The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico is a small, concise, sterling silver beauty. Of course, I’ve known of O’Keeffe’s art work for most of my life, but this museum really pulled together the various threads and stages of her career, giving a broad and deep view that I was delightfully surprised with. Keep reading →
Moab, Utah is the perfect epicenter for a desert adventure vacation, whether the priority is hiking, photography, cycling, auto touring, or mountain biking. I imagine that a hot air balloon ride over this area would be pretty darn great as well.
Bryce Canyon National Park is known for its hoodoos, those orange spires reaching up from the desert floor like spikes in an ancient god’s torture bed. Despite the well-recognized landforms, Bryce Canyon receives far fewer visitors than nearby Zion and Grand Canyon National Parks, so it’s worth visiting to avoid the crowds of summer.
Bryce Canyon is in southwestern Utah, an hour and 20 minutes northeast of Zion National Park, four hours and twenty minutes north of the Grand Canyon, and two hours and ten minutes southwest of Capitol Reef National Park, all worth the visit if you can spare the time. The nearest cities are Las Vegas, NV, nearly four hours to the southeast of BCNP, or Salt Lake City, UT, which is the same distance, to the north.
While visiting Bryce Canyon for five days this month, I was amazed at the formations our earth can take. Keep reading →
Zion National Park is a place that inspires religion, with its cathedral-like mountains and the restrained garden-like feel in its valleys. I wasn’t necessarily inspired to the local religions of Utah, but I could feel how this unique national park made me want to strive for something bigger, loftier, higher. For five days, I chose the park as my idol, worthy as it is.
Standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon, I experienced a flood of emotions I didn’t expect. The chasm is enormous – it stretches 277 miles, runs about 1 mile deep, and an average of 10 miles across – but it seemed to signify something much more for me.
I recently visited Tucson, but I basically hunkered down and used the city for a work retreat. I worked on client projects, blogged and made progress on my own creative stuff. Still, the one thing I won’t neglect in any city is the coffee scene. I visited nearly ten coffee shops in my 11 days in Tucson and yet one stood out. Batch Cafe & Bar actually stood head and shoulders above the rest.
As I made my way into the vast expanse of Big Bend National Park, I felt I was on another planet. I was totally unfamiliar with this landscape: the heat, the sun, the prickly plants, and, of course, the sand and stone.
At times, I felt the beautiful expansiveness of this protected area. At other times, death became a pervasive thought. As a pale-skinned Yankee, I couldn’t keep myself from thinking how dangerous this landscape seemed and how awful (and easy) it would be to die here.
