Ilanarama!

Finally, the fourth and last (and maybe best!) part of our spring 2024 vacation trips! As some of you know we used to live in Boulder (which is where Britt and I met, actually); we're still friends with quite a few people we knew in those days, and every once in a while they invite us on a trip, or vice versa. This time, they'd gotten reservations for a group campsite at Arches National Park in mid-May. We hadn't been to Arches for years (I was last there 15 years ago, and it had been even longer for Britt) so it seemed like a good excuse!

( Hiking among rocks with holes in them! Lots and lots of photos and blah blah! )

32 photos mostly of rocks with holes in them, no blah blah

After our 2017 eclipse trip to Wyoming I knew I wanted to see the 2024 eclipse as well, but we didn't actually get to planning until late summer 2023. We had vague ideas of going camping somewhere in SW Texas, but it turned out that a) our preferred camping mode of remote places on public lands wouldn't work in Texas because they have a dearth of public lands, and b) Texas state parks - state parks are our second choice because they are usually in interesting places with nice campsites - opened for reservations exactly 6 months in advance...and were already sold out when the dates we wanted opened. Apparently canny people got 2-week reservations 6 months and 2 weeks in advance, and then later canceled parts of their reservations. We, not being canny, were forced to look farther north and east, where it was statistically less likely to have clear skies; Britt got a site for three nights at Cooper Lake State Park, northeast of Dallas. (As you may know, it turned out that the actual clear sky map was almost opposite what was expected. Hah, I guess we were the actually canny ones!)

Once that was settled, I let Britt figure the rest out, since he likes to pore over maps and make plans. I was just along for the ride - and what a ride it turned out to be. Literally as well as figuratively, since we decided to take our mountain bikes with us. He picked two state parks for our outbound trip, and two different state parks on a different route coming back home, for a total of five different state parks visited, two in New Mexico and three in Texas.

( Five parks, 13 photos )

As some of you may remember, in 2017 we drove to near Casper Wyoming to see the total solar eclipse, which was an incredible, astonishing, literally awe-some experience. So when we learned that we'd be nearly in the direct path of an annular solar eclipse (what happens when the relative distance of the sun and moon are such that the apparent disc of the moon doesn't completely cover the apparent disc of the sun), naturally we made plans to get ourselves in position to see it!

We actually wouldn't have had to drive very far, as the center of the annularity path would pass only an hour or so south of Durango. But there had been a lot of regional buzz - nearby Mesa Verde National Park was expecting a huge influx of visitors, all the campgrounds and hotels were sold out - and we wanted to get away from people, as is our wont :-) So instead we drove about 3 hours to Utah's Cedar Mesa, an area with many canyons full of arches and ruins we've explored many times, and more importantly lots of nooks and crannies that regular RVs wouldn't be able to access but which would be no problem for our Sportsmobile.

As it happened, Cedar Mesa had a lot more visitors as well, and the spot Britt had picked as a possible camp already had a half-dozen vehicles parked along the narrow dirt road. No matter; we headed back to the main road across the mesa and continued along it, looking for possibilities. Pretty soon we found a small cut-off that wasn't on the map, but didn't have a "no vehicles" sign - perfect. The fact that it was narrow, with sharp dips and bumps and hard turns and a few sections of deep sand just made it better, because we were pretty sure nobody else would come in after us. We found a flat spot and settled in to enjoy the sunset.



The clouds cleared out during the night, making for excellent (though very chilly) stargazing. When I got up in the wee hours (so called because I had to wee :-) I saw a meteor streak across Orion!

After breakfast the next morning we moved our chairs and table to a spot just behind the van where we had a clear view of the clear, blue sky, and settled in with our eclipse glasses, eclipse binoculars, and the SkEye app on our phones.

And this is what we saw!



Many more photos, including total annularity, below the cut. Note that these were taken by shooting with a phone camera through one lens of a pair of eclipse glasses, so they are very far from professional quality! However, I think they're nifty, so you get to see them. Total annularity was maybe even prettier than totality, though we had to continue to use the eclipse glasses and not the naked eye. It also got colder and darker, though not by nearly as much as it did for totality.

( One ring to rule them all... )

The hiking plan laid out for us from Sëlva di Val Gardena to Compatsch was 11.8 miles with more elevation loss than gain. This would be accomplished by taking the bus from Sëlva to Passo Sella, about 2000’ higher, and beginning the hike there. (The Dolomites region is well-served by buses, and tourists are given cards at the hotels to allow free bus travel within the area – a really awesome idea that more places should embrace, in my opinion.)

We had an inkling this plan might not work the previous night, when we looked at the information booklet about the mountain bike race scheduled for that day. The road to Passo Sella would be closed for a couple of hours in the morning, but as the race was not taking that particular road (it used the dirt and gravel roads that made up many of the marked “trails”) we figured that we’d just have to start our hike a little later. But in the morning we discovered that not only was the road to Passo Sella closed, none of the buses would be running all day!

( Time for plan C. )

Saturday June 10th was a busy day for us, as it was the first day of transition from the Lombardy bicycling phase of our trip to the Dolomites hiking phase. As I mentioned last post, we shared a taxi to Angera and then took the ferry to Arona, where we took a series of three trains to Trento, changing in Milan and Verona. The Milan-to-Verona train was exactly the same one we had taken to Peschiera Del Garda to begin the bike tour; strange to realize that the distance we took six days to bicycle across could be covered in half a day by train! Of course, it’s the journey, not the destination…



( Adventures and misadventures getting to the Dolomites! )

I've been sadly remiss about writing up our recent vacations...and then I realized that I had a hard time recalling the details if I didn't write them up. So I'm determined to do a trip report for this one - bicycling and hiking in Italy! This is the first section of (probably) four; if you'd rather not read a WIP, I'll be posting an index when it's all done.

Britt and I had never thought much about Italy as a vacation destination, but when our friends Frank and June said they wanted to put together a group to do a bike trip around Lombardy – they’d done a bicycling tour of Ireland they enjoyed, but they had felt that it would have been more fun with friends – we said sure, sign us up! (I find that saying “sure, I’ll do that” to any opportunity is generally the best philosophy in life, or at least the most fun.) And if we were going to take the time and expense to fly to Europe, we might as well spend more time there, so Britt arranged a rather luxe self-guided hiking trip in the Dolomites for the following week, as ever since our Coast-to-Coast highlights hike in England, we had wanted to do more of the “dayhike from inn to inn and have someone else ferry the luggage” type of touring. So that was our June vacation, basically: a week cycling in Lombardy with friends and their friends, a week hiking in the Dolomites on our own, which along with travel there, back, and in the middle came out to three weeks in Italy.

( Getting there (in OMG FIRST CLASS) and days 1-3 of the cycling tour )

All the photos, none of the words (well, there are captions!): https://www.flickr.com/photos/svwindom/albums/72177720309412489/with/53008360297/

For many years now we've been (usually) going on a backpack trip in our nearby wilderness area, the Weminuche, with a group of friends that varies from year to year around the same core. This year we planned a trip to Sunlight Basin, which Britt and I last hiked to in 2004 with our friends Rolfe and Kristen as part of an epic backpack on what is now called the "Kodiak High Route" (stupid name, Kodiak, in Colorado??). Many things had changed since then: a snowslide destroyed the third bridge on Vallecito Creek (the "Swinging Bridge") a few years later, and the Forest Service being allocated less money for trail maintenance meant that the old pack trail up Sunlight Creek - already starting to decline when we hiked it in 2004 - was completely abandoned and mostly replaced by use-trails following the most direct way (rather than the easiest way), with many fallen trees to climb over or go around.

It was a multi-generational group, with my husband Britt the oldest at 68, Shan's son Anish at 23, and the rest of us scattered in between. We set out on Sunday morning and after half an hour or so, crossed the wilderness boundary:



( Lots of photos and blah blah about our six days in the wilderness! )

The album of photos at Flickr, few captions, no blah blah

ETA: Shan made a video of this trip, and it's on YouTube! It's a combination of video he took and photos we all shared.