Marion's Blog

The Retired Ladies Road Trip to Zion National Park - Part 1

My friends Amy and  Linda and I are on a road trip to visit another friend Stephanie. She lives near Zion National Park in southwestern Utah.

On day one we drove from Reno to Lone Pine down the east side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. It was overcast as we drove south so we didn't have too much of a view of the mountains. We stopped at Manzanar, one of the World War II Japanese internment camps. It is a sobering place with an excellent visitor center. Well worth a visit,

 

On day two we awake to beautiful blue skies and a wonderful view of Mount Whitney, the tallest mountain in the lower 48 states.

 

From Lone Pine we drove down into Death Valley, the lowest place in the United States, and back up to Stephanie's house in southwestern Utah

 

Today - day three we went to Zion National Park. It was snowing when we started our hike up Zion Canyon and then the sun came out as we reached the end of the trail and started back to the truck.

From Zion Canyon we went east and did the Canyon Overlook Trail. We saw very few people and we saw a family of mountain sheep right near the trail. I took a lot of pictures.

The view from the overlook was phenomenal too. Do I look like I am having a good time?

All my pictures form this trip are on Flickr here.

Pictures of Birds

When Duke and I were at the Malheur National Wildlife refuge in April we stayed at a couple of Bed and Breakfasts. Malheur is very popular with bird watchers. Every time we sat down to a meal with other tourists the first question we would be asked was "Are you a birder?"

I certainly don't think of myself as a birder but it has been fun on our recent travels to take some bird pictures and then use my copy of The Sibley Guide to Birds to try and identify the birds. I decided to start a Flickr set with one picture of each of the birds I have identified.

Here are a couple of the pictures. If you would like to see all the pictures you can see them on Flickr here.

I think these are Avocets. We saw these two in a puddle just east of Vya, Nevada last April

And I think this is a Chukar. He was on the edge of a meadow near Alkali Reservoir, Nevada. When we were out hiking the next day another Chukar startled me big time. He came right out of the bushes next to me and ran around pretending he had a broken wing. After he had done his job he flew away.