CuRVWander

Grand Canyon National Park, what an awesome, inspiring and breath-taking place.  But it is a park divided, the South Rim is convenient to a major interstate highway, has a railroad and runs shuttle buses up and down popular view points for fourteen hours a day 365 days a year.  The South Rim has a multitude of lodging options, I-MAX theater, and you are within minutes of well stocked grocery stores and restaurants.  The digital age has found its way to the South Rim as well.  This ease of access and facilities on a year around basis draws five million visitors a year.  A mere ten miles away, as the raven flies, is the North Rim.  Buried in ten feet of snowfall during the winter it is only open from mid-May to mid-October.  There is no interstate or major highway even remotely close.  A trip to the North Rim is not a visit of convenience, it is a place that you need to make plans to get to.  Basic services are Spartan at best.  There...

We have been on our summer assignment a little over a month now and have yet to get out to any of the places to see the canyon.  Our days have been pretty full with our routine work schedule and then there has been the extra training we have been getting.  We both got our certification to touch government computer keyboards and have our very own nps.gov email accounts now (ooohhh).  Then there has been the short road trips to see non-Grand Canyon attractions.  But we have changed that as of late. Just as the season was finishing up last year, the road to Cape Royal was closed so they could re-pave it.  It is a popular place for visitors to the North Rim to go and one of the few places that one can get a glimpse of the Colorado River.  The North Rim has a couple of rows of buttes between it and the river that keeps the sculptor of the canyon hidden.  For our first canyon outing we thought we would go try out the new road and see if they smoothed ...

It has been pretty steady of late.  Cleaning fire pits, filling flat tires, jumping dead batteries; just the usual.  We have however been getting trained to operate the check-in kiosk.  Sounds simple but as with all things government, it is anything but.  This means that we have to get 'certified' to push the keys on a government computer, which entails two hours of on-line testing and then a waiting period for our account to be approved.  THEN we can actually get trained on how to use the camper registration system.  We both aced the testing by the way.  Which I gather is not always the case based on all the procedures they have for reattempting the testing. A little something different is that tree pollen season is in full swing.  And since we have massive amounts of giant ponderosa pine trees that means massive amounts of pine pollen.  Having spent the last 30 years in the Atlanta metropolitan area, an area heavily wooded with pine trees...

On our first days off in June we decided to combine a lite shopping trip with some sight seeing.  Kanab, UT is the closest place, at 85 miles that has full service grocery stores (2 of them) and enough places with diesel fuel to spur a little competition and get the price of a gallon below $4.  A few miles west of Kanab is a National Monument called Pipe Spring.  We never made it to this attraction last year so we thought we would give it a try this time. Pipe Spring National Monument started out as ranching operation, pioneered by the Mormons.  Of course the spring was the life blood of Native Americans for hundreds of years before the Mormons arrived.  But it took the Mormons and their construction of a fortress over the top of the spring to forever change the surrounding desert from being a sustainable provider to a near wasteland.  The Mormons ran the operation as a tithing ranch, receiving thousands upon thousands of sheep and cattle they received f...

Cyndee and I went to the Lodge the other day to attend a presentation by an "Artist in Residence".  We were going to watch him fuse glass to metal with the final product being a fine piece of art. But first we had to walk the length of the very long Lodge parking lot.  A little something we like to do is look at all the license plates and see where everyone drove in from.  We see plates from all over, even ones from places that they could not have possibly driven from such as Hawaii and several countries in western Europe.  But on this day a couple of cars behind the plates caught our attention. One, a favorite of Cyndee's, was a Ferrari Testorosa. And then there is this: A 1930 Bentley. Keep in mind that it is not just a Sunday leisure drive to get to the North Rim.  Six hours from Las Vegas, five hours from Flagstaff, nine and half from Phoenix, and eight from Salt Lake City.  Nope, not just a spur of the moment decision to drive to t...

In photographing our surroundings Cyndee and I have captured tiny lizards scurrying across the desert, raptors nesting and on the wing, hummingbirds darting around, bears on a mountain, deer and turkey picking their way through dense forest.  But one critter that has eluded our camera is the Kaibab Squirrel. The Kaibab Squirrel is rare, existing only on the Kaibab Plateau and then only where the ponderosa pine grow.  The population of them is pretty high in North Rim Campground but you could not tell it by the photos taken of them.  These squirrels are wary of anything that moves and keep themselves at distance from anything not a ponderosa pine.  Even when they do finally come down to forage they are in constant motion, making it near impossible to get them framed up and a good lock on focus. After three months of chasing them around last season I have several dozen photos of blurry, gray shapes.  And even when I got close enough to use a flash to "freeze" ...

It started a couple of weeks ago.  If you had read one of my earlier blogs where I wrote about thunder snow, it was one of the lightning strikes form that storm that started what is now called the Galahad Fire. It started small and stayed that way for about a week, just a couple hundred acres.  But in the past week it has intensified and grown to almost two thousand acres.  The National Forest Fire Service has been building fire breaks near an historic cabin and fire watch tower and doing ping pong ball napalm drops with helicopters to start back-fires.  Up till now they have not been actively trying to extinguish the fire, just control where it is going as long as it continues to progress as a beneficial fire. The idea was to keep the fire west of a forest road known as Point Sublime Road (aka W-4).  As long as it stayed there it would burn to the west and toward the edge of the canyon where it would run out of fuel.  But the plan is to begin active fi...