Summer 2017 western trip, part 1

The huge smile on this lil' boy's face is because he is about to take his first plane ride ever!  Most of y'all probably know that we just returned from a week-long business/personal trip out west, and part of the mission was to give Stephen his first taste of flying...and one that Kenny would remember--Beth flew a couple years ago for her first time, so she kept telling her brothers of her "veteran" nature regarding flying...

We drove to Dallas and then flew into Las Vegas, arriving late last Saturday night.  The next morning we went to Mass at Holy Family Catholic Church, where Hope's cousin Father Steve Hoffer is the pastor.  After a nice visit with Father Steve, we struck out on our first adventure of this trip--a day visit to Death Valley National Park!  Our first stop in the area was a ghost town just on the outskirts of Death Valley called "Rhyolite":

The shell of the building pictured above was built before 1910 as a part of a substantial community that, like many similar ghost towns, sprung up virtually overnight, and then crashed almost as suddenly.  Today, Rhyolite is a tourist stop maintained by the federal government, with a paved road running through the ruins.

We drove out of the mountains into the basin that really defines Death Valley.  With each foot in elevation drop, the temperatures got fractionally hotter until we got to the bottom of the valley.  The picture of us standing by a dead tree near some sand dunes was taken when our rental car's thermometer read 118 degrees...we'd get hotter!

Death Valley is about heat, and stark natural beauty, and the fairly long human history of this extreme location.  After the Native Americans, American settlers appeared to extract (and lose) fortunes in efforts to mine the mineral resources of this valley.  The carts pictured above (with Hope, Beth, and Stephen) were exhibits of the style used to haul borax to market by 20 mule teams (hence, the ad slogan of one of those companies).  Note the eroded yellow hills in the background--Death Valley is filled with interesting colored rocks that are not done justice by photographs!  Kenny, pictured below standing in front of some of the ruin mine buildings, really embraced the extreme heat of this location:

as you can tell from their looks in the picture below, Beth and Stephen were not nearly as enthusiastic:

We were told by one of the rangers that the thermometer show above reads about 5 degrees high, which would mean we were experiencing about 122 degrees at this time (which is what our car was telling us).  Air temperatures this high almost immediately feel like an oven!

At the lowest point in Death Valley, you are well below sea level (marked on the cliff face on the picture above with a small white sign almost directly over Kenny's right shoulder, about 2/3 of the way up).  This part of Death Valley is over 280 BELOW sea level! 

The structures pictured above are from Hoover Dam on the Colorado River, and are water intakes for the power generation efforts there.  Note the light colored band of rock between the greenish water of the lake and the dark stone of the cliffs above--this is the rock that has been "bleached" of its color in the 80+ years of the existence of this reservoir.  The bleach rock has been exposed for a number of years due to the major drought the West has been in...

Hoover Dam (pictured above) was built in the 1930s to provide water, power, and flood control to this part of the world, and helped (still helps) build Las Vegas to a major urban area.

Hoover Dam is massive:  it is over 700 feet tall and almost a quarter-mile wide at its tallest/widest parts, and contains over 3.25 million cubic yards of concrete.  It is also interesting decorated with some Art-Deco accents common to government projects from the early 1930s:

The last monument at Hoover Dam was built to recognize the 112 persons who died during the years of layout and construction of this massive structure.  Hoover Dam was a stop on our way to Flagstaff, Arizona, where I was to attend a meeting for three days.  En route, we drove along parts of Route 66 and took in the high desert of northern Arizona.  The high desert gradually gave away to ponderosa pine-dominated forests, which occupied the higher (and moister) lands around Flagstaff.  Before we checked into our hotel, we made another stop, this time to visit Walnut Canyon National Monument just outside of town.  Walnut Canyon (pictured below) slices through the high ground near Flagstaff:

The sedimentary rocks that comprise the plateau have been eroded away at the canyon, and a large number of "bluff shelters" from a overhanging ledge of harder, more erosion resistant rock made the perfect location for small cliff dwellings (there is one near the center of the picture below):

Below, Beth and Kenny give a sense for the scale of these dwellings built into the cliff face:

One definitely feels cooler and more sheltered in these...which was good, because it was warm that day, and a monsoon afternoon thundershower was blowing up!  We left before the rains fell (one should avoid being in exposed conditions when faced by lightning in the mountains).

For the next two and a half days I attended a forestry meeting and Hope and the kids toured the Flagstaff area, having many adventures.  Part 2 of this series will pick up after the meeting, when we left Flagstaff for northern Arizona and southern Utah...