On to Bryce National Park

We stayed the night at Zion and then had a stunning drive through the hinterland to Bryce National Park. Several people had told us this was a 'must see' and it certainly was. As one person described it, a Disneyland of Hoodoos (Hoodoos are the towering person-shaped rock sculptures that are the highlight of the park).

We were amazed that at least 70% of the visitors were French - and most of the remainder from other European countries - with maybe only 5% American tourists. You very seldom heard English spoken - a bit like in downtown Brisbane(!)

Here are a couple of shots from the park rim and from down amongst the Hoodoos.

The photo doesn't really do the slope justice, but the path is a steep zigzag with 30 or 40 switchbacks. This shot taken from about halfway up.

Zion National Park

Rather than spend another rainy day at the airfield we decided to check out Zion National Park, an hour and a half's drive away. It is very busy - we got the last spot ( a disabled one) out of 330 in the campground, and that was about 1pm. Walking the trail down to The Narrows sometimes felt claustrophobic, not because of the terrain but the number of people - if you left the path, you had to wait for a gap in the human traffic to join it again! This photo belies what I said above -here's Dave in the apparently tranquil canyon...

and another picture taken in The Narrows where the trail crosses the stream...

Grommit drives into Zion

Zion national park and Bryce Canyon Nat pk is where we've been for a couple of days: hundreds of great photos to look thru yet. Here is one of an arch in the limestone inside Bryce taken with the iphone.

Cleaning RV

It's a big vehicle to clean!

The Legendary Parowan

Hi all, well we had a pretty uneventful drive across Nevada and into Utah (the land of the Mormon) yesterday, arriving at the wonderful flying site of Parowan in the late afternoon. Pilots continued returning from epic XC flights right the way up until after 8pm.

Today most of them are packing up, as the forecast is for a week of storms. We took advantage of the non-flying weather to install my new LX V7 vario, which I bought from Craggy Aero (great support). It's a beautiful instrument - but doesn't have its own built-in logger so I have sacrificed the butterfly and routed the Flarm GPS signal to the V7. Winpilot also hit the dust as I only have a cable from the C302 (which has gone to Craggy for repair).

All that took most of the day, especially as we had to make a trip into town to find a hardware store that sells metric diameter tubing for the vario (the old tubing was just a cm too short).

Here's a shot of me on the 6000ft altitude airfield, next to the windy Parowan Cliffs - you can run these for many many miles on a final glide to get home from an XC. I look forward to it...

Bristlecone Pine Tree

This one lived probably about 1500 to 2000 years, but is dead now. I will find some pics of some very old but alive ones later. They are very 'arty' trees in death...

Grommit in the Great Basin

Grommit driving us through the Great Basin, a huge inland area of flat 'cold' desert and mountain ranges. No water leaves the basin to the sea and in winter there is snow.

We stayed at the foot of Mt Wheeler in the national park, and hiked up to the glacier and saw many Bristlecone pines of 100 years old to around 4000 , and that's the living ones! (will put some photos up later- all on Fuji camera).