Finally, comfortable weather, and not just a small amount of it. Almost no smoke, just some at the time of our arrival in Southern Nevada. And temperatures that started at around 80 in the middle of August in Park City, then just above 90 at the end of September down here and are ending up just around 70 in the middle of November with a pending return trip up north, to ice, and snow.
It has been a good few months, a somewhat unusual long stretch of nature deciding that it is almost Autumn spread across the two geographies. It has been that period of late Summer about to be Fall for the entire time. Sometimes I recollect that in Park City it can pass over the course of a weekend in the middle of September. It is the season of yellow, not that of true Fall, when the trees are all crazy and bright, but a more mellow yellow, still mixed with more green than yellow.
Trips have been subdued, an ongoing and unfortunate artifact of the pandemic. Several hikes around Park City on the excellent trail system that has been developed there, and visits to an area known as El Dorado and a couple of slot canyon hikes in the Lake Mead Recreation Area. Also trips into Henderson and downtown Las Vegas. And as is always the case lots of small town strolling around Southern Nevada. We postponed, until next Spring, a planned trip to Maui because the governor of Hawaii asked all tourists not to come. Remarkable. So, I’ve been the anchor here while the rest of the family have come and gone, and in one case, come and gone again. Even a coyote friend also has come and gone, and come back again, pregnant. Certainly the premise for a decent country music song.
In terms of stuff done to my site. I’ve updated my photography pages to include shots from a mid-Summer appallingly toasty trip over to the horseshoe glass-floored viewing area on this side of the Grand Canyon and a really nifty Joshua-tree forest that we passed through on the way there. Those can be found toward the end of my Arizona pages. Also, in the Las Vegas pages are images from the arts district which is now also the brewery district apparently, a sensible outgrowth of the pandemic given the wide uncrowded streets and ample room for outdoor seating. And the cactus gardens, not yet decorated for Christmas, at Ethel M’s Chocolates. A uniquely Las Vegas experience. As almost always there are more shots of small town Southern Nevada in the Southern Nevada pages. Finally, toward the end of the Southern Nevada pages there are shots of a curious place known as Techatticup which is a vast collection of old stuff, some might call it junk, but I prefer to think of it as treasure, that lies on both sides of the small highway between the tiny town of Nelson Nevada and the roads-end at Lake Havasu. Also, we found a new-to-us slot canyon complete with a natural bridge running over it in the El Dorado wilderness area nearby and an old and well-known one north of Boulder City along the shoreline of Lake Mead.
The geology down here continues to amaze me. A disappointing aspect to our long-ago-now move from New England to Park City was that the geology of most of Utah is really quite boring. Unless you are into dinosaurs. The scenery is spectacular, but the underlying geology is surprisingly drab. Lots and lots of flat lying sedimentary rocks. Down here it is a very different story with a lot of wild igneous and metamorphic rocks with complex structures and chemistries and stratigraphies and, therefore, stories to tell. That was very much the case with the rocks encountered on both of our slot canyon hikes.
Another addition to my site is a short video of the Snyderville Basin which is the flat high-elevation glacial valley that extends out from the mountains around Park City. This was done just to play around with the latest GoPro. Amazing stabilization. Although it captures the season of late Summer and early Fall and the mellow yellow quite well. It can be found on my video page.
I’ve been doing a lot of work with Adobe After Effects which for the unfamiliar is sort of a quirky but powerful Photoshop for video that has been around for a long time. Also in late October I participated in the now remote and virtual Adobe Max conference for the second year in a row. It was very enjoyable in this format again, with new features coming out primarily in Lightroom, Photoshop and Illustrator. I continue to be interested in the dual styles for video that are becoming more and more pronounced. One associated with old-school hefty cameras and editing platforms which are to some degree cumbersome and certainly expensive, and one associated with ever-more tiny action cameras and phone video and phone-based editing which are best-suited for on-the-fly production and very inexpensive. Mainly related to improvements in inexpensive cameras and AI features in phone-based editing programs, the quality gap between the two approaches appears to get smaller and the lightweight approach gets easier and easier to use every year.
Also I’ve noted that Adobe Spark is now part of the creative suite. I followed the progress of Spark as beta software throughout its development but then dropped it when it became a product separate from the creative suite. It is nice to see it is back, well some of it anyway. The video piece of it is now replaced by Adobe Premiere Rush. And I haven’t found the replacement for the micro-site functionality. But I haven’t done much looking. At any rate, having the quick ability to toss together vector illustrations, text, photos, and short video for social media content creation in the current product is very nice and very easy.
