Here are just a few of the 4x4 road trips we took this year and some of the hikes.
Winter Road runs between House Rock Valley Road and 89A south of Kanab. This road is part of the honeymoon trail that young Mormon couples traveled by wagon to live south of Lees Ferry. Today it is a fairly well maintained road. As you can see the views from this road are spectacular.
Some hoodoos we found in a canyon in southern Grand Staircase Escalante.
Melinda is standing in front of a sign at the condor release site on the southern end of House Rock Valley Road. You can see how large a condor wing span is compared to Melinda's outstretched arms which are about 5' 9" from tip to tip. Obviously she's not ready to fly yet. )
The wind sculpted sand stone formations continue to amaze us in their beauty and diversity.
Here we are on our trek up to the top of Yellow Rock off of the Cottonwood Road. We saw the back side of Yellow Rock one day when we patrolled the Indian Pottery road south of route 89, so we were excited to see the view from the top of Yellow Rock. It was a very aggressive climb but well worth the energy it took to get to the top.
It is a lot further and steeper than it looks
Dick spent a lot of time this year laying out, routing, sanding, and painting signs that will be "planted" at various trail heads and roads in the Paria/ Vermillion Cliffs / Grand Staircase Monument areas. We worked a few hours a day on these sign most of the time we were at the Paria BLM Station this year.
Here we are "planting" one of the signs. "So what do you think?? Are the post holes deep enough yet??"
Before we left Paria we took one last hike down Wire Pass into the Buckskin Gulch. The water pools were frequent and relatively deep this year but the views of the slot canyon are always worth hiking through a bit of water.
Here is an example of the type of camp sites we stayed at as we headed north through Salt Lake Cite on our way up to Kalispell, Montana. This was our front yard overlooking the Yuba Reservoir.
While we were in Montana we headed up to Whitefish to work on the front yard of the small house we bought a few years ago. In these pictures you can see the before and after views of the front yard.....a lot of work but it came out nice. This is where we might decide to live when we come off the road someday.....Whitefish in the summer and Wellton, Az in the winter. It doesn't get much better than that!! )
Here is a picture of the "work crew" that transformed the front yard of the Whitefish property. From left to right is me, Melinda, our daughter-in-law Dawn, and our son Conrad. Needless to say Conrad did most of the "heavy lifting" on the project. )
From Montana we head toward Portland where we will be hosting at the Rooster Rock State Park on the Columbia River for a few months this summer.
Here we are camped below the John Day Dam in the Columbia River gorge. This is a great Corp of Engineer site to camp on and the fishing this time of year is incredible. We watched fishermen routinely pulling 30 to 40 inch Northern Pike out of the river all day long!!!
See Mt. Hood in the background.
Rooster Rock......here we come!
What we did discover this morning at 5 AM was how beautiful the sunrises are here at Rooster Rock. Here are a couple of the pictures we took this morning looking east up the Columbia River. This is the same view that Lewis and Clark would have seen standing on this same site back in the eighteen hundreds.
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