Tag: Nature

Hurricane Utah

Hubby and I as well as Nia and Mikey, our dogs, are in Hurricane, Utah for the week. It was Hubby’s idea to see if we liked the area during the winter to get away from cold and snow in Oregon. So far, in Oregon we haven’t had hardly any snow but the temperatures have been cold. We learned from people who live here you don’t say it hurricane, you say her-kin.

We were looking for an Airbnb around St. George where one of his friends lives. After looking for a dog friendly place and one that didn’t cost too much we settled on a house in what we thought was the outskirts of Hurricane. When we used the pinpoint you get when you first pick a house it looked like the house was on the edge of town near a cliff. We found out it was on the corner of a street at an interstection to a major highway and a well used street. The first night the traffic kept me from sleeping very well. Luckily, the traffic died down the next few nights.

OHV Sand Hollow

Our first day here, we drove around checking the area out. We saw signs to Sand Hollow State Park. But when we arrived and saw how much it cost to get in, we turned around and went up to an OHV area where there were about 20 Jeeps lined up and they people were having a meeting. We visited with a man there with an ATV and he said he’d been coming to those sand dunes since he was 12. He looked to be in his seventies. We walked out about the the dunes a little ways and then loaded back up into the car. We drove to St. George, bought some groceries, and returned to put the groceries away, then went out driving around looking for more places to explore.

Our second day we drove to Zion Park. First we drove up through the tunnel which was interesting. We couldn’t figure out why we saw what looked like a tunnel entrance in the side of a cliff with nothing leading up to it. After going through the tunnel, we realized it was a “window” in the tunnel to “light” the tunnel. After going through the tunnel we saw a small herd of Mountain goats. half a dozen people were parked or standing by the road taking photos of them.

Window to the tunnel.

It is the off-season so we didn’t have to take a shuttle and could drive our own vehicle up the Zion Canyon. The views were breathtaking but we were disappointed that all buy one trail didn’t allow dogs. Which meant we couldn’t get out and explore with the dogs.

Stream and cliff at Temple of Sinawava.
cliff in Zion Canyon

We saw deer on the drive as well as wild turkeys and of course the mountain goats.

The next day we spent the morning looking for Three Falls in the Hurricane area. We found the trailhead and had a short nice hike up Gould’s Wash, but we never did find the falls. When we followed the trail we discovered leveled tiers in the side of the hill where they had built an asphalt road and were putting in houses. So either we didn’t find the right trail or they covered the trail that led to the falls.

Entering the wash.

What looked like caves in the wash.
Walking through the wash.

End of the wash

That is one thing I don’t like down here. You see hundreds of houses that look a like in clusters all over in the valleys. They are building on farm ground. How are they going to feed all of these people moving in if they cover up the good farm ground with houses?

After that hike we came back to the house and walked to a historical museum down the street but even though the sign said open the doors were locked. so we wandered down to the Bonrue Bakery and had lunch then around the block and back to the house. We sat in the sun in the backyard watching the dogs until it was time to head to St. George to hang out with Hubby’s friend and his wife. They took us up Snow Canyon, then to check out Kayante, a community of houses that are four feet below ground level and keep the natural landscape. It was interesting but the houses felt claustrophobic to me. After that we had dinner in their community restaurant. The food was delicious.

Snow Canyon outside of St. George, Utah.

Today we are headed up to se Bryce Canyons. I’ll have photos of that in the next travel installment. So far this has been a fun mini vacation and we will definitely be back next winter.

Fun with Fishes

At the end of March, I had two book signings which led me to Orofino, Idaho where my younger brother and his wife live. My brother works for the Dworshak Fish Hatchery.

He was on call for the weekend and asked us if we wanted to go with him on his evening rounds.  I’m always up for a visit to the large facility. There are so many interesting places a person could lurk should he or she have murder on their mind. 😉 And there are some interesting tools that would also make for an interesting murder method, but I digress…

Following my brother along, he told us what each building housed and why it was important to the whole hatchery process. You can go to this hatchery during the day and get a tour of the facilities. It is fascinating.

My brother had to check the temperature of the water in the egg hatching room. He pulled one of the trays out and I tried to get a photo of the hatching eggs.

Then we moved on and he checked the water in the tanks that held over 30,000 one-inch-long baby salmon in each tank. Moving by all of those tanks there were tanks with week-old salmon that would soon be put in the outside holding tanks to grow until they were old enough to be let loose to make their way to the ocean.

The startling thing is that my brother said only 1 percent of the hatchlings make it to the ocean because of predators. Cormorants and seagulls were already congregating along the Clearwater River in anticipation of the salmon being released in the next week or two.  And lower downriver on their journey, the seals and otters await their arrival into the ocean.

The money and knowledge that goes into hatching out so many fish seem futile when you learn that only 1 percent of them will even make it to the ocean. And then they have to make the trip back up the rivers to spawn and start the process all over again.

I guess it is nature’s way of saying, “Never give up.”

Rock Formations

I love rocks. I love learning how they came to be where they are. “Nick on the Rocks” a five minute snippet that plays on our OPB station between shows is one of my favorite fill-ins. He talks mainly about rock formations in Washington state but how they are formed are actions from all over the Pacific Northwest.

I’ve always had a fascination with rocks. I love the huge black and white with flecks of shiny stuff, granite boulders where I grew up in NE Oregon. I would sit on a big one that was down by the irrigation ditch by our house. There was also a large one in the horse pasture where I would sit and watch my horse or the water running by in the ditch next to it.

While living in Central Oregon, we could see Smith Rocks. A premier sentinel of Rock that rock climbers from around the world come to crawl all over. In the morning when the sun hit them, they appeared green. As the light moved, they took on a pinkish color. They are one of the most stunning rock formations I’ve seen.

Where we live now there are lava tubes and craters ten miles from us. But the rocks that stick out on the ridge of our property are spectacular in my estimation. Different times of day and light, I see something interesting in the rocks every day.

Rock that looks like a head

We have one rock that looks like a head. At a book event in Portland, I noticed a book with a cover depicting a rock like we have on our property. I started up a conversation with Wilson Wewa, a Paiute man, whose story of traveling around with his grandmother and Northern Paiute legends were in the book. The Northern Paiute traveled around the Great Basin, which is part of where I live now. This rocks that look like heads are guarding sacred places.

There is another rock, I call Buddha. I don’t know why, I just do. One of our grandsons says it looks like a rock from Easter Island. It’s like a large head and a hand held out. There is a crack in the cliff next to it that looks as if the rock somehow popped out of there and turned. Just my imagination I’m sure, but that ‘s how I see it.

This is my Buddha rock

There is another grouping of rocks that looks to me like a monkey sitting on an elephant’s head. This could be because I just recently read two books set in India. Though there was no mention of elephants there were monkeys in the story.

And I look out my bedroom window every morning and see what looks like to me a large cat rock. It makes me smile and think that perhaps there is a reason there is such a rock. I have seen bobcat and what I believe to be lynx tracks in the dirt.

Then there is the curved ridge with spiky rock formations that I dubbed “Stegosaurus Hill” when we first looked at the property to buy. Yes, I love our property and the unique things I see in the rocks every day! I couldn’t find a photo of it easily and didn’t feel like stepping outside in the cold to take one. I’ll save that for another day.

Do you find rocks and formations interesting? Do you see the things I see in the photos?