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mmm, vacation
Mar. 30th, 2009 11:50 pmI just got back last night from a week of vacation. The first few days involved a lot of bumming around the greater San Francisco area, eating delicious food and seeing the sites. Sights seen include the streets of Berkeley (thai food, silly hats, cream puffs, and pretty gardens), Muir Woods (I love redwoods so much), Muir Beach, the Exploratorium (that place turned me into a deliriously happy 7 year old), and Golden Gate Park. It was good to see some people who live on the left cast now.
The next few days were in Arizona. I'm used to thinking of the desert as a bleak place, being previously only familiar with the desert at Burning Man, but the places we went were beautiful (although still too dry for me to want to be there for more than a few days at a time.) First we went to the Grand Canyon.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kilroi accidentally set both her hands on fire but survived with flesh and gloves unscathed. garnet420 convinced me to hike the whole canyon with him in one day, rim to river to rim (15.4 miles long, with a mile of elevation change each way). We did it in 8.5 hours, and it was awesome, although also totally stupid and I was walking with a limp for the next 3 days. (There's a reason there are signs posted all over the place telling you not to walk the whole canyon in one day. It could very possibly kill someone if they tried it in July or August.)
The Grand Canyon is big. Like, really big. It is hard to comprehend just how big it is even after having stared into it for 2.5 days. We saw lots of stars, and I learned how to find Leo and Gemini. It was beautiful weather for hiking (50s during the day), but really freaking cold at night. Like 15 F. This was definitely the coldest camping trip I have ever done. Thankfully,davidglasser loaned me his balaclava, since I forgot a hat. The morning after hiking the canyon, I discovered that I'd forgotten to empty the bottom compartment of my backpack, and I'd inadvertently lugged four books, including a rather large guide to caribbean reef fish, all 15.4 miles through the canyon. Oops. I feel I should also mention something about our fifth compatriot, Erin, but she didn't do anything as foolish as the rest of us, so I'm not sure what to say.
After the Grand Canyon we headed south, stopping at some pueblo ruins and at Sunset Crater, which is a volcanic mountain that shot itself up out of the ground about a thousand years ago, and you can still walk past the lava flows. We saw an astonishing number of different environments on the trip. We spent that night in the painted desert and spent the next day wandering short trails in the petrified forest and around some badlands. The petrified forest is surreal. You're walking through a desert, and half the boulders are these strange things that look like chunks of giant trees, since they were 225 million years ago. The other half of the boulders are normal rocks that have been sculpted by erosion in fascinating ways. The painted desert and badlands hills are these colorful layered things that scream, "Geology is cool, see!"
I took about a billion pictures which I will slowly upload to flickr over the course of the week. I will hopefully post some of the better ones here, for those of you who don't want to see all billion of them. I hopefully will also go through them and tag the good ones as Good, so in the future the good ones will be easy to pick out.
The next few days were in Arizona. I'm used to thinking of the desert as a bleak place, being previously only familiar with the desert at Burning Man, but the places we went were beautiful (although still too dry for me to want to be there for more than a few days at a time.) First we went to the Grand Canyon.
kilroi accidentally set both her hands on fire but survived with flesh and gloves unscathed. garnet420 convinced me to hike the whole canyon with him in one day, rim to river to rim (15.4 miles long, with a mile of elevation change each way). We did it in 8.5 hours, and it was awesome, although also totally stupid and I was walking with a limp for the next 3 days. (There's a reason there are signs posted all over the place telling you not to walk the whole canyon in one day. It could very possibly kill someone if they tried it in July or August.) The Grand Canyon is big. Like, really big. It is hard to comprehend just how big it is even after having stared into it for 2.5 days. We saw lots of stars, and I learned how to find Leo and Gemini. It was beautiful weather for hiking (50s during the day), but really freaking cold at night. Like 15 F. This was definitely the coldest camping trip I have ever done. Thankfully,
davidglasser loaned me his balaclava, since I forgot a hat. The morning after hiking the canyon, I discovered that I'd forgotten to empty the bottom compartment of my backpack, and I'd inadvertently lugged four books, including a rather large guide to caribbean reef fish, all 15.4 miles through the canyon. Oops. I feel I should also mention something about our fifth compatriot, Erin, but she didn't do anything as foolish as the rest of us, so I'm not sure what to say.After the Grand Canyon we headed south, stopping at some pueblo ruins and at Sunset Crater, which is a volcanic mountain that shot itself up out of the ground about a thousand years ago, and you can still walk past the lava flows. We saw an astonishing number of different environments on the trip. We spent that night in the painted desert and spent the next day wandering short trails in the petrified forest and around some badlands. The petrified forest is surreal. You're walking through a desert, and half the boulders are these strange things that look like chunks of giant trees, since they were 225 million years ago. The other half of the boulders are normal rocks that have been sculpted by erosion in fascinating ways. The painted desert and badlands hills are these colorful layered things that scream, "Geology is cool, see!"
I took about a billion pictures which I will slowly upload to flickr over the course of the week. I will hopefully post some of the better ones here, for those of you who don't want to see all billion of them. I hopefully will also go through them and tag the good ones as Good, so in the future the good ones will be easy to pick out.
