Hi,  Here's another brief trip report and info on new pictures. My cousin Megan left her northern woods in New Brunswick Canada to join me for 10 days in Utah's canyon country, and we had a fine time seeing some of the highlights, hiking, and exercising the digital camera. We took around 500 pictures -- all 'for free' --  kept 200, and I've picked 66 of my favorites you can view if you wish.

Megan is especially interested in flowers and knows a lot about them, and many are blooming this time of year, so we had fun photographing and identifying in our flower books most of what we saw. For the last half-dozen holdouts, we dragged the laptop into 4 Ranger Stations and stumped all the rangers, until we finally found one who really knew her stuff and just said "That's Easy!" and went bing-bing-bing through our mystery photos.

Leaving Salt Lake City we were surprised to find ourselves in a nasty ground blizzard at 10,000 feet, a whiteout almost bad enough to force us to stop. As soon as we dropped down a bit we were ok, but during the week following we got snowed on twice more. Finally the typical Colorado Plateau clear sunny weather returned, great for bringing out colors in the rocks and for hiking.

A major destination was Hole in the Rock, where in the unusually severe winter of 1879-80, 250 Mormon settlers traveled nearly 200 miles across unknown territory, with the Colorado River as a major obstacle where they  widened  crack in the cliff and lowered their 26 wagons 1800 feet down the 45 degree crack and rafted them across the river, along with 1000 head of livestock.  This was an epic adventure, supposed to take 2 months, finally taking 6, over terrain their scouts said was impassable, but they lost no lives and 2 babies were born on the trip! Sometimes you can see traces of their wagon tracks across the sands, and it is a moving experience to see the places they camped and try to get some idea of what it must have been like. We were on the northern half of this epic which now is an easy gravel road except for the last few rough miles, but the southern part is even today is regarded as extreme jeeping territory.

I've put the pictures from this trip in a slideshow which you can look at if you have a broadband internet connection. You can expect several minutes to download. If you don't have broadband, and you want to see the pictures, send me an email and I will be happy to send you a CD which is easy to use.  If you want to know  more about any of the places, or want any individual images, let me know.

The address for the slide show is http://www.firestardesign.com/johna

The new slideshow is 04MEGAN.exe, which contains 66 pictures.

The slideshow from Texas which I posted previously, 04BIGBND.exe, is also still on the server.

Here is how to work the slideshow:

To Start >> Click the filename, and choose 'Open' or 'Save';  or if your browser doesn't offer 'Open',  save to disk and then Double-click or 'Open'
To Abort >> Esc
Next >> Right-click
Back >> Left-click

If you are running a software firewall (e.g., Norton Personal Firewall), it may not like the .exe file, in which case you would have to temporarily turn it off for the download (the Firewall, not  the AntiVirus). If you run into any trouble, please let me know.

If you would like for me to take you off the distribution list for future reports, let me know.

Regards, John Armitage