Red Canyon Hike

We went to Red Canyon today to do a little hiking. It is about 20 miles from Bryce Canyon in the Dixie National Forest. There is a nice 50 site concessionaire run campground that is also there. We started hiking the Hoodoo Trail which lead to the Pink Ledges Trail. These two trails formed a loop trail from the Forest Service Visitor Center.

Virginia finally got hold of our co-hosts that were supposed to be here by May 1 and they said that they will not be coming. So, I guess that means we will have to handle the campground ourselves.

Snow Storm at Bryce Canyon

It has been snowing off and on most of the day. Early this afternoon I ventured out to take some photographs of Bryce Canyon covered with some snow. It started to snow really hard in the early evening and the Visitor Center had to turn on the sidewalk heaters which are usually only used in winter. We made a couple of rounds in the campground to make sure everyone was ok. The tenters were our chief concern but all was well.

UT Route 12 Scenic Drive

We took the day off and drove down UT Route 12 which is classified as one of the scenic drives in this state. We drove all the way down to Boulder which is about 75 miles from Bryce Canyon. The geological landscape seemed to change every few miles along this route. There are many geological time periods visible along this route. We stopped at an old gas station in Boulder to rest before we headed back to Bryce Canyon.

Our Site at Sunset Campground

We arrived at Bryce Canyon yesterday afternoon and started to set up camp at host site #1 at Sunset Campground. This is our first duty day as campground hosts at Sunset Campground. We met with Virginia early in the morning and she issued us our NPS uniforms and gave us a big box of forms and equipment that we would need to do our job here, We also we issued park radios and instructed on their proper use. We opened up Loop A of Sunset Campground at about 7 PM.

We left our home in Fort Worth early today for Bryce Canyon. We are staying the night at the same campground in Tucumcari, New Mexico as we did last year. Tomorrow we will stay at a KOA in Flagstaff, Arizona. We should arrive at Bryce Canyon National Park two days from now.

I received a call from a park ranger at Bryce Canyon National Park asking if I was still available to work the early summer season at Sunset Campground there. Liz and I talked it over since we would have to get ready to leave in about 4 weeks. We decided that we really loved it there and we would do whatever it took to make it happen. I called Virginia at Bryce Canyon National Park back and said we would love to have the assignment. Now comes the hard part of getting ready for a 3 month assignment in a short period of time. I'm sure that we will make many mistakes packing since we have never been out in our RV for this length of time. We have to report for duty on April 15.

I have applied for a few campground host jobs for this summer. One of the places that I have applied to is an opening at Bryce Canyon National Park. I don't think that I will get it but I applied anyway!

Homeward Bound to Loveland

I got a call from my nephew shortly after we got back from Bryce Canyon and he asked what was going on with my mom's grave stone. I said that nothing had been done so I got the RV ready to travel back to Ohio to check out what type of tombstone my sister and John had in mind. I got back to Cincinnati at the beginning of August and I began to check out the types, designs and costs of different types of tombstones. I selected a mother/father type that covered both graves and my sister was happy with my selection. We had a long term campsite at Olive Branch Campground which is not far from Loveland where the graves and the funeral home are located. I ordered the grave marker from the funeral home. They will install it in the graveyard as soon as they receive it from the supplier. We stayed there until about the end of August. We stopped at Elkmont Campground in the Great Smokies for a couple of weeks before we headed back to Fort Worth for the winter. We spent most of our time there in Gatlinburg shopping and walking up and down the parkway. We rented small trikes one day and rode them all around the Gatlinburg area. They were only 50cc models, so a motorcycle license was not required. We had a great time riding them.

Bryce Canyon Trip

We left Fort Worth again on the first of July for a 2 week vacation at Bryce Canyon National Park. We spent the fourth of July at an RV park in Tucumcari, New Mexico. We arrived at Bryce Canyon on July 7. It just happened that our visit there was at the same time the Astronomy Festival was taking place. We bought a newly published book there on the night skies in the National Parks. The author was in the visitor center signing copies of the book, so we got ours signed. We visited all the view points and hiked the Navajo and Queens Garden loop trail while we were there. We returned home on July 25.

We left Carlsbad Caverns to return home to Fort Worth. We got back home from our 2 week adventure on June 15.