Valley of the Gods was part of Bears Ears National Monument in Utah when Obama designated it; Bears Ears was the first national monument created by request of and with input from Indigenous tribes. The protected land size was reduced under Trump, restored under Biden, then reduced under Trump again, and, thanks to lobbying from […]
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Moving Sunlight and Changing Focus at White Sands National Park
How do I tell you about White Sands National Park in New Mexico? We spent only a day there (a short record for us), but my impressions are hard to pin down. Words aren’t enough, and photos are hard to take. I could tell you about the unique geographic features that come together to make […]
Where Salt Marsh Meets the Sea
We’re spending the rest of November traveling down the Texas coast, camping at one beach spot for a few days, then moving on. A sampling, a taste of each one. We’ve done this before, so we’re staying at a few favorites, but we’re also adding new spots, like here, our starting point at the top […]
Surprising Watkins Glen
I could tell before we pulled into the campground that I was going to hate this place. Tons of out-of-town traffic, signs and parking lots for shuttles, restaurants and gift shops, all for some bunch of waterfalls or something. But Tracy insisted I go on a certain short hike he’d been on years ago. He […]
Alaska Photo Journey
I’ve been thinking back to our Alaska trip last summer (2023), and I’ve realized I don’t have a single, encompassing compilation of our memories. Here goes! British Columbia in May The Alaska Highway connects the Lower 48 with Alaska, and it’s really the only way to get to Alaska. Like a lot of road-trippers, we […]
For Itinerants, We Sure Settle Down Well
I’d forgotten that a friendly Canadian gave me her tiki bar sign right off her campsite post in Alberta a couple of summers ago. Here, in the Tip o’ Texas, we’ve been unpacking storage spots in the Airstream that I didn’t realize we had (which is saying something) and finding things like tiki bar signs […]
Beach Camping Is the Best Camping
This! This is why I live in a trailer. We’re back on the beach near Galveston, Texas, exactly where we spent a week last year, because it is just the perfect spot for us. It’s not in an ocean-side campground; it’s not a camping spot with a palm-roofed tiki bar. What it is is a […]
You Keep Watching the Tundra, Then You Remember to Look Up (at Tombstone)
I said this to Tracy yesterday while we were hiking along the mountains in the northern part of Tombstone Territorial Park, here in the Yukon, a little east of Fairbanks. The sub-arctic tundra here is so beautiful—moss and lichen and flowers—a deep cover that insulates the permafrost right below. Even if the ground weren’t captivating, […]
What 10 Million Bats Looks Like
They don’t look like anything I can describe, is what they look like. There is no way to capture in a photograph, or even a video, the enormity and beauty of this many animals moving all at once, together as a colony and individually as mammals, feeding. They fly together, and they fly into each […]
Kayaking the Largest Oxbow
You probably know this, but I didn’t: an oxbow is a water formation that started as a big curve in a river that got cut off, as in the river took a short cut through the curve, for whatever reason, and kept going, leaving the curve on its own as a separate body of water. […]
