Hoodoo Scan

We made the effort to visit both Zion and Bryce Canyon yesterday. This meant we had to drive several hundred miles just to reach both from our base camp. It was not a particularly successful day as far as exploration goes. Both parks were overrun with people. In Zion, you could drive through but people were being urged to park outside of the park and take a shuttle to the park and then take another shuttle to explore the park. Certain areas were available only to people taking the Internal shuttle. Reminds me of taking a shuttle to explore Denali many years ago. Zion is different in structure from Arches so it will require a different strategy. It is more of a canyon so there are few areas to pull off, park, and take short walks to see things. Arches had many larger parking areas I suppose because the topography was suited to providing these opportunities to park and walk.

You can't be upset when the National Parks are so popular. We realized this would be the case from other recent trips, but we thought we would avoid the heavy season by exploring after schools had started. We don't see many children but many, many folks speaking languages other than English. Buses and buses loaded for foreign visitors. The U.S. has spectacular parks and folks with the means to visit will make the effort. The recent willingness of politicians to questions the value of reserved and protected recreation areas need to get out of Washington or New York and take a look. The opportunity to travel and just look is a true gift that makes America great.

I did take some photos yesterday, but my favorite was not taken in one of the parks. Windmills have always been a family thing because we used a windmill on the family farm. I have several unique images in my photo collection.

I did take some other photos. The image below is from Bryce Canyon showing the tall structures called hoodoos. I guess I had heard the word before, but I associate hoodoo with "the blues" as in hoodoo the hoodoo man. The meaning in the blues genre is to black magic (I think). I don't know if there is a connection to the geological use or not. 

I just realized there is a feature in Blogger that allows you to geotag a post with a location.  Cool. It just took me several years to discover this feature and I will have to use it more regularly from now on. I have my iPhone set to geotag all images I collect so in theory I should be able to go back to older images collected with my phone and precisely locate the image. Sounds like a lot of work, but maybe on some cold winter day I will give it a try and update my travel log.