your own path.” Les Brown
The Henry Mountains as seen from Highway 12's beginning in Torrey, Utah -- photo by Pat Bean
*Travels With Maggie
Utah Highway 12, a 125-mile Scenic Byway that runs from Torrey just outside of Capitol Reef to Highway 89, has been called America’s most beautiful drive.
Yippee! Driving it was my agenda for the day.
The journey for my dog, Maggie, and I began in the Dixie National Forest. The narrow road through the woodlands, with rarely another vehicle in sight, climbed steeply upwards, offering spectacular views of snowy peaks in the Henry Mountains.
The nearer landscape was a mixture of red earth and rocks heavily dotted with cedar and sagebrush that gave away to tall pines and firs and still leafless aspen at higher altitudes.
I stopped at all the overlooks to gasp in wonder. I also gasped with delight when, just as I topped a 9,600-foot summit, a soaring red-tailed hawk glided past.
I didn’t mind at all that the winding and steepness of the road often meant traveling at speeds of 25 mph or even less at times.
The Burr Trail Grill and Trading Post, the civilized beginning of the Burr Trail Scenic Backroad. -- Photo by Pat Bean
It was just after 11 a.m. when I pulled into Boulder, a tiny town of less than 200 that was just 35 miles away from Torrey.
This scenic town was once so inaccessible that it was the last place in America to still get its mail delivered by mule power. That changed after a road was finally built to it from Escalante in 1939. It was 1947, however, before Boulder got electrical power.
My timing to hit the town, which sits at an elevation of 6,700 feet in the shadow of 11,700-foot Boulder Mountain, was perfect. I could have a leisurely lunch at the Burr Trail Grill, so named because of its access to the trail that’s been a hot land issue for Utahns for many years.
Pointing the way. -- Photo by Pat Bean
As I sat there, eating a spicy, guacamole hamburger made from 100 percent organic beef raised in Boulder, and my split pea, asparagus and shallot salad, memories of my last meal here and my drive on the four-wheel drive trail flooded my little gray cells.
I had been accompanied back then by a professional photographer. We were paired up together to do illustrated newspaper stories on the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument that had been newly created by President Bill Clinton, and on the controversy surrounding the proposed paving of the Burr Trail.
The wild and scenic backroad, which is now partially paved, begins in Boulder – right next to where I was having lunch — and runs through Capitol Reef National Park’s Waterpocket Fold and then on to Bullfrog in the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area.
While the road is only about 70 miles long, it took the two of us from early morning to dusk to drive. Of course that included frequent stops and us getting lost a couple of times.
One special moment of the trip that I recalled this day was standing beside our turned-off vehicle, facing a landscape that appeared untouched by human hands, and being amazed at the quietness. It was as if all of a sudden I realized how amazing it was not to even hear the quiet hum of a refrigerator.
If ever I had a day I could repeat, this one would certainly be on the list.
But there was no time for regretting that this wasn’t that “Groundhog” day. There was still more of Highway 12 ahead. And next up was the mind-boggling Hogsback section of our drive.
I’ll tell you all about that tomorrow.
*Day 11 of the Journey, April 29, 2011
Posted in Birds, Nature, Travel, tagged ash-troated flycatcher, capitol reef national park, cohab trail, Highway 24, mule deer, postaday2011, Utah, wallace stegner on May 7, 2011| Leave a Comment »
“National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.” Wallace Stegner.
The domes of Capitol Reef. -- Photo courtesy Wikipedia
*Travels With Maggie
My soul-stirring day’s travel, full of colorful wonders of Mother Nature, didn’t end with the day’s driving. The magic continued at Capitol Reef National Park, a landscape created around 65 million years ago when forces deep in the earth created a wrinkle on the planet’s surface.
In earlier times, when I was driving a 4-wheel drive vehicle, I took the back, unpaved, steep, twisting road. which went up and over the fold, into the park. Today, with my 24-foot Gypsy Lee, I more sedately drove into the park on Highway 24, which was still quite scenic.
Driving down into the park’s gorge, a steep narrow road, was one of Gypsy Lee’s first adventures, and I still have the picture my oldest son, D.C., took of her that day.
This photo of Gypsy Lee down in Capitol Reef's gorge was taken in May of 2004, when she was just two months old and Maggie and I were both seven years younger. -- Photo by D.C. Bean
Thankfully this was not my first or even second visit to the national treasure, becauseI didn’t have too much time to gawk at the park’s features. With what I did have, I decided to hike a ways on the Cohab Canyon trail, which after a short ascent is fairly level.
Its trailhead is right near the park’s campground.
I walked slowly, not as interested in distance, as I was in taking in the smaller miracles so often overlooked by younger hikers. I know, because I was once one of them.
Today, however, I got my thrills from examining the swirl of patterns on sandstone rocks that lay jumbled along the trail, from a yellow butterfly flitting over some tiny pink flowers growing next to a just-beginning-to-bud cactus, from a mule deer staring at me from up the trail before quietly disappearing, and from the sight of an ash-throated flycatcher sitting up straight on a pinyon tree branch.
These were the kinds of things that interested me for the hour or so before I got back on the road for an 8-mile drive to Torrey, a small town just outside the park where I had reservations at Wonderland RV Park.
My head was so over-filled with the day’s amazing sights that I lay sleepless in my over-the-cab for a long while, watching stars overhead through my roof vent and listening to Maggie snoring on the couch below. She had decided I was too restless and retreated there for a better night’s sleep.
Have I ever mentioned how loudly Maggie snores?
*Continuing Day 10 of the journey, April 28, 2011.
Posted in Nature, tagged canyonlands national park, change, government shutdown, Maine, Polticians, postaday2011, Scarborough Marsh, Utah on April 9, 2011| 4 Comments »
Perhaps a quiet walk beneath a blue sky filled with fast-moving clouds, such as here in Utah's Canyonland National Park, will invigorate the will of politicians to do what is right for the American people. -- Photo by Pat Bean
“America is a tune. It must be sung together.” — Gerald Stanley Lee
Just for Today
Talk these past few days about the government shutting down has been disturbing to me, and I’m sure to many other Americans. But I didn’t feel any relief this morning when I read that the shutdown had been averted.
Instead I felt angry with all the games too many of our politicians have been playing to booster their own parties, their own images, their personal agendas and their personal vendettas. I watch as we, the American people, try to elect leaders who will go against the current political grain, only to see the newly elected join it.
I don’t have all the answers on how we can change this ever-worsening situation, but I do have a few suggestions:
One-term limit of four to six years for all politicians so they can spend their days working for the people instead of working for re-election.
Salary and benefit packages of elected officials that are in line with those of the average wage earner of their constituents so they will be more in touch with those they were elected to serve.
Everyone, not just politicians, could benefit from taking time to smell the flowers, such as these in Maine's Scarborough Marsh. -- Photo by Pat Bean
Politicians who are more concerned with what is right then in staying loyal to their parties.
And, most importantly, a mandatory day once a month for politicians to walk a scenic landscape with Mother Nature to restore their souls.
These suggestions, in case you’re interested, come from an old broad who is proud to be a tree-hugger who yearns for world peace.
Perhaps, dear blog readers, you have other suggestions for changing the status quo in our nation’s capital. If you do, hopefully you’ll share. Change has to have a beginning.
Posted in Birds, Nature, Travel, tagged bald eagles, Carl Sandburg, Decorah Fish Hatcher, eagle chicks, Farmington Bay, great blue herons, Iowa, postaday2011, Trout Run Creek, Utah on April 4, 2011| 4 Comments »
A pair of bald eagles, injured in the wild, that are living out their lives at the Brevard Zoo in Florida. -- Photo by Pat Bean
“There is an eagle in me that wants to soar, and there is a hippopotamus in me that wants to wallow in the mud.” — Carl Sandburg
Just for Today
Ever since I counted 149 eagles wintering at the Farmington Bay Wildlife Management Area in Northern Utah, I’ve been a bit blase when spotting a lone bald eagle. Of course I still look for this symbol of our American heritage, and even experience a shiver or two when I do see one flying overhead or sitting atop a tall tree.
I appreciate the sightings all the more because of this great bird’s comeback from near extinction with the passage of the Endangered Species Act and the banning of DDT.
This morning, however, the adrenalin-pumping thrill of eagle watching was back, thanks to a live, streaming video cam in Iowa that I watched on my computer here in Arkansas. The cam is aimed at a 1.5 ton eagle nest, 80 feet up in a cottonwood tree on the bank of Trout Run Creek at the Decorah Fish Hatchery. The large nest is being attended by a coupled pair of eagles.
When I first looked, all I saw was one of the adults sitting on the nest, on what I had read were three eggs. When next I looked, one of the adult eagles was gently feeding two chicks while the third egg was still unhatched. Reading a bit more, I learned that the first chick hatched Saturday, and the second yesterday. Perhaps the third will hatch today. The pair successfully fledged three chicks in 2010.
Great blue herons at Farmington Bay in Northern Utah, where I once counted 149 bald eagles on a February day. -- Photo by Pat Bean
As I write this, the eagle is now back sitting on her chicks to keep them warm. What appears to be a healthy breeze is ruffling the feathers of the adult eagle.
You can hear the wind blowing, the creek babbling, the chicks peeping and just now the honk of geese flying somewhere overhead.
I plan to keep the feed to the site open on my computer today. Perhaps you would like to join me for the show. http://www.ustream.tv/decoraheagles
“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters.” — Ursula K. Le Guin
Pat Bean is a writer, avid birder, hiker and passionate nature observer with wanderlust in her soul. She spent nine years living and traveling in a small RV. She now lives in Tucson with Scamp, a rescue who was supposed to be a Schnauzer mix but turned out to be a Siberian Husky-Shih Tzu mix who is as stubborn as his owner, her granddaughter says. She was also a journalist for 37 years, and can be reached at patbean@msn.com
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