CuRVWander

I have a number of shots in the camera that were picked up here and there as we went about our business over the past week.  Some of them would have been nice to go along with the previous couple of posts but rather than go back and edit those posts I think it would be better to just put them here since it is unlikely that anyone would go back and read posts they have already looked at. Our grocery run to St. George took us past some nice vistas and I mentioned the buffalo a couple of times.  On the 12 mile drive to the park entrance station from the campground the road slices through a meadow.  It is a big meadow, long and narrow and runs the length of a shallow valley for about 10 miles.  This is where the North Rim buffalo roam. The herd tends to gather near the park entrance station in the early mornings and that is exactly where we found them just as the sun was getting above the tops of the trees.  They had parsed themselves into two groups abou...

We are settled into a pretty steady routine of late.  Our co-host couple, Don and Anne had to leave for a few days.  Don needed emergency dental work to replace a cap that popped off a molar and then they are scheduled for a six-day rafting trip down the Colorado.  That has left us with a continuous duty schedule from Sunday to Sunday.  For now we are trying to keep up the pace and not let things get too shabby for when they return and pick up their half of the week. We will get one day of rest and then we'll head for Bryce Canyon.  We were able to find a combination of hotel room availability and positions open on a half-day trail ride in Bryce.  We wanted to do this for a couple reasons; Bryce Canyon is on our must-see list while volunteering here at the North Rim and the trail ride into Bryce is less steep and wider than the Grand Canyon trail rides (they can use horses instead of mules) and have more opportunities to take pictures because of...

We made it twenty days on the groceries we came in to the North Rim with.  We still have quite a bit of frozen meat and vegetables but we have run out of all fresh food like the 25 pounds of apples and 40 pounds of oranges that are a steady part of our diet. And then there were odds and ends like sweetener and light mayo.  This little list may sound kind of short to make it worth six hours of driving and almost a 100 bucks of fuel but when we were all said and done, we tallied up around $700 on our little shopping trip.  Yikes! But boy, what a drive.  One hundred fifty miles to the west and nearly a five thousand foot drop in elevation.  We oohed and aahed our way down off the plateau and across the southern entrance of Zion National Park.  Even from twenty miles away it looked amazing.  St. George was only a little further.  As we left the North Rim around sunrise the temperature was a chilly 51 degrees.  Pulling into St. George,...

We are more or less getting settled into a routine in our current camp hosting job.  We have met a good number of rangers and people that work for the interpretive services group.  They call the interpretive people volunteers, they have the same volunteer patches on their uniforms as we do, yet they get paid.  We'll have to find out more about how you draw a paycheck for volunteering. But now that we know so many and they know I am scouting wildlife to photograph, we are getting some good intel on sightings.  Such was the case in the last couple of days.  An off-duty ranger biked over to our rig and wanted to let me know he had spotted a grouse and some deer. We were between our split-shift so I grabbed up the camera and headed out.  The grouse turned out to be a hen that had decided to roost on a pile of lumber outside one of the park service employee cabins. After the grouse I headed out to find the deer.  On the Kaibab Plateau there ar...

The Grand Canyon is an outdoors-person paradise.  Hard-core back country backpackers come from, literally, all over the world to hike the seemingly limitless trails.  But all this beauty and grandeur attract more than the well trained and physically fit.  You are just as likely to encounter someone pushing a walker in front of them as you are someone with a 50 lb pack on their back. In the past few days a family from France were visiting the North Rim.  A mother, father, two adult daughters and a son-in-law.  They were enjoying a hike on the North Kaibab Trail.  This is the trail on the north side that goes all the way to the bottom of the canyon and connects to the Bright Angel Trail to the South Rim. But you do not have to take the trail its full distance, and most don't.  There are a number of overlooks and points of interest that are a relatively short walk in distance.  However, they all involve elevation changes worth making note of...

It has only been a couple of weeks since leaving the sweltering heat of the South and the scorching temperatures of the high plains of Texas and desert of Arizona but they have already faded into distant memory after being where the daytime temps only briefly exceed the mid-70's and mornings are just one side or the other of the 50 degree mark.  My five-cup mug of hot tea is thoroughly enjoyed each morning and not one watt of electricity has been spent on running air conditioners.  All we do is adjust how many windows we want open, usually not more than one or two. Since the last post Cyndee and I have celebrated our anniversary.  Thanks, Mom for the text message.  You did better than me on remembering how many years it was.  The day of our anniversary we were on duty, which meant we would be working from six to ten pm.  So we were going to celebrate later on one of our days off.  But our co-camp host got all wound up about it being our annive...

The last couple of days have just been doing our campground host routine; running the traps.  Putting out the reserved signs at night for the people that did not make in by the time the ranger station closed, pulling the reserved signs in the morning and giving a list to the rangers of who showed during the night and who didn't.  Not rocket science but it does get you out of bed before six am and keeps you available to the campers until ten pm. We also do what is called the 11:00 purge.  Everyone that is leaving should be out of their site by 11:00 and arriving campers can not check in until 12:00.  That gives us hosts a one hour window to clean fire pits and pick up the campsite, if necessary.  But at 11:00 we go around with a list provided by the rangers showing all that have not returned their little paper camping permit that hangs on the post at each site. Most of the time the campers have just forgotten and left their permit on their post and ...

Internet connections have been dodgy the last couple of days.  I am trying to squeeze in this post while it lasts. After monsoonal rains on Sunday we hit the same 15 mile road early on Monday.  The weather has tended to be better in the morning so we left early and drove all the way out to Angel's Window/Cape Royal. With clearer skies today, the Colorado River can be seen near the bottom of the window. I mentioned a post or two back that now was the peak of the wildflower bloom.  Not all sights are grand vistas.  What the plaque does not convey well is that 'tall' means around 10 feet high and maybe twice as wide.  That is a big plant to think of as a rose.   While the Cliffrose may be a large tree-like shrub, it has tiny leaves and delicate, fuzzy stems that are at the base of a wilted bloom. While the blooms of the Cliffrose may be tiny, they are profuse. Don't know what these are but they were in p...