Trip Log: Photo Album, part five.

Dear Cyber-Friends,

Wow, I didn’t mean to take such a long break from these posts. You’d think it’d be easier to stay on a schedule when it’s just uploading a bunch of photos, huh? However, right after the last batch went up, the season proper started on the ranch, which means lots and lots of guests and training and stress and drama and basically it’s only gotten worse and worse through the season instead of smoothing out like we all hope and dreamed it would.

This means that currently I’m a big ball of stress and frustration and barely suppressed violence and depression, with a side-helping of in-pain and sleep-deprived. Fun times. Why do I like this life-style again? Please remind me.

Oh yeah, it’s because it ends at a predicable time, and I get to do stuff like the things I’m about to show you in between jobs!

So the day following whatever it was I showed you in the last post, I woke up to this hovering above my campsite:

New life goal: Hot air balloon over Canyonlands.

For the rest of the day, I headed back into Arches to finish exploring there, since I’d just done the one trail last time.

Couple of cool scenic shots from along the road… You don’t even need to get out the car to see something awe-inspiring around there; everywhere you look is gorgeous and amazing, in ways I’ve never seen elsewhere.

My next stop was at Balancing Rock, which is exactly as the label says. Basically, the geology explanation is that there’s a denser type of rock sitting on a less dense type of rock. The less dense rock (LDR) gets eroded faster, but the denser rock keeps the LDR direction under it protected longer than the rest of the LDR, so you end up with a bigger rock sitting on a smaller rock for a while, until enough erodes for the denser bigger rock to fall off.

Also, it looks super cool, you can walk around the base, and I took approximately a zillion pictures of it from every angle. You’d think I was planning on doing a 3D rendering of it on a computer or something… Anyway, here’s the most impressive shots:

(Don’t those middle ones kinda seem like you’re looking up from under a T-Rex?)

There’s also a couple good distance shots from the far side of Balancing Rock:

Yay for pretty landscape!

Okay, that’s only about half the photos from this day, but I’m gonna break this up into two posts because it’s already reaching the “wow, that’s a lot of pics” level.

Love,

GeGi.