Days Fourteen through Sixteen – Forest Solitude

Just a short drive south of the Grand Canyon National Park, we pulled into the Tusayan Forest Service campground to look around. The campground was quite large and spread out. The campsites were in a dry Ponderosa Pine forest with very little underbrush. Surprisingly there were only a few other campers scattered among the various loops on the hillside.

We pulled in to a site that would great for our rig and stepped out of the truck. The air was fragrant with the scent of pine, the temperature was a comfortable 75 degrees, and birds were chirping in the trees. It didn’t take more than a glance at each other to decide this would be camp for a few days. 


Often when we travel we move to a new camp each day as we ramble along. However, periodically it feels good to settle in one spot for a few days. It gives us a chance to rest, relax, and in this case sort through hundreds of photos from the Grand Canyon to narrow them down to a few for the the blog. It isn’t something we plan, but rather the site presents itself as a good place to pause and reflect. Tusayan did just that.  


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Day 1 – Searching for Some Sunshine

Image
We headed south from Olympia, driving through gloomy rain showers until we were well east of Portland, Oregon. Our destination? The Total Eclipse of the sun in Texas, which will occur on April 8th. That will give us about 9 days to travel the 3,000+ miles. I always forget the interesting geology that is exposed in the Columbia River gorge. The varying shapes of the basalt columns kept my interest for miles on end. Especially this time of year, spring, there were many waterfalls spraying the cliffs, and Multnomah Falls was roaring! Our first night was spent at a Harvest Host location in Echo, Oregon. The host was Echo Ridge Cellars. They have a nice flat gravel lot for Harvest Host guests.   The wines sold are pressed from their vineyard which is about 3 miles away. The building itself is my favorite part. They have restored and updated an old grain elevator. The inside of the elevator was left exposed so visitors can see the construction. It is very solid 2x6 boards stacked flat,...
Read more

Day One – What a Difference a Month Makes

Image
Wood’s Prairie takes to the road again. Our destination this trip is to the desert southwest red rock country. Specific plans? Nope, whichever way the wind blows us. We are hopeful that we can avoid too many large crowds, but we’ll see. Day one saw us heading east on I-84 in Oregon up the Columbia Gorge. As it turns out, we travelled this same road one year and one month earlier on our jaunt down to Texas to see the total eclipse of the sun. However, what a difference one month makes in the Pacific Northwest! The first thing we noticed was that there weren’t snow patches in the shady areas of the gorge’s basalt cliffs. Of course, that meant that there were far fewer waterfalls splashing down the crevices of those basalt columns. I snapped a picture of Oregon’s famed Multnomah Falls. That is a favorite spot for visitors, especially in the spring, as was indicated when the parking lot was so full that it was closed when we drove past. Our next observation was that the varying shades of...
Read more

Day Two – Diamonds and Daydreams

Image
We found our next camp along the shore of Diamond Lake with the towering Mt. Thielson keeping watch over us. A cloudy first day gave us some rainbows and puffy pink clouds. It seemed to us that the mountain looked an awful lot like the mountain that The Grinch lives in, so we kept watch for him. This was a great campground and our site was right on the lake. During the day, we had frequent visitors in the form of gray jays, squirrels, ducks, and geese. Later that night, the sparks from our campfire flew away into the black night and brought back with them a brilliant sunrise. As the sun rose behind Mt. Thielson, first there was a glimmer, then there was a silvery rim, and finally the sun rose, a white diamond above the black mountain.  The suns rays spread more diamonds across the lake surface.  What a beautiful way to start our day.
Read more