In retrospect it has been a pretty sweet summer so far. I’ve spent more time than normal in the mountains of northern Utah which has been nice. The prior two summers of extreme heat and smoke just never materialized this year, and hopefully won’t in the next couple of months. Living in a place like Utah over a long period of time allows you to completely ignore and almost forget about quite wonderful spots all around you and then revisit them with a renewed sense of awesome.
I developed a strong hankering to hit the Sundance and Midway parts of the Wasatch, south of Park City and more so linked to Provo, and all that entails, rather than Salt Lake City, early in October when I made the long haul down to Southern Nevada only to see so many posts on Facebook, in local hiking groups, of what was a magnificent Autumn for arboreal splendor. It’s not quite New England but, in particular, that area of the Wasatch is similar. So I settled for wandering around in May and June. Taking photos first and then returning for video later. The photos are of only Cascade Springs, a large mountain natural spring complex, and Sundance, the ski resort formerly owned by Robert Redford. I came away from the experience with two thoughts. The area truly is spectacular. And the times, they are a-changing. The development pressure around Midway is extreme, related to expansion of a highway and the development of Utah’s tech industry center at its base. And the Sundance ski resort, which is not the location of the Sundance Film Festival, is still very small and has been the most conservatively managed of the Utah ski resorts but recently has changed hands. Midway to Sundance, long may you run.
We also spent a day on the last weekend of the Utah Tulip Festival at Thanksgiving Point in Lehi, Utah. This was a first for me and I found it “wide-ranging”. So many Tulips all over the place. Literally all over the place. And the place is a huge place. Photos of the tulips and those of the Sundance area can be found toward the end of my northern Utah pages in my photo galleries. The video includes those two spots as well as a few hikes around the shoulders of Mount Timpanogas, the Alpine loop road, the older section of Midway, the Provo River, and Wasatch Mountain State Park. It can be found in my video gallery.
I’m still wary of international travel because of the pandemic. But have begun to enjoy a certain level of comfort with travel within the United States. My concern is getting stuck somewhere if lock-downs are renewed for whatever reason. So late May and into June brought us to Maui which is as good as it gets for travel within the good ole USA. It was a short trip that went without a hitch. Although it had been rescheduled twice over the course of the pandemic. First when the initial lock-downs occurred, and second, during a later wave when the governor of Hawaii actually asked tourists not to come. Maui has gotten more developed over the last ten years or so since we were last there. And it remains very much a tourist-focused spot. More and more, a high-end tourist spot. We were in Oahu and Kauai three years ago and I’m sticking with the north shore of Oahu as my favorite place in Hawaii. It feels real there. Images from this Maui trip can be found toward the end of my Hawaii pages in my photo galleries.
Spending a relatively big chunk of time in Park City without the crazy heat and smoke has been great with a few walks around town and in the mountains. My favorite hiking trail is now a down-hill training run at the Olympic sports complex, but these things happen in Park City. It isn’t worth getting upset about. Progress. It was a nice trail because it was one of the few spots where the dominant trees, maples and oaks, were deciduous and turned red in the fall. Most of the Utah foliage experience is about aspen, and therefore yellow. Generally the trail system is first rate and remains a high public priority. And now the county provides little Uber-ish cars that will take you anywhere, including trail-heads, for free. Paradise. Not to mention the electric bus that goes back and forth into town, also free. Using the electric bus, we hit main street for a gallery stroll, a monthly event, at the very beginning of August. The art in Park City is always deserving of a gander. Photos from around Park City this summer are located toward the end of my Park City pages in my photo galleries.
Finally I found a few old photos from Southern Nevada, dating to around the time we bought the house. Including the one and only time a desert tortoise made an appearance at the pond. And of course there are a few new ones from short visits over this Summer to check on the place. Those photos are located in my Southern Nevada pages in my photo galleries.
My gathering and production of food photos and other still-life stuff continues to be in the works. I’ll be picking up where I left off with that and also the Route 66 photography in the Fall.
I did get around to a couple of other new things related to my site. One was a re-structuring of the code of the entire site. I consider the whole thing an experiment with a commitment to keeping it functionally inventive and unconventional. The most recent attempt was to use CSS grid for the entire structure of the site. This worked well I thought but was very limited with regard to how the site structure handled text, in particular large blocks of text over various screen sizes. CSS grid works great for the layout of images that need to move and resize to fit various screen sizes. So now I’ve pulled the lengthy text sections out of the grid structure and superimposed them on top of it using z-index values with margin offset hacks and the use of conventional CSS or flexbox within the large text sections. I’ll be giving that a bit of a whirl for a while. Now I need to clean up the code. A little housekeeping behind the scenes is in order.
Also I’ve gotten around to the very beginnings of a technical illustration page with just one item. This is a series of interactive maps, topographic and geologic, of the area including Boulder City and a run of the Colorado river to the south through several wilderness areas. The geology is quite nifty. Lots of recent volcanics piled up on very old basement rocks without the big pile of intermediate-aged sedimentary rocks that cover most of Utah. All are cut very deeply by the Colorado and extremely well exposed, with a long but now largely discontinued precious metals mining history, generally gold.
I’ve also been working with D3.js a lot lately so my next bit of work for the technical illustration page should be largely D3.js and SVG based. My fondness for both comes from many years of experience with Adobe Illustrator and vectors in general.
My site is located here if you ended up in this journal without passing through it. The technical illustration page beginnings are located here.
Finally an annual trip to upstate New York is in the works so another set of images from up there should be appearing soon.