I’m so lucky to have found and married somebody who shares my love of hiking in wild desert places. I’d been wanting to take Kristina to a little canyon in the area I call “the land between” and we went there for our most recent hike. It’s a place I remembered fondly even though it…
Tag: public land
Hikes: Desert Wash in the Land Between
Why would you want to go out hiking in a place where there are no trails, no other hikers, and probably no signs of civilization at all? I never asked myself that question before meeting Chad, because going out hiking on trails was a rare enough treat and reprieve from my place in the noise…
Hikes: Autumn Outing in the Ashley National Forest
Getting out of the house and into nature, I notice a letting go of anything I’m preoccupied with. I feel like it is a sort of mental and spiritual deep cleaning, pushing out the superfluous, reconnecting to the essential. Doing a yoga pose or two during these moments of re-connection is invigorating, somehow more special…
Fantastical Fantasy Canyon
It started with Goblin Valley. The name caught my attention, of course, and when I looked it up to see what it was like, I was even more intrigued. Then Chad told me that there was a place not too far from here that was similar, with strange, fragile rock formations. Fantasy Canyon, the place…
Mountain Yoga
It was time for another adventure, and since our previous hike had been in a desert location, I suggested we go to the mountains this time. On a previous trip we’d driven around Elk Horn Loop and I’d told Kristina that I wanted to come back to one particular part of the loop – the…
Bear Hike At Pole Creek Canyon
For our latest weekly adventure, Chad took me up to a place called Pole Creek Canyon. We started our hike off-trail through some lovely Aspen forest, Chad pointing out bear claw marks on trees, and rocks overturned by bears looking for ants. Being pretty new to this type of hiking, that is, hiking in territory…
Hikes: Desert Hike in the Uintah Basin
For labor day we decided to go for a hike in one of Chad’s favorite desert canyons. He’d been telling me about this place, but I’d been slightly put off from getting excited about it because of a big stretch of power lines that were near the entrance. His enthusiasm for the location, however, convinced…
Hikes: Larva Lake
One of the ways Chad and I like to keep our relationship strong and let ourselves relax is by going on some type of adventure once a week. Chad took me up to another of his favorite spots in the Uintah Mountains. We hiked through the Ashley National Forest on our way to a small…
Travel: Cool Night in Mancos
Waking up in Chaco was hot, really hot, so it was a relief to finish out the day in the cool evergreen forest at Mancos State Park, Colorado. The next day before we hit the road we had a fun time doing some yoga, taking photos and relaxing. As ready as I was to get…
Travel: Chaco National Heritage Park, New Mexico
The road to get there was 21 miles of washboard purgatory (why not hell? well, we didn’t know if we would ever arrive…), but the arrival was cool moonlight silhouettes of astounding buttes. Coyotes howled all night and the burning sun woke us in the morning. This was my first real experience of the desert.
Travel: Oasis State Park, New Mexico
I got some good driving time in on the RV going from southwest Oklahoma to northeast New Mexico. The roads were nice and straight, which made for smoother sailing in the RV (which over 55mph often felt like a boat rocking on a troubled sea), and I started to relax a bit driving such a behemoth….
Travel: Wichita Wildlife Refuge, Oklahoma
The Wichita Wildlife Refuge was one of the few destinations that were on our original travel plan that we actually made it to. It was exciting to be arriving just around sunset and to have a wide choice of campsites to pick from. Also, we were finally out of the humid forests of the Southeast…
Hearthwilde 