237 years later. They could have done a whole lot worse...(ref. almost any where in the Middle East).
Hope you are well engaged in the pursuit of Happiness this weekend.
Evening comes to High Rock Canyon, Nevada.
I used to fly recon for SIFC.
You did what?
I sat in the right-front seat of a small single engine aircraft and followed the path of thunderstorms looking for lightning fires for the Susanville Interagency Fire Center (pronounced sif-C). When we found a fire I would radio the ground folks and help guide them into the fire. Since SIFC covers an area from Denio in the Nevada desert to the Ishi Wilderness in the foothills of the central valley and from the Medicine Lake highlands to the Feather River canyon, there was a lot of ground to look at.
Some of the ground was very interesting from the air. One of those spots is High Rock Canyon in Nevada. This is a narrow canyon that stays green long into the summer after the surrounding sagelands have browned up. That made it a good landmark in an area where there are few roads, fewer dominant peaks and hundreds of square miles of nothing (to most people). So when I flew recon it was a welcome sight. I knew where I was. There was something to rest the eye on, if only for a moment.
A few years ago Kathy and I took a weekend and drove to High Rock Canyon. This is something of an expedition as the canyon is between the Smoke Creek Desert and Vya. (Think Burning Man and Nowhere. Still not finding it –try Google Earth.) We got lucky and had a few thunderstorms visit the area while we were there. It made for nice light. Just like when I used to fly recon for SIFC.
A late spring sunset over Crescent City on the Del Norte coast of California.
Time to prep for the next adventure. The redwood photos are processed, keyworded, rated and safely tucked away in their little backup hard drives. It was a fun trip and we have some good images to show for it. But that's the past. That means it is almost time to go get fresh photos. Time to clean the trailer, prep the truck, fill out the fly collection, check the camera gear, train the yard kid, and make sure the neighbors have their rifles sighted in on our doors and windows. Am I kidding about the last one? Trust me, you don't really want to find out the hard way. Let's just say its a rural community where people go out and practice being top carnivores on a regular basis and watch what goes on at the neighbors.
We head north in under 30 days. I hope to keep a running log of where we go and some of the stuff we see and do. The clock's ticking, the to-do list is growing, gotta go.
We've been web people for a whole week now. So given this long period of time and initial feedback, we made some changes to the site. The first change was to make the menu that appears at the bottom more transparent. Hopefully the navigation menus won't interfere with the photos as much in the new iteration. Additionally, we have changed the photo on the about page. We've added some photos and will add more soon. Hope you enjoy and keep those comments and e-mails coming.
So sometimes things are intuitive sometime they are not. So far I can say this has been an interesting experience of fumbling through a new program. Some stuff is obvious: click on a square to add something. Sometimes not - don't ask how long I flopped around trying to get auto resize turned on for photos. And adding a picture in a blog was interesting too. Still haven't figured out how to go back and edit a blog entry. I can remove it but editing? But I could edit this post but not the previous...hmmm.
"Why do you want to do a blog?" Kathy asked.
"So our friends and family can see what we are up to without having to wade through the latest photos of cute [kitten, puppy, aardvark - you pick] on Facebook. Plus we can actually control the size and quality of our photos better."
OK that was the sales pitch - since you are reading this you know we have embarked on this experiment. We'll see where it all leads...