GTT ’26, With a Small Side of NM

Posted on March 4, 2026 by admin

Never cared much for the term snowbird, with its connotations of getting up every morning to play golf during winter in some arid place, or spending the evenings with members of your cohort in some gated community, maybe drinking but definitely grousing about the state of the world. Still, considering that in the winter of 25/26, I’ve spent two out of the last three months – the hard winter months, up Illinois way – in warmer places, it would be churlish to cast shade on fellow old people who happen to enjoy golf or grousing.

On the other hand, I’m not about to claim snowbird as descriptive for myself. I just happen to be able to take long trips during the cold months (along with my laptop, for work). In December, Florida. In February, Texas.

Back on February 3, I got on a plane and flew to Austin. I flew home from Dallas on March 3. In between, I spent time – and Yuriko joined me for a while – traversing the state of Texas, going so far west at one point that we ended up in New Mexico. By traversing, I mean long drives, in a rental car part of the time, and in my brother Jay’s car as well, a blue Subaru known as the Blubaru.

I drove from Austin east to Houston, mostly on US 290; from Houston to Nacogdoches, mostly on US 59; then to Dallas on various state highways, such as Texas 21 and 19; and from Dallas to San Angelo to Marathon, Texas, on US 67 and on the grandly remote US 385, which will also take you to the desert reaches of the Big Bend.

From Marathon, Texas, across to Carlsbad, NM, our route took us along US 90, then Texas 56, then US 62/180. Later, US 62/180 took us from Carlsbad part way back to Dallas — to Sweetwater, Texas — but mostly we went on the faster but less interesting I-20. Dallas to San Antonio was partly I-35, but also US 281, which takes you around the perma-gridlock that is Austin.

Of all those, the road between Nacogdoches and San Augustine on a day trip, Texas 21 heading east, winding through greenish (for February) rolling hills, was a favorite.

The towns listed above were just the places I spent the night, alone or with Yuriko or with my brothers. In between were such places as Bastrop, these days a day-trip from Austin, with the requisite boutiques and restaurants; Huntsville, home of Sam Houston and memorials to the first president of Texas; San Augustine, rival with Nacogdoches in claiming to be the oldest town in Texas; Stephenville and Ballinger, geographically about as deep in the heart of Texas as you can be; the West Texas art town of Marfa and the way station of Van Horn; a string of oil patch towns such as Hobbs, NM, and Seminole, Lamesa, Snyder, and Sweetwater, back in Texas. Later, traversing north to south and back again, I stopped in Hillsboro and Belton, along the I-35 axis; and Lockhart, which has claimed for itself barbecue capital of the state.

Along the way, oddities were encountered. Otherwise, why drive on smaller roads?

Such as an ice cream shop in Waller, Texas.

Or a highly visible ad for Rockets RV Park in Gaines County, Texas, not far east of the border with New Mexico.

A former Texaco station on an obscure Texas highway (Farm-to-Market 1690).

Had various encounters with the historic El Camino Real, whose various tendrils crossed a large slice of the future state of Texas, once upon a time.

Yuriko and I visited Big Bend National Park, Guadalupe Mountains National Park and Carlsbad Caverns National Park. I saw the National Museum of Funeral History in the city of Houston and the museum devoted to Houston (the man) in Huntsville. Also, Roadside America in Hillsboro, an eccentric collection of American commercial art, complete with a personal tour by the proprietor, and the outdoor art at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, that is, brutalist concrete structures in the brutal desert environment. I became acquainted with the splendid Glenwood Cemetery in Houston and the smaller and more ragged, but no less interesting city cemeteries in Huntsville and Nacogdoches. I stopped and looked at about a dozen county courthouses, of which Texas has many.

We ate a lot of meat along the way. As one does in Texas.

Also, Mexican food.

Eat like that and you’d better do some walking, and I did: various places in Austin and Houston and Dallas, in all three national parks, around downtowns and courthouse squares in a number of small towns, and a handful of local parks.

All that was good, but of course best of all, I had time to visit friends and relatives, of whom there are many in Texas: Tom and Nancy in Austin, Kirk and Lisa in Nacogdoches, another Tom and Steve and Ron and Greg and Judith in San Antonio, to list the friends; both brothers, two out of three nephews and their wives and all four of their children, to list relatives, along with the mother of one nephew’s wife (niece-in-law sounds peculiar, but that fits too). Also, I met for the first time two good friends of Tom’s, and one of Kirk and Lisa’s granddaughters.

I’d set out to do four long drives when I was 64, but this makes five. Guess I’m an overachiever about driving, anyway.

Everglades National Park: Skeeters

Posted on January 6, 2026 by admin

I’ve seen maps of Everglades National Park for years, and noted with great interest the main road snaking through the park, from the southern part of greater Miami to a point on the peninsula’s south coast. It was a road I’d long wanted to drive (in red, below), and on the afternoon of December 12, that’s what we did. Only about 40 miles each way in the park, so not too long a drive.

We stayed in Homestead, as far south as metro Miami goes, for the purpose of visiting the Everglades. Outside the park, the road is Florida 9336. Inside the park, it’s the less interestingly named Main Park Road. Odd, considering that some examples of nearby features are named Gumbo Limbo Trail, Hells Bay Canoe Trail, Alligator Creek, Snake Bight Trail and Coot Bay and Coot Bay Pond.

Almost no one else was around, which is the secret sauce for most enjoyable drives. My only minor complaint is that Pa-hay-okee Overlook, at the edge of a cypress zone, was closed. Considering how flat the terrain is, that view would have been expansive.

The park road takes you to Flamingo, Florida, which has no current human population unless you count park staff, who must stay nearby somewhere at least sometimes. Flamingo has no flamingos, according to a park ranger we met, whom I’ll call Bobbie. There seem to have been some of the birds in the late 19th century, she said, but they moved on when hunters showed up, looking for a source of colorful feathers for women’s hats fashionable at the time.

Plenty of other birds are still around, looking for a meal. Hadn’t seen that many circling birds since we were in north-central India.

Flamingo, which is mostly the visitors center, lodging and campgrounds, offered views of Florida Bay and a few of its many keys, a term not limited to the chain of islands connected by the Overseas Highway.

We saw a manatee. Or at least a manatee nose poking out of the water near one of the docks at the park, then ducking underwater with an occasional small splash. The barest outline of its bulk was visible below.

For some reason, the rusty fire hydrants on the park service property caught my attention.

We walked the Guy Bradley Trail. The Flamingo visitors center is also named for Bradley, an early game warden in the area who died in 1905 at the hands of poachers.

The trail, paved and mostly in good shape, was an easy one.

With some views of its own, including the ocean and not including the ocean.

One reason to visit the Everglades during the winter months, maybe the number-two reason right after the absence of searing heat, is the absence of mosquitoes. Make that the relative absence of mosquitoes. During our walk through the greenery around Guy Bradley Trail, a small number of winter mosquitoes were there to greet us.

Even in an age of DEET and whatever has mostly replaced DDT, you will find mosquitoes and more importantly, they will find you. That’s my experience over the years.

South Korea, 1990.

I close my eyes and I can recall those Pusan nights in ’90 in my non-climate controlled room, drinking the tea available in pots just outside everyone’s door, swatting mosquitoes that had clearly feasted on me moments before they died, and listening to the irregular beep-BEEP-beep-beeps of auto horns wafting in through the damaged window screens, along with more mosquitoes.

Saskatchewan, 2006

The only creature I run into regularly while camping is one or another kind of mosquito. The weather had been dryish in Jasper NP, so there weren’t that many there. Things had been even drier at Theodore Roosevelt NP, and we encountered only a very few hardy mosquitoes who managed to survive wrigglerhood in the risk-of-wildfire badlands this summer.

The plains near Regina, Saskatchewan, were another story. On the evening of July 3, we found a private campground a few miles east of Regina for a reasonable C$14. The place was sparse with people, probably since the Canada Day long weekend was winding down, but well populated with blood-drinking vermin. Their main diet likely came from the livestock on the surrounding ranches, but they weren’t above snacking on human beings. Once a cloud of them followed me, so I had to zig-zag back to our camp to lose them. Others buzzed intensely around the tent door until I sprayed it with Off.

Florida Panhandle, 2009

I got out of my car to look around. The forest seemed even more oppressively dense with rain clouds gathering overhead. The air was warm and a little steamy. All I heard was the crunching of my footsteps, the mild rush of the wind, the twitter of birds and, suddenly, the buzz of mosquitoes. Mammals as large as human beings must be a tasty treat for the mosquitoes of the Apalachicola River Basin, because they attacked with terrific speed and in increasing numbers. For all I know, there are a dozen kinds, part of the wonderful biodiversity of the area. I had no chemical protection. I’d forgotten to pack anything with DEET in it, and the TSA might have taken it away anyway.

I took a short look at an interpretive kiosk that had some artifacts behind glass, and another look at the Milly Francis marker, but within a few minutes I retreated to the car. A couple of the mozzies followed me in, but I managed to dispatch the bastards in a pop of my blood.

South Carolina, 2025

Other national parks have majestic mountains or picturesque glaciers or striking deserts or epic coastlines or an important history of human activity. They have high-profile wildlife and ecosystems unique in the world. Congaree does count as a special place, preserving a tiny fraction of the floodplain forests that used to cover much of the Southeast, but that’s a little hard to appreciate on the ground, especially as the target of its high-profile wildlife, mosquitoes.

Everglades National Park: Gators

Posted on January 5, 2026 by admin

On December 11, I took this picture.

Text to a friend, along with the image: Now, what’s the bump in the water? Ah, it’s an alli AHHHGH

Reply from friend: Ha. Ha.

I thought it was funny, even though the joke depends on an alligator canard. As Bob the alligator wrangler told us the next day after our boat tour of the northern reaches of Everglades National Park, the creatures are actually “pretty chill.”

It’s those lowlife crocs that will attack you for no good reason and, I have to report, south Florida is one of the few places where alligators and crocodiles share a habitat. Of course it is. Bob worked for Coopertown Airboats, which is on US 41 and whose tours ply the nearby sawgrass waters, and have since 1945.

The company also has a few alligators lounging around the grounds in cement ponds, and some baby gators, one of which Bob handled with no problem. “Just keep you fingers away from his mouth,” he said, inviting us to touch the alligator. I don’t know why I was surprised to find that a living alligator’s skin feels pretty much like an alligator skin purse or wallet.

Behind glass at Coopertown was the Everglades’ real menace, anyway, a fat, pale ugly-as-can-be python, an inert reptilian Sydney Greenstreet whose countless cousins have claimed much of the biomass of the Everglades as their own, one nightmarish swallow at a time. The python is king of invasive species in Florida, which is saying quite a lot.

The Coopertown gators weren’t hard to find.

Neither were the boats. Nice, simple wayfinding.

I expected the tour boat to look something like this, which was tied up at one of the docks.

The kind you see, or used to see, on TV. The sawgrass and alligator encounters made me think (a few days later) of Flipper for the first time in many long decades. It wasn’t a show we watched much in our house in the mid-60s, but I have a very vague memory of it, maybe from repeats but also reinforced by the saccharine theme song as included on one of the TV Toons records I owned in the ’80s. Reading about the show, I found that it was set in the Keys and not the Everglades, and the characters tooled around in a more standard motorboat. Still, it might have been the first time I ever heard about the Keys.

Those spiffy airboats are for the more expensive tours, I think. Ours was a larger flatbottom with a few rows of metal benches for regular tourists.

But it was pretty good seating for the half hour or so, especially since we got the front row.

Off we went into the grassy water, dotted by quasi-islands sprouting trees. Soon the scenery looked like this.

And this.

Leaving me to wonder, I’m glad the guide knows his way around, because I’d be lost instantly. The boat guide wasn’t Gator Bob, incidentally, but an older fellow perched in the pilot’s cage.

Before long, we found a lounging alligator in the wild.

December is part of the sluggish season for local reptiles, the guide explained. Not too cold for alligators, naturally, but cool enough that lying around in the sun is a good option for them. Regardless, the gator – let’s call him Bob – had his own paparazzi for a few moments.

Our return took us through thick patches of lily pads. They moved aside without tangling or anything complicating that would happen if I were piloting the boat.

Bonus at Cooperville, out near the parking lot. A US Coast & Geodetic Survey Bench Mark, dating from 1965 if I read that right.

Another bonus: A World Heritage Site plaque, complete with comments by birds.

“Everglades National Park is the largest designated sub-tropical wilderness reserve on the North American continent,” UNESCO says. “Its juncture at the interface of temperate and sub-tropical America, fresh and brackish water, shallow bays and deeper coastal waters creates a complex of habitats supporting a high diversity of flora and fauna. It contains the largest mangrove ecosystem in the Western Hemisphere, the largest continuous stand of sawgrass prairie and the most significant breeding ground for wading birds in North America.”

Good old wading birds. Still, that isn’t what people come to see. That would be gators. How do I know this? Consider a scene from a souvenir shop I visited later in our trip.

It was much further north, but still Florida.

Big Cypress National Preserve

Posted on January 4, 2026 by admin

Americans know their national parks – the famous ones, anyway – but how about their national preserves? A similar, yet different sort of designation by Congress. I don’t know all the details myself, but one thing is that resource extraction seems to be possible in limited ways at least some of the 21 preserves, but not at all (?) in the 63 parks. Regardless, preserves are different places on the maps, though they are often adjacent to parks.

Such as Big Cypress National Preserve, which is a large chunk of Florida next to Everglades NP.

Head south from metro Orlando on US 27 and eventually – and it takes a while – the suburban aspects peter out and give way to agriculture, especially citrus and sugarcane. At a hamlet called Palmdale, the highway Florida 29 continues the trek south, meeting both I-75 (Everglades Parkway, Alligator Alley) and US 41. By that time, agriculture has given away to (mostly) undeveloped wetlands. Swamp, in the old days, but in fact the preserve and the park don’t qualify as such. We picked US 41 and headed east, into the thick in the Big Cypress.

Daylight is short in December, even in southern Florida, so we barely had time to traverse US 41 before losing the light. But we managed a few stops.

The territory was behind fences in some spots.

Mostly not.

By dark, we’d passed out of the preserve and on to the edge of the national park. Much of US 41 – known as the Tamiami Trail in part of Florida according to various sources, but not on any signs that I saw – is under construction toward its eastern end, meaning a tight drive through concrete barricades, everyone’s least favorite kind of driving. Under reconstruction, that is, and for good reason.

“The Tamiami Trail (U.S. Highway 41) has long been recognized as one of the primary barriers to flow of water through the ecosystem,” the NPS notes. “The need to eliminate barriers to overland flow of water in the Everglades is considered one of the indisputable tenets of restoration. Much scientific information amassed in recent decades reinforces the importance of removing these barriers to water flow in order to restore natural marsh connectivity.

“In 2009, Congress authorized implementation of the plan selected in the 2008 Modified Water Deliveries to Everglades National Park, Tamiami Trail Modifications, Limited Reevaluation Report (LRR) … The LRR plan would improve potential marsh connectivity, reduce sharp changes in water velocity, and improve rainy season depths and durations. In addition, these modifications will improve the ridge and slough landscape and fish productivity, which could result in increased foraging success for wading birds.”

It makes for a temporarily unpleasant drive, but I think we can all get behind increased foraging success for wading birds and other worthwhile eco-goals for the much abused Everglades. Now only if the plan could do something about Everglades pythons.

Florida ’25

Posted on December 28, 2025 by admin

Decorating for Christmas this year meant a rapid set-up. We spent a fair number of hours on the 23rd making the living room ready for a tree – moving clutter, mostly. On Christmas Eve, I brought the tree in from the garage, and Ann mostly decorated it. Finishing touches, by me, were in progress even on the morning of Christmas Day, but since that moment in the life of our family doesn’t involve an early-morning rush downstairs by children anticipating Santa’s bounty any more, that was doable.

Ann did a fine job of decorating, in the style of our family: fill up the tree with a wide variety of glowing and glinting objects accumulated across the decades.

We got a late start on decorating for Christmas, though when I think about, decorating after the Solstice discourages the sort of front-loading of Christmas that a lot of people complain about, but which they do anyway.

We had a good reason for the late start: a drive to Florida and back, beginning on December 4 and ending on the 22nd. Not just to Florida, but as far as you can go in that state, at least by car, namely to Key West and back. Early to mid-December seemed like a good time to do such a thing, after any traveling people do for Thanksgiving but before the worst of the Christmas-New Year’s rush. A short shoulder season in other words, but a good one, with room rates not quite subject to surge pricing, and crowds thick in some high-volume tourist destinations, but not impossible.

Also, Florida has few mosquitoes this time of year. Not no mosquitoes, as we found out one day in the southern reaches of the peninsula, just a “bearable” number.

Sometime earlier this year, I got the idea that I wanted to take four long drives after turning 64. Four for 64, you could say. Doing so by the end of 2025 wasn’t part of the idea, but that’s how things worked out. The drive to Florida and back, by way of such places as Indianapolis, Louisville, Chattanooga and Atlanta, totaled 3,682 miles. For all four trips since June, the total is about 14,300 miles.

That could be made to sound impressive, but in fact American men my age average more than that every year, about 15,000 miles, at least according to this source, which cites US DOT data. Younger men drive even more annually. Most of that is commuting, however. My commuting mileage by car has been exactly zero this year, and while I drive locally to stores and such, it couldn’t be more than a few thousand miles. So it seems clear that, as an American man, it was my duty to get out and drive.

When we headed south in early December, snow covered the ground all the way past Indianapolis, where we stopped for a few hours at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, which is part of a larger campus called Newfields – and better examined in summer, I think. But the museum is a good one, with a solid collection, especially 19th-century American and European works. Such as “Justitia,” a Morris & Co. work from the 1890s.

After overnighting south of Louisville, we diverted from I-65 and took smaller roads through southern Kentucky and into Tennessee to a holler in Jackson County, where we were the guests of dear friends. Tennessee musicians from those parts — some professional, others skilled amateurs — gathered on the the evening of Saturday the 6th, for one of the periodic jams in our friends’ barn, which houses no animals these days, but a small stage and some sound equipment and a fair number of folding chairs. A joyful jam it was. Food was potluck. I like to think we went to a hootenanny.

The road through the holler. By this point, no snow. We were trading cold for warmth. That was one of the goals of the trip. Maybe the main one.

From there it was mostly a straight shot down through Georgia on I-75 to Florida, and eventually US 27 to Orlando by way of non-coastal Florida places like Gainesville, Ocala and Lady Lake, a string of settlement less agricultural and less pastoral now than ever, more like an endless outer suburb. Heavy traffic is an invasive species in this part of Florida, surely as pythons are in damper parts of the state. Not just masses of cars and trucks, either, but also golf carts. We passed close enough to The Villages to see billboards advertising legal representation in the event of golf cart accidents. Carts, I’ve heard, provide transport in great numbers in that sprawl of a settlement.

The drive to and in Florida involved the usual North American mix of large and small roads, smooth and ragged, grid-like and irregular, though Florida cities tended toward the irregular (except for Key West), and as crowded as can be and as empty as can be. Snow lined the way up north, thinning out the further south we went, giving way to brown landscapes and bare trees. Then we came into greenery – evergreens and palms and even deciduous species turning color. We crossed mighty bridges over mighty rivers, small culverts over alligator haunts, and the string of bridges that make up the civil engineering marvel known as the Overseas Highway (US 1). We crossed barely acknowledged borders and signs at the Florida visitor center on I-75 proclaiming The Free State of Florida.

Florida Man was out and about, weaving in and out of high-speed traffic, pushing 100 and pretty sure that physics doesn’t apply to him, though I have to admit that Florida isn’t different from any other state in that way. Traffic stopped cold more than once: for a banged up, upside-down SUV; for a raging RV fire, attended by a half-dozen firemen; for a serious two- or maybe three-car wreck on the other side of a divided highway; for construction, usually without any workers in sight; and once for no reason that we could tell at all.

In Orlando, we spent all December 9 at Universal Epic Universe, a theme park that only opened in May. Ann flew in the day before we went to the park and flew home the day afterward, taking advantage of the low prices that discount airlines offer to high-volume places in a shoulder season, if you take no bags and buy nothing to eat or drink at sky-high prices, literally and figuratively. A small bag of hers had been stowed in our car for the visit.

A theme park is one thing, but I wanted a look at Orlando, at least a sliver of it, the next day. Ann’s flight was fairly late that day, so we were able to spend part of it in posh Winter Park, including a tour boat ride through the town’s small lakes, lush with greenery and expensive houses on their banks, and connected by canals.

A drive that included the stretch of US 41 that passes through the Everglades took us to Homestead, Florida, and the mid-century charms of The Floridian motel. A day in Everglades NP followed, including an airboat tour and a drive to the coast at Florida Bay. The next day, before leaving Homestead for a drive in the rain across the Overseas Highway to Key West and while the sun still shined, we toured the Coral Castle, a one-man construction project using 1,000 tons of oolite to make walls, carvings, stone furniture, and a castle tower.

Key West was a two-day, three-night mid-December ramble on the busy and less busy streets of Old Town, including humans but also chickens, taking in the likes of the Hemingway House, the Little White House, Mallory Square, the San Carlos Institute, the Key West Aquarium, and the Key West Cemetery. Also, tourist shops, boutiques and the building where Pan-Am was founded. We ate and drank, though as our wont, nothing alcoholic. Key West was decked out for the holidays but not over the top. We walked and walked some more. It felt like a couple of pleasant summer days.

From my 2014 visit, I knew that on the back streets near the little-visited cemetery, parking was possible on an otherwise cramped island. So it was. On Margaret Street, within sight of the cemetery.

The return drive took us up the eastern coast of Florida, but avoiding the worst traffic in Miami-Dade by taking Florida’s Turnpike. By December 17, we’d arrived in Orange Park, a large suburb of Jacksonville, for a stay with two other dear friends, former Austinites now in northern Florida. Part of the next day was in and near downtown Jacksonville, one of the larger U.S. cities I’d never visited before (I believe San Jose is now the largest on that list). During our downtown stroll, we encountered the coolest building in Jacksonville and certainly one of the coolest in Florida.

We quit Florida on the 19th, but weren’t quite done with the trip. Yuriko had never been to Atlanta and wanted to go. Though I’d been however many times since 1982, I was happy to oblige, so we spent two nights and a day there, using the day to see the astonishing Georgia Aquarium and the impressive but somewhat overpriced World of Coca-Cola.

The last legs of the trip were long drives: Atlanta to Elizabethtown, Kentucky; and from there to home the next day. I wasn’t about to let them be completely dull drives, so we stopped on the second-to-last day in Chattanooga, to see the conveniently located, blocks-from-the-highway Chattanooga Choo-Choo redevelopment. On the last day of the trip, we stopped in Jeffersonville, Indiana, and walked across the Big Four Bridge, a former RR bridge across the wide Ohio, now serving pedestrians and bicyclists.

Home and then — Christmas, when things slow down for a week or so. Good timing.

Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park

Posted on October 2, 2025 by admin

A vast stretch of mountains majesty well over the tree line, a complex mass of sand piled at the edge of rugged mountains, and the well-hewn cliffside relics of a people remote in time but whose presence endures – the first three national parks we visited in Colorado in September all rated as exceptional destinations. But I’m glad, simply because it was last on the clockwise loop I’d planned through the state, that Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park came last. It would have been a hard act to follow.

As a steep – and really deep – crack in the earth, the Black Canyon lives up its name, with most of the canyon cast in shadow most of the time, striking in its seeming darkness. But not pitch black all the way down its 2,000-foot cliffs. Far away, a whitish irregular ribbon runs through the gray bottom of the canyon, quickly recognizable as a river in quicksilver motion. The Gunnison, that is.

If there were no other people around, which happened sometimes at this park, you could hear the roar of the river. Faint, but distinct in its power. Mass snow melts and rushing tributary creeks enable the Gunnison to act (on a geological time scale) like a high-powered saw cutting through rocks that are unimaginably ancient. Before long, that is 2 million years, the river gouged the crack you see, exposing rocks 1,000 times older than the time it took to cut the canyon.

A single two-lane road snakes about seven miles along the south rim of the canyon (should I even have to say it? By the CCC), offering a string of overlooks. Not far from the park entrance, an overlook gives a taste of vistas to come. I might have named the place Gray Canyon, but that isn’t quite as poetic, is it?

Also, evidence of the fire that swept through the park in July, burning about a total of about 4,000 acres on both the south and north rims, along with some Park Service infrastructure. A number of trails leading away from the south rim overlooks were still closed when we visited the park on September 19, with signs disallowing access to charred grounds and slopes.

Fortunately for us, we were able to drive the South Rim Road and see what we could see at some of the overlooks. Unless you’re keen on some kind of lunatic climb into the canyon, that seems like a perfectly reasonable ambition. At the main visitor center on the road – which a ranger told us had barely escaped intact, through the efforts of hotshot crews – a path leads to scenic perch, built to accommodate casual visitors. It survived the fire as well.

Any photo’s going to be a pale image of this vista, but they will have to do. Believe me, it was a place to drop everything and gawk. And, even while safe behind rails, to experience a touch of vertigo. Nothing incapacitating, just an unsettling mental comparison between little you and the huge yawning drop.

A pointy ledge below. An opportunity for an Instagram death. It was hardly the only one.

Further down the road, a good view of the Gunnison. It’s hard to tell just by the images, but that’s around 2,000 feet down. Eventually, the water goes into the Colorado River.

Capt. John Gunnison is the U.S. Army officer and explorer who came to the canyon in 1853 as part of the effort to find a route for the transcontinental railroad. To sum up his conclusion, in terms he would have never used: Not through the Black Canyon, Secretary Davis. Are you kidding me? Later that year, Gunnison and most of his men got the worst of an encounter with some Ute warriors and, among other places, the river acquired his name as a posthumous honor.

I also have to say that Gunnison’s career also included surveying in the Upper Midwest, such as the Green Bay area, and that he surveyed the border between Wisconsin and Michigan. An underappreciated kind of achievement, I’d say.

None of the viewpoints were crowded. The Grand Canyon, this isn’t. The more accessible south rim of the Black Canyon isn’t crowded, even on a warm Friday afternoon, unlike the more accessible south rim of the Grand Canyon.

Near the end of the road is a view of the Painted Wall.

The stripes are not paint, of course, but pegmatite, an igneous rock that solidified after the surrounding rock did, for reasons that a geologist, which would not be me, might be able to explain. A sign at the viewpoint helpfully compares the height of the cliff (2,250 feet) to various manmade structures. The only one that would rise higher than the wall is Burj Khalifa, and that not by much. Note also that the top of the cliff, across on the remote north rim of the canyon, has absolutely nothing in the way of safety infrastructure. The cliff is a cliff, with gravity ready 24/7 to whisk the careless or suicidal to their doom.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t include a few more post-char landscapes: the sort that spread out from South Rim Road for long stretches. It would be a thrill of a road anyway — a little more thrill than I need, actually — with its sporadic few spots where the separation between the road’s edge and an enormous cliff was a single white line.

At the end of the road is the trailhead of Warner Point Trail. From the parking lot, according to a sign, the walk is 1,373 yards to the overlook at Warner Point. Near the sign, I heard a couple of young German men obviously working out the distance in meters (you don’t need much German to understand that). No matter how few people are at a U.S. national park, some are going to be Germans.

I preferred to work out the distances in miles. That would be nearly eight-tenths of a mile, so roughly a 1.6 miles there and back. Or 2.5 km for Euro-types. Better shoes on, poles in hands, hats on heads and water in a small backpacks, we set off on the trail. Yuriko and a few other people (including the Germans) got to Warner Point before I did , but get there I did.

The walk was partly on this kind of trail.

With a fair amount of this kind of thing.

Along the way, an impressive collection of deadwood that the recent fires missed.

With views of the agricultural valley outside the park..

Finally, the end of the trail at Warner Point.

When I got there, Yuriko was waiting. Two other people were there (not the Germans; as athletic sorts, they’d come and gone). Soon they left. So we had the vista to ourselves for about 10 minutes, until another couple came along and we left. When we were quiet, the only sound was the Gunnison far below.

Mesa Verde National Park

Posted on October 1, 2025 by admin

In 800 years or so, will people come from significant distances to look at the ruins of my mid-century neighborhood? That doesn’t seem likely for any number of reasons. I’d be surprised if my own house survives until the next century, considering how good people are now at razing and rebuilding. But considering such a long span of time, there’s no way to know.

That’s the kind of thing I wonder about when facing structures of that age, especially those whose inhabitants are known mainly by the structures and other items they long ago cast off.

On September 17, we’d come to the Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde National Park. To get close, you sign up and pay for a ranger-guided tour, which goes down stone stairs, along the edge of the cliff near the dwellings, and then back up some stone stairs (built by the CCC; does that even need to be said?). The elevation is 7,500 feet or so, but that didn’t cool things down that day. It was hot and sweaty.

A shot like that took some effort. We were hardly alone at Cliff Palace.

The ruins, which are most certainly near a cliff, are probably not a palace in the grand sense of a royal residence. More of a neighborhood, one of many in the vicinity, though the largest. Also, not quite as much of a ruin as it used to be. This is an image of the Cliff Palace from 1891, taken by Gustaf Nordenskiöld.

Not as long ago as all that, considering the age of the structures, but before TR inked the bill creating the national park, and back when you could help yourself to whatever was lying around, as the explorer (and photographer) Nordenskiöld apparently did, taking many items back home to Sweden. Eventually, the items made their way to Finland. A few were returned recently.

The ruins aren’t quite as ruined these days. The 20th century was a period of stabilization. Not as many artifacts got nicked either.

A kiva. The largest one at the Cliff Palace, I think. A religious site similar to others in the Southwest, such as at Bandelier National Monument (and now I know that was a kiva).

The canyon below the Cliff Palace. Imagine having to scramble up and down the walls regularly, to tend to fields or fetch water or escape from marauders.

Mesa Verde is of course much more than the Cliff Palace, since the park protects an estimated 5,000 archaeological sites, including 600 cliff dwellings. The main road through the park (built by the CCC, naturally) takes visitors to other overlooks. The dwellings of Spruce Tree House are sizable and also off limits these days, until the overhead rocks are stabilized.

More cliff dwellings. They are a little hard to see, but they are there.

On top of the main mesa, the road also goes through areas burned by wildfire at one time or another.

Flora always bounces back.

I had the vague idea that the inhabitants of the cliff dwellings disappeared mysteriously after about 1300, but visiting the park schooled me on more current thinking. They left, but there was nothing mysterious about it. Drought hit them, and hit them hard, so they migrated to find water and other sustenance. Persistent violence was probably a factor, too, as tends to happen in periods of strained resources. So it’s pretty clear that Ancestral Puebloans’ descendants even now live among the tribes along the Rio Grande, not too far away.

I also didn’t realize that the well-known cliff dwellings were only occupied for a relatively short time, in the grand scheme of native inhabitation: only about a century. Before that, most of the inhabitants lived atop the mesas. One such ruin is called Far View, which isn’t far from the road.

I heeded this signs and didn’t enter. But you can walk around the perimeter and imagine the passing centuries.

Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve

Posted on September 30, 2025 by admin

It’s a safe bet that when most Americans think of scenic Colorado, they think of the sort of mountains you see at Rocky Mountain National Park, or many of the other ranges in the state. Less likely to come to mind is 1.5 cubic miles of sand. That much sand is hard to imagine at all.

That’s the amount of sand thought to be piled at Great Sand Dunes National Park in southern Colorado. Naturally, it isn’t a 1.5-mile cube, though the idea is amusing. The NPS notes that the sand is more spread out: “The 30 square mile (78 sq. km) active dunefield is where the tallest dunes reside. It is stabilized by opposing wind directions (southwestly [sic] and northeasterly), creeks that recycle sand back into it, and a 7% moisture content below the dry surface.”

We approached the park on September 14, heading eastward on Lane 6 North, an Alamosa County road through the flatlands of San Luis Valley, an enormous stretch of land between the San Juan Mountains and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. At 8,000 square miles, San Luis is the world’s largest alpine valley, the Denver Gazette asserts, with an average elevation at more than 7,600 feet.

Great Sand Dunes was a national monument for longer than it has been a park, though park status represents an enlargement of the monument that President Hoover created. It is Colorado’s newest national park, raised to that status only a little more than 20 years ago.

At a distance of some miles from the park, you notice a pale rim at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo range. As the mountains come better into view, so does the rim, soon looking like a vast pile of sand – which it is – pushed up against the mountains by some enormous broom – which it was not (see above).

Also on offer: a nice view of the Sangre de Cristo, including flora that thrives in the sandy soil of its foothills.

The tourist side of GSDNP features a visitor center and a parking lot and, a short ways away, camp sites. Vegetation girds the parking lot. From there – dunes at the other end of a long sand flat.

No further signs, no trails. Visitors head toward the dunes and wander around wherever they want.

A major activity is sandboarding. Like snowboarding, I suppose, only without the freezing white stuff. Atop this dune, sandboarders are ready to slide.

It’s a young person’s and young families’ game. We happened to meet a pair of young men on one of the dune crests, boards in hand. One of them was wearing a Texas A&M cap, and I asked if he’d gone to school there. He had, finishing a few years ago. I wasn’t entirely certain that he believed me when I told him my grandfather was Class of ’16. That is, 1916.

Horseback riding is also allowed on the dunes, under certain conditions.

We merely took a walk, climbing a few of the smaller dunes. I’d learned my lesson back in 2007, when we clawed our way up a large sand dune in Michigan, at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore: “It was a slog. One foot up, then it slides down a bit. After all, it’s warm sand. Make that pretty hot sand. Step, slide back, step, slide back, step, slide back. Rest. Heat. Sweat. Sand in shoes. Remove sand pointlessly, because it comes back. Step, slide back, step, slide back…”

The day at GSDNP wasn’t quite as hot as in Michigan, but the sand was just as sandy. So we admired North America’s largest pile of sand, but not from the top of any particularly large pile.

Rocky Mountain National Park

Posted on September 29, 2025 by admin

On September 15, KKTV in Colorado reported that Trail Ridge Road through Rocky Mountain National Park was “briefly closed Sunday [the 14th] due to the wintry weather. This was first time snow and ice shut down the road since it reopened in May.”

We drove that road two days before, on the 12th. As the article notes, the “48-mile highway through the park is North America’s highest continuous paved road and connects the east and west sides of the park… [it] reaches 12,180 feet at its highest point. Alpine Visitor Center, where snowfall was caught on webcam, is located at about 11,796 feet.”

We’d spent the night before in Granby, Colorado, from the looks of it a growing town – complete with large rows of spanking-new townhouses – and from there entered the park from the western, or less crowded side. The eastern entrance near Estes Park, Colorado, has a more direct connection to the mobs coming from greater Denver.

RMNP is a place of majestic vistas. We came for that, and were not disappointed. But I was just as impressed by something we saw near the western entrance at a place called Holzwarth Historic Site, in the Kawuneeche Valley. A picturesque place.

It was the first place we stopped in the park, walking on a path through part of the valley. A small bridge crossed what looked like a creek.

A sign on the bridge informed us, however, that this was the Colorado River. A flabbergasting moment. I’d known that the Colorado rises in one of the remote parts of the park, but I didn’t know we were going to encounter the river – whose downstream will carve epic canyons and be dammed to the hilt for the water and power needs of millions of people – by crossing it on foot in a few seconds.

The Holzwarths ran a dude ranch on the site for much of the 20th century, before selling it to the Nature Conservancy, which eventually resulted in the area being added to the national park. A number of the dude ranch buildings still exist not far from the baby Colorado River.

From the valley Trail Ridge Road, which is also US 34, heads upward. A look back at the valley.

Soon you reach Milner Pass on the Continental Divide, crossing back to the Atlantic side; we’d crossed to the Pacific side at Berthoud Pass the day before outside the park, on the way to Granby.

From there, the road takes you above the tree line. By that elevation, the warmth down in the valley is just a memory, as brisk chilly winds blow. The air was still above freezing that day, but not by much.

From one of the several pullouts on the road, a path through fields of alpine tundra.

Been a long time since I’d seen any. Back in the Canadian Rockies? No, Alaska. Still, a while ago. We’d reached autumn above the tree line, with the tundra turning.

The road goes on.

Who first built the road? There was none when Rocky Mountain NP became a national park, with President Wilson’s signature on the bill. Improvements came later, and of course they were by the CCC.

At the Alpine Visitor Center, parking was hard but not impossible to find. The views are good from there, but if you want the better vistas, you climb some outdoor stairs. Roughly 200 feet of them.

The air was cold and there wasn’t enough of it. Or so it seemed. I took my hiking pole, put on a sweater and cap and started up. I could have bought a small can of oxygen at the gift shop, had I known about it. I saw a woman, clearly older than me, coming up the stairs as I was headed down, pausing to inhale vigorously from such a can.

Yuriko and Emi made it to the top before I did, but by taking a number of breaks, I managed to get to there myself. Just another thing I should have done 30 (40) years ago. But even then, I’d have been tired at the top.

It’s that extra five feet that leaves you gasping, I think. No matter, the view was worth the gasps. Entirely. The images, as usual for this kind of vista, barely convey the scene in its glory. This is going to be a persistent reality over the next few days’ posts.

Enough to make you burst out with a rendition of “Rocky Mountain High.” If you had the oxygen. I have to say I was glad to repair soon to a lower altitude, one below the tree line. From the Alpine Visitor Center, the road heads toward the eastern entrance to the park, a good many miles away and several thousand feet closer to sea level.

Before we left the parking lot, we saw a fox — guess that would be an alpine fox, pointy snout, pointy ears, billowing with orange and white fur — trot onto the parking lot, as if it had a car parked there. A young ranger, presumably used to the elevation, took chase. Not to catch the fox, which would have been impossible, but probably to prevent the animal from getting run over. Roadkill is one thing, but parking lot kill would have put a small dint in the scenic wonder all around. Anyway, the fox headed for the slopes.

Not only was the air better below tree line, fall foliage was well under way, something we haven’t gotten much of even now here in northern Illinois, though it won’t be long.

One down, three to go. One of the marvels of Colorado’s four national parks is how different each of them are from the others, as we would soon see for ourselves.

Colorado Lasso ’25

Posted on September 28, 2025 by admin

Driving down from the alpine wonders of Rocky Mountain National Park a couple of weeks ago on highway US 36, I realized we’d be passing through Boulder, Colorado. So during one of the moments of standstill traffic on that highway as it winds into Boulder — it’s a crowded road, especially on a weekend during warm weather — a thought occurred to me. More of a memory-thought, since it harkened back almost 50 years.

At zero mph, I had time to consult Google for more information. (Remarkably, the signal was strong.) Google Maps pinpointed the location I’d thought of, on a leafy street in Boulder. That day I expended some tourist energy, of which I don’t have quite as much as I used to, to find Mork’s house.

That is, the house used in establishing shots in Mork & Mindy to show their home, since the show was set in Boulder. I know I’d seen Boulder on maps. Funny name, I thought as a kid. Really Big Rock City. It’s still a little funny. But other than as a spot on the map, the show was probably the first time I’d heard anything else about the place.

The passengers in my car, Yuriko and Emi, having grown up outside of the orbit of ’70s American sitcoms, didn’t particularly appreciate the place. At least not until I conveyed the information that the show made Robin Williams famous. He’s a known quantity. I read a bit about the house later, and there seems to be no consensus about whether the owner cares whether anyone stops by the take a picture. My guess would involving factoring in a dwindling number of people coming by. You know, because the show went off the air over 40 years ago.

Then again, if my U.S. travels have taught me nothing else, it’s that retirees are out being tourists. They have the time they didn’t used to, and currently are just the right age to take a peek at Mork’s house at 1619 Pine Street, which is easy enough to find. Even if, like me, their fondness for that show was lukewarm at best.

Boulder and Mork came early in the second leg of my three-legged, 4,498-mile drive, which seemed to kill that many bugs on the windshield and front hood and bumper. The house counted as merely one spot in a trip that took me through hundreds of places. I spend most of September on the road, heading west from Illinois early in the month along I-80 and smaller roads, especially Nebraska 2 through the Sandhills, and spending time in western Nebraska and its rocky outcroppings and in southeast Wyoming, before going to Denver. That would be the first leg. Which, I’m very happy to say, included a good look at Carhenge.

Yuriko flew to Denver on the last of the points I got from SWA for the Christmastime FUBAR a few years ago and we met there. (New motto for the airline: Now We’re Just Another Airline!) After an overnight jaunt to Rocky Mountain NP in the company of our friend Emi, the two of us then spent more than a week taking a clockwise circle-(like) course — a lasso, you might call it, a straight line connected to a loop — from Denver to Colorado Springs to Pueblo to Walsenburg to Alamosa to (coming down from Wolf Creek Pass) Pagosa Springs to Durango to Silverton to Ouray to Montrose to Salida and back to Denver, where Yuriko flew home. That was the second leg. The drives were varied and gorgeous.

You’d think that would be enough, but I had to drive home, loosely following I-70 this time, making my way from Colorado through Kansas, Missouri and Illinois, and making a number of stops, big and small, such as Kit Carson, Colorado; Abilene, Kansas; and Kansas City, Missouri, for a third and final leg. No single small road took me through Kansas, but a series of them did, some as empty as, well, eastern Colorado and western Kansas. That’s some fine driving. Mountains are great, but after a week or so of their twisty ups and downs on two lanes, flat is all right. More relaxing, even.

For reasons that will soon be obvious, not long ago I looked up 2024 visitation statistics for the four national parks in Colorado: Rocky Mountain, Mesa Verde, Great Sand Dunes, and Black Canyon of the Gunnison.

Far and away the top national park draw in Colorado is Rocky Mountain NP, which received 4.2 million people last year, according to the NPS. In fact, it’s a top ten among most-visited U.S. parks. That isn’t so much of a surprise, considering the monster population that lives nearby in greater Denver and other parts of the Front Range. Indeed, for a lot of people, RMNP is easily a day trip.

That isn’t true for the other three national parks, but even so I was surprised to learn how few people actually visit any of them. They aren’t that remote. We aren’t talking Gates of the Arctic NP or American Samoa NP remote. Still, out of the 63 current U.S. national parks, last year Mesa Verde ranked 41st, Great Sand Dunes 44th, and Black Canyon 49th. The three of them combined saw only about 30 percent as many visitors as Rocky Mountain in 2024.

We set out to see all four of the national parks in Colorado. And we did. You could call it a national park trip, along the lines of the one a few years ago mostly on the Colorado Plateau. But the parks were only a framework, never the total picture, over mountains and across plains. We saw a lot else besides, such a male bear outside our window about 10 miles north of Durango, a female in a tall nearby pine snarling at him, and cubs higher up in the tree. More detail to come on that, in the fullness of time.

Rocky Mountain NP is an exercise in rising above the tree line, by vehicle but also on foot, up a path, into to a satisfying exhaustion before majestic mountains. The pale sand dunes of the Great Sand Dunes NP rise from a valley and back up against a mountain range, as if a giant broom swept it off to corner, and for visitors amounts to a giant sand box. Mesa Verde NP, where the stone dwellings of the Ancient Ones are tucked away in steep stone canyons, shows how much effort people will put into making a home for themselves. Black Canyon of the Gunnison NP is a scenic great unknown, a great dark crack in the earth that reminds you that gravity is in charge, its ragged cliff edges rife with opportunities to die for an Instagram image.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: National Parks