Travel Blog

This week marks the passing of a truly great man.

That term gets thrown around so much that it has almost lost its meaning. But in the case of Joe Paterno, it is true.

As many of you know, both Sue and I are Penn State alumni. When I first started there, I did not care about football, but listening to how everyone talked about JoPa made me pay attention. Sure it was fun that we usually had winning teams. And it was funny to watch him stalk up and down the field during games in his high water slacks and white sweat socks. What made me at first admire the man was finding out how much he cared about the students. You may have heard about the team’s high graduation rates, but you don’t hear how Joe and Sue Paterno would take these guys into their home and teach them values off the field that helped many succeed in life. You probably don’t know about how he took part in so many student events across campus. And no one talks about how he is the one who strong armed the athletics department into supporting all teams, not just the money makers.

Joe was a celebrity, but he did not let that change him. He walked to work most days. If students recognized him he would chat with them when he had the time. He stood in line at local eateries with everyone else, and would wait his turn to order lunch. He made himself accessible.

So, like many Penn Staters, I became a football fan. I was lucky enough to be there for the ’94 season and followed the team through their undefeated season all the way to the Rose Bowl.

A few years after I graduated, I went back to Penn State, working as a major gift fundraiser in the College of the Liberal Arts. Fundraising is a big business for universities, and getting donors together with Joe would often times close more gifts than even a meeting with the President of the University.

During a big fundraising campaign, Joe was given a choice of what projects he wanted to support with his time and money. He and his wife chose to assist the libraries and Liberal Arts, because, as he told me once, without a strong foundation in those areas, you will never have a great university. That is why we are the only university I know of where all the sports arenas are named after past University Presidents, and the library is named after the Head Football Coach.

Whenever I met with alumni, Joe’s name would come up. It didn’t matter if we were winning or losing, everyone respected the man. His strong ethics and passion reflected well on the school and made us all proud to answer the cry, “WE ARE…PENN STATE!”

Unfortunately, the University Board of Trustees made a bad choice at the end. They needed a scapegoat to take the stench of scandal off the school that was brought by an ex-employee and bad choices from the Director of Athletics. So they chose the biggest sacrifice they could and dragged our legendary coach through the mud.

In the years to come, I am going to try and forget that dark chapter of Joe’s career, because I love my school and don’t want to remember how they wronged a great man.

And Coach Paterno was that. He stuck to his principals. He did what was best for his students. He loved, and was loved by, his family. And he was rightly adored by millions of alumni and fans. Joe Paterno made Penn State a great university by setting the example for us to follow. And now it is up to us to live on with his memory and try to honor his legacy.

We love you Coach. You are missed.

If you're wondering why we're advertising for a car dealership to the right, we bought a used car so we didn't have to drive the Beast all the time. Since we're going to be around for awhile, we decided it made sense. Plus, it's a Volkswagon Bug, yellow, no less. So it was clearly meant to be. I had one in my old life, and it was my favorite car EVER. It's going to be hard to sell it again in three years. As for the ad, the dealership was waffling on the price we wanted to pay for it, and they agreed to meet the price we wanted in exchange for the ad. So that's that.

We had New Year's Day off (Happy New Year, by the way), so we drove the bug to Navajo Bridge, Lee's Ferry and the Vermillion Cliffs. We were told condors may still be hanging out there (the cliffs), and we were curious to see some. We got to the bridge first and walked across. It was way high and kinda scary looking down.

We went across to the VC, but it was closed. So were the restrooms, which is just mean, if you ask me. There's running water, for pete's sake. Keep the bathrooms open.

We wished a Happy New Year to the Native American artisans who were out there with their jewelry and stuff, and then drove to Lee's Ferry. We were outlaws because we saw the sign about the Fee Area too late, and I buzzed right by it. But when we got to the water part, we saw a sign that said Grand Canyon National Park, so we figured we were ok since we work there.

I think this next picture was taken on the way to the Vermillion Cliffs, but I can't be sure. It's cool, though.

Then we finally got to our destination, which was Vermillion Cliffs and the condors.

At first we didn't see anything, but there was a couple there who pointed out where the condors were sitting. We counted about seven or so sitting around up there where all the white bird poop was. Luckily we had binoculars, so we could sort of see them. It wasn't very exciting at first, so we just talked with the couple and their whippets, and about 20 minutes later, the condors all started to fly around. We counted about nineteen all said and done. It was really cool. We don't have a powerful enough lens to have gotten any pictures of them, but we had a good time. We were having such a good time, in fact, that we were late for New Year's dinner at Phil's moms' place.

That's about it for now. I do have a few more pictures to share. The first one is very disturbing, so look at your own risk. The last two will get you over the shock of the first one.

Last weekend I sent Sue to work just as the moon became fully eclipsed. But we didn’t get any good shots of the moon and canyon. Sorry.

While she was slaving her Saturday away at the store, I had the day off to work a Christmas Bazaar here at the Canyon. This is an annual arts and crafts fair put on by a local church. This year Paula and I went in together on a table to sell our art work.

Paula had lots of great pictures from her and Mom’s travels around the Western U.S. this fall. She is also doing weaving now, so she had some neat fabric pictures – a 3x5 woven piece that is an explosion of texture and color – and woven bookmarks that Mom was there selling since Paula also had to work that day.

I had made wire split twig ornaments and jewelry. For those of you who don’t know, split twig figures were created by prehistoric natives thousands of years ago out of willow twigs. These figures have been found in caves throughout the Canyon. We are not really sure what they were for, but most academics feel they were used in hunting ceremonies. When we first came last year I was inspired to make earrings and Christmas ornaments in their likeness.

This year I made the ornaments out of thick wire. The best sellers were ones I did with antlers and Rudolphs with little red bead noses, and some wire angels and Christmas trees. I also made split twig earrings out of copper wire, but most people who live in the Canyon already had similar earrings, so they didn’t sell well.
This was my first art show, and we had a lot of fun talking with some of our work friends who were also selling jewelry. And we made enough money to make it worth it so maybe I’ll try it again next year.

The Canyon has been having some amazing sunrises lately.

I’ll leave you with a rare, and beautiful, occurrence. This past Tuesday we had an inversion – when the clouds drop below the rim of the Canyon. It made it hard to turn away from the windows at work, but fortunately this is my view from the register so I got to watch the river of clouds move through the Canyon all day.

We were a bit worried about how long it would take us to hike back up to the top, so we got up really early. We had to use our headlamps for the first part of it, even. It was nice to see the sun come up as we were walking.

We had a ways to go.

Phil was looking nice and fresh, wasn't he?

I seem to have a lot of pictures of Phil's hat, but it shows nice perspective, I think.

Bright Angel Trail is so beautiful at this end of things. We couldn't believe how nice it was. We did have to maneuver around some water hazards at some points, which no one had ever told us about, but we did ok with those.

Before we knew it, we had made it to Indian Garden, which is only 4.5 miles from the top! Emery Kolb used to run down to Indian Garden and back every day with glass plates on his back to use the water that was down at Indian Garden to develop his photographs. Sometimes he ran up and down three times in one day. If he could do that, we could certainly make it up with no problem. That's what we kept telling ourselves, anyway.

But we didn't seem to be getting much closer.

However, when we looked back, we seemed to be making some progress.

So we kept trudging along, getting out of the mule's way again, and slogging through the muck that is the first few miles of Bright Angel Trail. And we enjoyed the view, of course.

Then we saw a sight for sore feet - Kolb Studio. That little beauty sits right at the start of Bright Angel Trail. We were getting there.

After that picture was taken, we only had a few switchbacks to go. We made the hike up in really good time, for rookies especially. We made it up in 5 hours and 50 minutes. Some folks we know took more than 9 hours to make it up, so we felt pretty good about that. And now that we have the bug, our next goal is to do Grandview Trail, which, as Rangers describe, "kicks your butt." And a co-worker mentioned to Phil that he wants to do a Rim to Rim in the spring, which entails hiking from the North Rim (about a five hour drive from the South Rim) to the South Rim. I think we're going to be on-board for that one. We'll keep you updated.

We were having some fantastic November weather, up until it was time for me and Phil to hike down to Phantom Ranch. Oh, wait, before we get to that, for those of you unfamiliar with Grand Canyon NP, Phantom Ranch lies one vertical mile down at that bottom of the canyon. Because humans don't travel vertically too well, the hike down to Phantom is at least 6.5 miles of switchbacks. I say at least because there are two ways down. One is the S. Kaibab Trail, which is 6.5 miles. The other is Bright Angel Trail, which is nearly 10 miles down. Most people who are doing the hike take Kaibab down and Bright Angel back up. That's what we did.

Ok, where was I? The day we headed down was the first day in a long time that it was supposed to rain. We were a bit bummed, but we were determined to go no matter what. When we started the hike, it looked like this:

We got drizzled on a bit, but we didn't get too wet. And once we hiked down a ways, we got out of the fog. It was cool to look up and see the wall of fog on top of us, but it was totally clear down and around us.

It was nice to see the long way down we had to go.

And I always tell folks that when we get some weather here, it makes for spectacular pictures.

Did I mention that S. Kaibab Trail is pretty steep?

We were pretty much alone going down too. That's another plus for the Kaibab Trail. It's a lot less popular than Bright Angel. But we still had to share the road with the mules.

And then we heard the roar of the Colorado.

Then it was time to cross the Black Bridge. Can you imagine being the fellas who carted all the building materials for this bridge down those switchbacks?

And then we were there! Phantom Ranch. The oasis at the bottom of the canyon. It gets warmer as you go down, and it was like a lovely spring day. We couldn't believe how green it still was.

We caught up with our ranger friend who made it possible for us to stay down at the Ranch. She came through big-time. We got to go to her Ranger Program that evening, which was a big treat. We kept looking up, not believing we were so lucky. Only 1% of visitors to the Grand Canyon ever make it down to where we were. How lucky are we? I'll leave it with that thought today, and the next blog will be about the trip back up.

Hoo boy, it's been awhile, hasn't it. I do have lots to write about, though. It won't be tonight, however. I just wanted to check in and let everyone know we're still alive and well. I'm working on some pictures from our hike down to the bottom of the canyon and back, so that's next. But since we took that little vacation, we have to work nine days straight, so I'm not sure when I'm going to get around to it. Soon, soon, I promise.

In other news, Phil and I have decided to park it here at the canyon for awhile. The truck bills have been massive, and we have to store up some acorns. So Phil has taken a job as manager of Kolb Studio, our personal favorite store here at the South Rim. I've accepted an office job that will keep my introvert happy, and then I'll still work two days a week in the stores to get my extrovert fix. It seems like it will work out fine.

We are still going to consider ourselves full-time RVers as we are still living in our RV. It just won't be moving for awhile. We still plan on having some grand adventures, and we hope you all will still check in with us from time to time. We haven't given up the dream...we just realize we have to adapt to circumstances in order to keep our dream alive.

I will post again soon with the Phantom Ranch stuff.

Before we left Moab, we sitting around talking about what we wanted to do for the day. Phil always suggests hikes, and I try to come up with alternatives. So I said, we should go rafting. He loved that idea, so we called around to see if there was room for us. The Canyon Voyages Adventure Company had room on an all-day semi-float trip for the next day. It meant us staying in Moab longer than we had planned, but we were ok with that.

We met up with the rest of the folks early in the morning and took a 30-minute van ride to the put-in place. We had one more stop along the way to a very ritzy 500 dollar a night ranch-resort to pick up a couple, who kept us waiting, but that was ok too.

And then we were floating down the Colorado. It wasn't quite what Phil and I wanted to do. We wanted to do some crazy rapids, but it wasn't the right time of year for one, and that trip costs a lot more money, for two. Next time. This trip had a few rapids, though, and they were pretty fun. But the majority of it was just nice floating with great scenery.

Check out this guy's house! He's a software developer. I knew I should have paid more attention in computer class. Of course, back in my day, computer classes were taught by the assistant football coach, so I'm not sure what good paying attention would have done.

After that guy's house, we came across some birds houses (bird's houses; birds' houses?).

I don't know about you, but I think those swallows have some impressive architecture as well.

We had been on the water for a couple hours, and then it was time to drop the rich folks off at their luxury ranch.

It was a really nice place. And the rich folks were fairly nice as well. I heard more about a trip to South Africa than I ever needed to hear, but that's fine.

For the first half of the day, Phil and I were on the big rubber raft with the other folks, but this company gave you the chance to be in a 2-person duckie if you wanted to. Others had that pleasure first, but Phil and I called dibs for the afternoon.

Then it was time to stop for lunch, which was provided by the rafting company. It was a really nice spread, and the rafting guides were a hoot. Doesn't Phil look happy that it's lunchtime?

And then it was our turn in the duckie! The guide told us what we've been doing wrong in our own kayak, so it was a pretty good time. Hardly any fights at all, and we didn't end up in the river.

You can see the tip of our duckie in the picture above. That was a good time. And we got to go through two rapids in it, and that made us want to go on a more difficult trip in the future. It is just so fun.

Anyway, all good things must come to an end, and that was the end of our trip.

I'm glad we went. We got some really good kayaking tips and it made me a lot more comfortable to take our own kayak out.

Now let's shift to the Grand Canyon. I got to work at my favorite store the other day, Kolb Studio. It was on Halloween. Remember that for the pictures coming up. But first, a classic Kolb sunset shot.

It was a pretty warm evening, so the door had been open all day. I left it open after it got dark because I run a bit hot, and this little critter decided to come in for trick-or-treat.

I did my best to get him to go back outside, but I just couldn't persuade him. I finally had to call our maintenance guys to come and help me. By that time, Phil had shown up too to pick me up to go home, so he helped Mark and Kelly get the bat outside. I hope the little bugger wasn't too traumatized. But we all thought it was a very fitting visit for Halloween.

That's about it for now. I'm supposed to be helping Phil fold laundry. I have lots more to tell you, and I will be doing that soon.

Truck Update: It's the transmission AGAIN. We're getting the AAMCO runaround from the Dodge place in Jackson who had it last for the transmission. They're giving us the same "not our fault; it's the third-party vendor's fault" that we got before from AAMCO. All I want to know is, when is it not the customer's fault? Oh well.

After our stay in Vernal, we moved onto Moab, Utah. This was our third visit to Moab, and our second time staying at the same RV park. It's a Passport America park, so we stayed four nights for 80 bucks. Not too shabby. And as is usual when we come to Moab, we went to Arches National Park. This time around, as to not bore you all too much with the same old pictures, we took a road less traveled. And for good reason. The literature called it wash-board, and that was pretty accurate. But when we got to the trailhead, we were only one of two cars there, so that was nice.

That's the tail end of our truck at Tower Arch Trailhead. We headed from those posts to that big boulder up top, and around the backside. I can't remember if this next picture was taken from the front side or the back side, but you get the idea.

The park paper called this hike moderately strenuous, and at first you don't think so, but it does get a bit trickier as you go along. We had to scale up some smooth rocks, and there were parts where we had to climb uphill in sand, but overall it's doable and very worth it. You're working towards reaching a really cool arch, which Phil and I got to have a quiet lunch under.

And luckily for us, not another soul showed up until we were almost finished eating. But then we let them have the spot, and headed back.

I really like hikes that loop and don't make you hike back the same way you came, and this one gave us that opportunity. I think the round-trip is only about three miles, but it feels longer because of the difficult bits. If you make it to Arches, give this hike a try. We give it two hiking sticks up.

Should we have a caption contest for this last pic?

I have one more blog about Moab that will come in a couple of days. I'll give you a hint...we can finally tell people we've been on the Colorado River. We start work at the Grand Canyon tomorrow. Oh, and our truck is broken again. At least this time we know it's not the transmission. We took it to a really great transmission place in Flagstaff and they gave it the green light as far as the transmission goes. The bad news is they had to refer us to another shop because they had no idea why it was acting the way it was. So that's next week's trauma, I mean, adventure. We'll keep you posted. If it's more bad news, you may be seeing a PayPal donation button on here for the Beast's treatment.

A few days back, on my day to drive, Phil took us on the Flaming Gorge route. He seemed really anxious about it, and even called a campground in Vernal to ask them how rough it was. What are they gonna say? To get to them, you have to go through Flaming Gorge. Of course they're going to say it's fine. But I guess I can admit that it was ok. Not great, but not too scary either. I did have a lot of white-knuckle switchbacks with the recommended speed of 15 mph. And someone has a sense of humor. After you get passed the first switchback, there's a sign that says..."9 more." Ha ha, very funny.

But we made it to the dam and bought our magnet and patch at the gift shop.

And five miles past that was our dinosaurcentric destination - Vernal, Utah.

Vernal is much like Roswell. They embrace what they got to work with. Phil and I have been looking forward to visiting Dinosuar National Monument for about a year now, and it did not disappoint. It wasn't quite what I thought it would be...I thought it was outside where you walk through a canyon or something with dinosaur bones up on either side of the canyon walls. What it turned out to be was a very nice driving-tour-ish park, with what they call their Dinosuar quarry being only a small part of it. To preserve the bones, they built a building around some of the bones. What we were in was their second stab at it. It seems the first building was erected on non-stable ground, and it was pretty much condemned in 2006. It's taken them awhile to get it all back up and running, but we were lucky enough to come when everything was open to the public again.

It will do until Jurassic Park opens. We spent the rest of the afternoon taking the driving tour through the park, stopping for a 3.5-mile hike, where we got to see some fall colors and some modern-day dinosaurs.

Our lizard count on that hike was 17. Not our best, but respectable. Both Phil and I had to see it for it to be counted. We aren't slackers who just count lizards willy-nilly. And here's Phil looking very rakish in his hiking hat.

The end of the driving tour was Josie's Ranch. Josie was a woman who settled here in 1914, when she was 40 and divorced. She decided she wanted a place of her own. She lived here for 50 years, alone, and did all the work on her little ranch. She had chickens and horses and the whole nine yards. She sounds like a pretty cool lady to me. This is one of the houses she had built for herself over the years.

All I know is she must have had a chamber pot because her outhouse was about a mile away. I know you don't want it right by your house, but sheesh.

That's about it for Dinosaur. We moved on to Moab after that, and I will get to that blog sometime soon. Tomorrow we're leaving Moab and we should get settled in at the Grand Canyon tomorrow late afternoon. I'm glad we're there early...we're behind in our Halloween decorating. This is all we have done so far:

I'm thinking it's going to be a year-round addition to the truck, though. It's just way too cool.

We're not in Wyoming anymore (we're currently in Moab, Utah), but I still have some remaining Teton adventures to talk about. Before we left the park, we decided to go to a few places we'd not been before. One of them was the very famous Snake River Overlook that became so famous because Ansel Adams took a great picture of it back in the day. This is our version:

Not quite as striking as Ansel's, but it will do. We would have stayed longer to take more pictures, but I had to pee, so we moved on to another pretty well known spot...Schwabacher's Landing.

We also went up Signal Mountain for the first time. It was a weird, hazy day, so my pictures aren't so good, but it was very nice up there. We didn't see much wildlife, but we did almost hit an elk on the way up. I didn't have time to whip the camera out, though.

And that did it for the places we hadn't done before that we wanted to do. So on our way home, we went to a place we've been many times, but really like, Oxbow Bend. This picture could be a postcard, don't you think?

Phil even managed to get Quackers in there. Nice!

Before we left, the weather was starting to change. We had some snow for a couple days (AccuWeather was only off by a day on that, so good job guys).

I loved it. I went from that to Moab, which is near 80 degrees right now. I'm melting. The guy in the RV office was nice enough to give us a 50-amp site so I could have air conditioning. I like it when folks take pity on me. Plus, he remembered us from last year, so we got a cushy pull-through spot instead of the back-in spot he had us in originally. Ha!

Anyway, the rest of the Teton pics of of moose. They started to come back to the campground once everyone started to leave. It was nice to see them all again.

That last shot wasn't taken in the campground, but you'll forgive me, won't you? There were actually three moose there that morning...one bull and two cows. Let me see if I got a good shot of the bull too...nope, I guess he's only in the pictures at the top of the page. Sorry, mom. I know you can't see those ones.

That's it for today. From now on, the blogs will consist of Flaming Gorges, dinosaur bones and some rocks in Utah. I'll try to get to that tomorrow if Phil doesn't kill me hiking.