Ah. Late July, August, and early September were a beast. Errantly evacuated because of a nearby 16,500 acre wildfire, high 90’s and occasionally over 100 degrees, trails and all sorts of other things getting washed out because of crazy rain, thunderstorms at five in the morning for days. Tornadoes. We don’t have tornadoes. Until now. Now apparently we have tornadoes and 100 degree days. If I believed in that sort of thing I would have speculated that the end times were upon us. But I stick to the secular script and attribute it all to the climate misbehaving in what have actually turned out to be oddly predictable disparate ways.
I saw somewhere that Stephen Trimble has updated his quite good book on the geology of the great basin desert with new science and other things I would presume. I look forward to this because the first time around I felt pretty satisfied with the explanation of a great drying out and heating up emerging from the ice age resulting in desertified valleys and isolated sky islands.
That was before Al Gore visited the theater in the Park City library during the Sundance Film Festival with his inconvenient truth. I didn’t respond well to that because I found it lawyerly and giving no quarter to alternative thoughts. The approach of Trimble, at least in the earlier edition of “The Sagebrush Ocean”, strikes me as much better. An examination of evidence in ways that make sense with the purpose being to explain rather than preparing a decisive argument with the purpose being to convince. More science club and less debate team.
Another book on the same subject that I enjoyed at around the same time was “The Desert’s Past” by Donald K. Grayson. That one is a tome of facts, a comfortable place for me at the time. It lacks the grace and photography of Trimble and, for that, can be forgiven because it leaves few stones unturned.
The end of August and beginning of September were quite troubling because an eighteen year old cat had reached her last days. She was a spunky orange cat until the end and the event was made worse in that she was the last of a cohort of three cats that ended up in the family via various complicated ways at around the same time. Each, not just a cat but a story and a personality. Not the end of a cat but the end of an era.
We also had friends enroute from North Carolina to visit both the high country of Northern Utah and the so-called mighty-five of the canyons of the southern half of the State. At the time it appeared that tourists were getting washed away in flash floods by the droves in the National Parks and lightning would be problematic in the north.
It all worked out just fine.
I had an absolute blast and I am sure I was a bit of a pain. We hung out with them for the first part of the northern part of their tour and we visited a few spots: Guardsman’s Pass, the Lake at Brighton, the Silver Fork Lodge at Solitude, Cecrete Lake and Albion Basin above Alta, the top of the Snowbird Tram, Little Cloud Bowl and the Peruvian Gulch, Mirror Lake and the Mirror Lake highway in the Uintas, Ruth’s Diner in Emigration Canyon, and what once was the Rhode Island Diner in Oakley.
Every one of these were once, at least for me, touches of magic in a dusty world. Memories of cross-country ski races from Brighton to Park City, the times I rode my bike to the top of the Snowbird Tram (“Here?, You rode your bike to here?” “Yes”). Little Cloud, the ski run I loved so much that I named a llama after it. OK the white llama did actually look quite a bit like a little cloud. It grew less little and cloudlike with time. The two moose that appeared on a trail twenty feet away in densely, densely falling snow near Soapstone Basin in the Uintas.
Trails that once were cakewalks are cakewalks no longer. But the memories, touches of magic in a dusty world.
Anyway a few images from the three days in the high country of northern Utah are at the end of my northern utah usa pages in my photography galleries. Parts of 10 and 12 and all of 11.
I’ve been in the the desert of Southern Nevada for a little over a week now. More 90 and something degree days. Fixing things that broke over the Summer, mainly water emitters, and replacing a few plants that didn’t make it. I also, as a next step in redoing my site, have put together a video page which is linked to Vimeo which is a new regular platform for me. I’ll still be putting things up on youtube, but thought I would give Vimeo a try as the main video link from my site. It provides greater control and is less ambitious as a social media platform. I had told myself I would do this when I got to ten videos. I’m a little late. Hopefully I should be putting up more videos more often. Seventeen videos is a rather paltry sum relative to the number of photos in my galleries.
I should be back in Northern Utah soon, with friends from India. This time I think it will be the West Desert and Salt Flats and Antelope Island but I am not sure.