CuRVWander

The Park Service has added a third set of hosts to our campground.  The affect on us is that now, on our third day of our three-day shift, we have what is called a "project day".  So instead of making our regular rounds doing audits and inventory of campsites and compliance notifications we now do a variety of things such as simple maintenance projects, cleaning fire pits, recycling of propane canisters and my favorite, park patrol. Our first project day we opted to do park patrol.  It's the holiday period encompassing Thanksgiving, Christmas and the New Year and the campground is packed solid with holiday vacationers.  There is very little chance to get access to a campsite to do any maintenance so on patrol we go. So far the exploring of the park with Cyndee and I together has been pretty minimal.  Between work, dust storms, grocery runs, and house chores we have only done things that could be done quickly.  The canyon hiking that I have written abou...

  The above picture is the main attraction of Death Valley, Badwater Basin.  It's the lowest and hottest place in the National Park at 282 feet below sea level with temperatures exceeding 130 degrees in the summer.  Fortunately those temperatures abate significantly in the winter.  We have been having daytime highs of mid-60s to low-70's for a few weeks now.  Morning lows have even dipped below 40 degrees.  We're actually running heat the first couple of hours after rising at 6:00am.  It has been a very welcomed change in weather patterns compared to our first couple of weeks after arrival where night time temps didn't get below 90 degrees. I previously wrote about a hike to Natural Bridge and posted a good number of photos.  For this post I have a few more shots from that hike that don't have anything to do with the bridge.  Rather these are shots of "secondary" attractions or unadvertised visual delights. First up is a canyon wall just past...