This past weekend, I did the up-and-back-down version of the famous Narrows hike in Zion National Park. It was physically exhausting, since the hike involves nearly constant wading up a swift river with depths varying from shin- to thigh-high, but also immensely rewarding -- especially where the river was wall-to-wall and 30 feet wide, with vertical walls towering 1500 feet above. The temperature reached over 105 degrees that day, but in the canyon it was cool and comfortable.

The conditions in The Narrows makes casual photography difficult, so I have no photoset to show off, but I posted the above image to give you a sense of the scale. I'm the orange humanoid speck at the bottom of the opening.

Ever since my disappointing trip to a ghost town in Death Valley last year, where all there was to be found was some rusted cans and tens of abandoned mines, I've been hoping to go visit Rhyolite, two hours northwest of Las Vegas. This past weekend, that guy from fantent/snakesonablog and I finally made the trip.

Rhyolite, one of the better preserved ghost towns in southern Nevada, had a population nearing 10,000 at its height in the late 19th century, but was empty a few decades later. Several large buildings still remain, including the jail, a residence/brothel, the bank, and the train depot. There are also abandoned mines peppered around the area, and a small cemetery.

In addition to the historical landmarks, Rhyolite has also become the unlikely home for a modern sculpture garden. You can find these sculptures near the road approaching the town. The oldest sculpture, an odd portrayal of The Last Supper with white-robed ghosts, has been around since the early 1980's.

I took a small number of photos of the town and the sculptures.

So I just got back into town after my three-day trip to San Diego for the Comic Con convention. It was my first time there and thus I was new to the overwhelming crowds, the elaborate costumes, the excessive nerditude, and the long lines. On Friday morning, I participated in round table discussions with Samuel Jackson, Snakes on a Plane director David Ellis, and snake handler Jules Sylvester. At some point in the near future, I will post video of those discussions. In the meantime, here are some things I found out:

• The snake on the teaser poster is a western diamondback rattlesnake, according to the snake handler.
• David Ellis: Quentin Tarantino is a huge fan of Snakes on a Plane.
• Samuel Jackson asked to be in the movie as soon as he heard about a movie called Snakes on a Plane and verified that it was about snakes on a plane. When I asked him if he still would've taken the role if the title was metaphorical (my example was something like "if it was about, say, convicts in Kansas"), he responded in the negative.

As you can see, I threw some hardballs out there.

I also went to the panel in a huge room later that evening, filled with 5,000 or so Comic Con attendees. The panel was quite entertaining, especially because of how Samuel Jackson handled the questions from the nerdy crowd. They also brought in some live snakes and showed a 10-minute clip from the film. (Unrelated: they also screened 5 minutes or so of the new Tenacious D rock opera movie, which looked great.) Watch the panel, and/or read Brian's coverage.

A few more things I saw:

• Frank Miller and some people from the film 300, based on a Miller graphic novel about the Battle of Thermopylae. Looked very violent.
• Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez talking about Grind House, which features two full-length features, one from each director, as well as some fictional trailers thrown in. You can read AICN's coverage here, but it looked incredibly fun.
• Caught a clip of Southland Tales, Richard Kelly's follow-up to Donnie Darko. The clip they showed came off as a bad music video, featuring a bloody Justin Timberlake singing The Killers while playing with a beer can, supported by dancers in nurse uniforms. His description of the plot sounded intriguing, so I'm hoping the uncomfortable clip is justified by the film somehow.
• Looked at a lot of comic book art, but didn't buy anything since I don't really read comic books.

Anyway, more to come when I get the video clips from New Line.

For the next few days, I will be in the land of R.E.M., the B-52's, and Neutral Milk Hotel to attend a wedding. (Congrats, "Slater.") Posting may be light, not that it's been heavy recently. (Sorry, work's been busy.)

 

Jen and Jesse came and visited us separately in a period spanning two weeks in the middle of March. Here are 48 pictures from their visit.

I spent some time this past weekend at the Mojave National Preserve and greatly enjoyed the vasts amount of open desert (pictures forthcoming). The trip made me recall an Internet phenomenon that took place six or so years ago: the Mojave phone booth site.

The site started when the creator found out about a pay phone that was situated tens of miles down an isolated dirt road in the middle of the Mojave desert. He became so excited about the strangeness of it that he went through a series of adventures to find and use the phone booth, all while documenting his journey on the website. For some reason, the booth captured the interest of the Internet-at-large and suddenly people were frequently calling the booth and making trips into the wilderness to find it.

The National Park Service eventually tired of all the publicity and, citing the negative effect of all the attention on the wilderness, had the booth removed. The booth is still gone, and nothing remains to mark its place, but a film inspired by the booth is coming out later this year.

I had always thought the booth was on some major road in the preserve, but after my trip (and as you can see in the image above), I realized it was actually down an unmarked dirt road that goes right into desert nothingness near the 30 or so volcanic cinder cones in the park (those are the spots in the picture). The yellow road to the east of the booth is a small paved road that heads into the heart of the park, so there really is no practical reason to drive down the over ten miles down the road (4x4 suggested) that led to the booth, unless you were one of the private miners, or just exploring.

Note: the image above is an area 60 miles or so southwest of Las Vegas. I-15 is the major highway between Vegas and Los Angeles.

 

Lee and I spent a night and a full day at Death Valley National Park the weekend before last. It's only about a 2 1/2 hour drive west of Las Vegas. Here are 24 photos from the trip.

I've been asked a few times where the pictures on the banner come from, so I thought I'd take the time to answer here on the blog. All the pictures but two were taking with my ancient 2 megapixel Canon Powershot A40 -- the others (marked with an *) were taken with my brother's much nicer 6 megapixel Canon EOS-10D (I think). Yes, I need a new camera.

From the top left, and proceeding clockwise:

1. A corridor of the 19th century Fort Jefferson on Dry Tortugas National Park, on a small island located 70 miles west of Key West and not much farther from Havana, Cuba. (Spring 2003)
2. A window of the William J. Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock, Arkansas. (Summer 2005)
3. Balanced Rock in Arches National Park, southeast Utah. (Summer 2005)
4. An assortment of figs freshly picked by my uncle and laid out to sun-dry by my aunt, in my family's village in the mountains of northeast Sicily near Messina. (Summer 2002)
5. *Relatively smaller mountains east of the Grand Tetons in northwest Wyoming. (Summer 2004)
6. *Me reading David Foster Wallace's Oblivion en route to Rio de Janeiro from Boston. (Summer 2004)
7. Newspaper Rock, a Native American petroglyph panel located in southeast Utah with art that is potentially 2,000 years old. (Summer 2005)

Clearly, things have been slow around here for the past few days, in part because of my computer problems but also because I was in Houston for a wedding Friday through Sunday. We had a great time during the weekend, although I was disappointed yet pleased that we didn't encounter anything stereotypically Texan while there. Instead, we spent Saturday afternoon visiting the more sophisticated side of Houston.

First we hit up the Rothko Chapel (it is what it sounds like), then moved on to the Menil Collection of modern art. The last culture stop was at the Byzantine Fresco Chapel (pictured on the right), which is an incredible modernistic chapel consisting of stolen Byzantine frescos later recovered and reassembled coupled with a plexiglass frame hanging from the ceiling. Neat. The neighborhood around the museum could have been airlifted directly from Cambridge, MA for all I knew -- it had that kind of academic feel.

Like myself before I moved here, perhaps you believe that Las Vegas is surrounded on all four sides for miles and miles by the desert. The truth is that yes, there's a lot of desert, but there are also mountains surrounding the city -- hence the Las Vegas Valley. Indeed, there is a ski resort within an hour's drive from the city, albeit not a large one.

This past weekend, Lee and I took a day trip to the nearby Spring Mountains, a National Recreation Area. The highest peak in that range is Mt. Charleston, which is somewhere near 12,000 ft. high. We did a several hour hike that took us to about 8,600 ft. and the temperature was in the low 50's. Evidently, the Spring Mountains are an excellent getaway during the extremely hot Vegas summer (which I have not yet experienced). I was also pleasantly surprised to see some transitioning foliage, especially since I'm missing my first New England Autumn in seventeen years.

84 photos from the Boston to Vegas road trip.

 

Here are a few pictures from the cross-country trip Lee and I made from Boston to Las Vegas. The top left picture is from the Clinton Library in Little Rock, Arkansas; the top right picture is from about 10,000 ft. at Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado (Lee is standing on the large boulder); and the bottom picture is from Dead Horse State Park in Utah (you might recognize the river bend canyon (or a similar one) from Koyaanisqatsi). I'll likely put up larger versions of all of our pictures within a week two, so keep an eye out.

Some highlights from our trip:

• Visiting Mammoth Cave National Park
• Paying $22/ea. to visit Graceland, and not feeling a sense of shame after the visit (before is another matter)
• Realizing in West Memphis, AK that our oil cap had been missing from the beginning of our trip, and then visiting four auto shops twice each before finding one that fit. The first three auto shops were staffed and patronized by mostly black people. The last auto shop, which had a not-so-subtle four-leaf clover on its sign, was staffed and patronized by all white people
• Visiting the Clinton Libary in Little Rock and feeling depressed about our current leadership (and about how Clinton blew his legacy and the Democrat Party's legitimacy for (hopefully no more than) 6 years
• New Mexico; Sante Fe and its environs
• Finally seeing some Cambridge-types in Boulder, CO; noticing The Onion has an office there; buying the New York Times and realizing for the first time that the levees had broken in New Orleans; listening to talk radio and realizing that even the right-winger hosts were mad at the Bush administration; being really depressed about the government's response in New Orleans
• Rocky Mountain National Park
• Visiting the headquarters of the Mormon Church in Salt Lake City
• Utah; Arches National Park; Canyonlands National Park; Dead Horse Point State Park
• Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado; seeing the Ancestral Puebloan (Anasazi means "enemy of Najavao" so is sort of innapropriate) cliff dwellings in person
• Grand Canyon
• Driving over a dark mountain after having crossed the Hoover Dam at 3am and seeing a huge field of lights in all directions suddenly appear: Las Vegas