Vacation Pics

This was outside Saguaro National Park, in Tuscon Arizona. Those giant saguaro cactuses that you see in all the cartoons can only grow in a few places. You can only find them in Arizona and Chihuahua. We were there in June, 2010, and I wanted to see the park the first thing in the morning to beat the heat. That was a good decision. By 10:30 AM, both electric fans were running.




We went to Yellowstone National Park in September 2010. This is Roaring Mountain. All that white stuff is steam coming out of the ground. The mountain just sort of hisses now, but back in the 1880s, you could hear it from two miles away. I would have preferred to take a picture next to a geyser, but they put the parking lots a safe distance away. The steam vents in Yellowstone stop, and start, and move around. I did see orange cones at a place where the steam started coming up through the pavement.




Yellowstone has some nifty single-lane paved roads that go through scenic areas. They are narrow and twisty, with cliffs on both sides, and no trailers or RVs are allowed. I made a point of driving on them. This is Firehole Canyon, formed by the Firehole River. The river steams in the early morning because it's fed by hot water. This was one of the few parking spots, over the waterfall.



Since we'd driven 900 miles to go to Yellowstone, we decided to spend a day seeing the nearby Grand Teaton National Park. Yellowstone is huge, and takes more days than we had to see even half of it. This picture is of Teaton Lake, at the north end of the park. You can do the auto-tour of Grand Teaton in a day. Well, maybe you can. It got late and we turned around before we got to Jackson. The mountain second from the left is Teaton Mountain. I personally don't see the resemblance.

Beautiful.thanks for posting. My wife and I realy want to see these places someday.

Man those are great! I love seeing people USE these cars. And love pics period.

Very nice!

A great car in some great shots!

Beautiful pics of our great country and a beautiful wagon being used the way it was meant to be used..
Maybe someday I will get the chance to see those mountains from my wagon
Thanks for the PICS
Jim Gordon

Those are some great pics! Looks like a sales brochure, and I'm sold on one!

Thank you for the kind words.

Here are some more Yellowstone pictures, mostly taken by Mrs Danger.

There are plenty of other vacation pics in the other albums.

Lorne, you need to make time in your life to visit the US national parks. My parents made the trip when we kids were five, six, and seven years old, forty years ago, and I still remember a lot of what I saw.

I so want to take my family to Yellowstone. Good pics!

I found another picture, this one from our honeymoon. We went to Painted Desert National Park, Petrified Forest National Park, Meteor Crater, and the Grand Canyon National Park. This picture is from the Painted Desert. Not many people have pictures of the Painted Desert in the rain!

We learned that you should always go to the Grand Canyon last. Nothing is impressive compared to the Grand Canyon. If you see it first, a meteor crater that's a mile across is pretty darn big. If you see it on the way home, it looks like a puddle.

Sadly, I don't seem to have any pictures of the car in front of the Grand Canyon.

I love these pictures more every time i see them Nick.

I love the last Buick wagon as well. The Rich Funeral Homes owned those in the late 80's,us poor guys had Pontiacs or Chevs.

I always wanted to ask if you are anywhere near the Unser family. I was Lil Al's biggest fan for years,but he sure hit rock bottom after his racing career.

Just curious what he does now.

I don't know much about the Unser family. I know that one of them lives on a big lot by the river. You know how some people inset wagon wheels into their block walls? He has Indycar wheels in his wall.

Nick I like the tan 80's Estate wagon a LOT. We traded in out 78 Grand Safari for a silver 86 Estate Wagon, and that looks a lot like your old car. Our '86 had wire wheel hubcaps though....WISH we'd had the mags.

GREAT PICS! Keep them coming!

I didn't like that Electra Estate Wagon. It had 300,000 miles on it and it was worn out. I spent way too much money on it trying to keep it alive, and it just wasn't worth it.

I bought the 1994 Roadmaster last year and I sold the 1988 Electra Estate for $500. I couldn't be happier.

Great yellow stone pictures. It is on my Bucket list.............

Going there is one of my dreams for the future too Tim.That is truly some beautiful country of ours.Friends told
me you dont just see the beauty of Yellowstone,you inhale it and feel it all thru your body.Of course these guys
were probably drunk at the time knowing them.Still want to go there.More Pics Please.
Is 1800 a good price for a one owner garage kept 95 RMW with all the goodys.Owned by a 84 year old giving up his license.Going to pick it up tomorrow!
YEE HAW
Jim Gordon

yeah,. really nice pics,.
did you see yogi?

nick

We didn't see Yogi. Here's why.

Whenever there is any wildlife close to the road at Yellowstone, there is a big traffic jam because people just stop in the middle of the road to take pictures. The first time it happened, we thought it was pretty neat, and we took pictures too. After it happened 2-3 times every day, we started getting annoyed.

We saw people actually go out and mingle with a herd of elk, trying to get better pictures. I'm sure that it's a nightmare for the park rangers. It's not Disney World. Those are wild animals.

At one traffic jam, we didn't see anything. I told Mrs Danger that maybe it was for a jackrabbit, and she laughed. All these people were watching the mountainside with $8000 cameras. I rolled down the window and asked someone what was going on. She told me that she heard that someone thought that they'd seen a bear up in the trees. No one else had seen anything. We drove on.

From the 1870s to the 1960s, people used to see a lot of bears at Yellowstone. The hotels inside the park had open garbage dumps, and the bears would come to eat. Stupid people would mingle with the bears, trying to get better pictures. Someone got injured by a bear every week, and every couple of years someone got killed. The Park Service closed the dumps in the 1960s, and moved the bears that were habituated to humans far out into the wilderness. Now the bears at Yellowstone act like wild bears are supposed to act -- they avoid humans.

So that's why we didn't see Yogi.

--Nick

not even boo boo??

phantom 309 wrote:

not even boo boo??

I went to Shenandoah near Mike's place in VA on my first B-body road trip and went to sign the register in park HQ. The entry before me was signed by Yogi Bear and his reason for visit was "to score some Pick-i-nik baskets!"

NO, BS my son and I laughed about it for a the whole trip.

It's not exactly vacation pictures, but they sort of are. I had to use the rest of my vacation days from work by the end of the year or I would have lose them. So I'm taking a few days off, and today we drove across town to see the National Museum of Atomic Science and History.

This is the wagon parked in front of a Redmond missile. In back, they also have a B-52, a Titan II missile, the Atomic Cannon, and numerous smaller planes and missiles. Inside the museum they have atomic bombs, torpedos, antique X-ray machines, radioactive water coolers, Lionel toy missile trains, explanations of atomic theory, and descriptions of great men of science (as well as of Marie Curie). I think my favorite item was a glass-radium bead on a lamp pull cord, so you could see the glow-in-the-dark pull cord in the dark and easily switch on the lamp. It was on display next to a set of marbles made of glass colored with uranium.

you compensating for something with these pics????


nick

Finally a vehicle that makes our wagons look small!!

Great pics! Keep them coming!

-Mike

phantom 309 wrote:

you compensating for something with these pics????


nick

Nope. Let's just say that I don't need a Corvette.

Today we went for a drive. We drove up the mountain up to the gate of the White Mesa gypsum mine. This is only a mile from the main highway. There were No Trespassing signs everywhere. It's on the Zia Pueblo reservation, so I was expecting the tribal police to arrive at any minute to shoo us off. Maybe the white car blended in with the white rocks.

VERY pretty! You live in a gorgeous place!

-Mike

http://graphicleftovers.com/graphic/dead-pontiac/

In case anyone wants to buy the finished picture of the dead Pontiac.

The is the Bosque del Apache bird sanctuary. It's a couple of hours south of Albuquerque. Snow geese spend the Winter here, and then migrate back north in the Spring. The lake was absolutely full of them. Every once in a while they would startle, and thousands of snow geese would take flight all at once. The sound of their wings when they took off was like a strong wind through trees.

What surprised me the most was learning that about half the snow geese have already gone. Last week there were 35,000 in the sanctuary. This week there are 18,000. I would have liked to have seen the whole flock.

The Rio Grande river is a couple of miles away the other direction. I could see one flock after another of different kinds of birds migrating north along the valley.

Nick Danger wrote:

The is the Bosque del Apache bird sanctuary. It's a couple of hours south of Albuquerque. Snow geese spend the Winter here, and then migrate back north in the Spring. The lake was absolutely full of them. Every once in a while they would startle, and thousands of snow geese would take flight all at once. The sound of their wings when they took off was like a strong wind through trees.

What surprised me the most was learning that about half the snow geese have already gone. Last week there were 35,000 in the sanctuary. This week there are 18,000. I would have liked to have seen the whole flock.

The Rio Grande river is a couple of miles away the other direction. I could see one flock after another of different kinds of birds migrating north along the valley.

If that was me you'd get a great shot of my Roady peeling out before it shat all over!!!!

Cool pic though!

I was worried about that. Both on the car and on us. It didn't happen. I figure that geese must dump the excess weight before they take off.

My parents had their 50th wedding anniversary this weekend, so my sisters and I went to Utah to visit them. We took lots of pictures of family, but you guys don't want to see them. Besides, it's hard to get a photo of six people who all have their eyes open.

On the way home, we spent an afternoon in Moab. My parents recommended driving the La Sal Mountain loop. There are signs at the bottom warning motorists not to take trailers or large RVs up the road. That sounds like my kind of driving.

This is the view of Castle Valley. We drove for a mile or two up the twisties, and then we came around the corner and saw this.



You old guys might remember the rock from this ad in the 1970s.



After driving along the ridge for a while, we came to some cattle in the road. My sister, who's never seen a cow outside of a pen, wanted to stop and pet them. She didn't understand that free-range grass-fed cattle are different than the pet cows that she's seen back east. They just walked away from her as she approached them.

I used the opportunity to take another picture of the wagon.



The next day we headed home. But I spotted some rocks with really good light on them just at the top of a grade. At the bottom of the grade, I turned around to go back to the top of the hill. All that just to take a photograph for you guys.



I turned around at the entrance to Hole N" the Rock. We've been there before, so this time we didn't stop. It's impossible to miss -- the sign is painted in twenty foot high letters on the cliff. It's a very cool place, with sculptures welded out of old mining equipment, a huge home that had been chiseled out of the rock, and a petting zoo.


Between Friday and Monday, we put 1200 miles on the wagon. It's a driving car. People who leave their wagons in their garages don't know what they're missing.

Awesome pictures Nick !Thanks for showing them to all of us.Looking at these pics makes me want
to jump in mine and just drive
Jim Gordon

I like the new pics! These wagons make the best trip cars, and you get good comments whenever you stop too!

Keep them coming!

-Mike

81X11 wrote:

I like the new pics! These wagons make the best trip cars, and you get good comments whenever you stop too!

Keep them coming!

-Mike

The scenic road has several 15 mph full-lock turns. We got back to the motel, and the maintenance guy asked us if we had trouble on the road with that big Caprice. I smiled and said, "I've done some improvements to the suspension. There was no trouble at all."

We went to Yellowstone again at the end of September. This time, we stayed in the Inn at Old Faithful. We chose the old wing, which was built in 1910. The center of the Inn is a 75 foot atrium built of logs. The railings are logs. The diagonal braces are logs with a 45° bend in the middle. The banister for the staircase next to our room was a log that curved all the way down to the floor at the top of the stairs. The walls of the room were rough-cut fir. The bathroom was art deco tile. We loved it all.

Last year, we didn't see any of the big geysers because we didn't have time to wait. This year, we sat on the benches that surround the geysers and waited for an hour or two for the big event. It was definitely worth it. Great Fountain Geyser, for example, erupts every 12 to 15 hours. We waited for an hour and a half, and when the eruption began, it made a boom like an artillery piece. Then hundreds of thousands of gallons of boiling water shot 150 feet into the air, and it continued for 45 minutes.

A mile down the road from Great Fountain Geyser is White Cone Geyser. It goes off a couple of times an hour. It's not so big, or rare, but you can park the car right next to it. So that's what I did, so I could take a picture for you guys.

We learned about the ravens at Fire Hole Lake. Some motorcyclists had parked and walked down the path. As soon as they were gone, some ravens landed on their bikes and started to unzip the luggage. I chased the ravens off. Those ravens were stubborn. They wouldn't leave, but would hop along the ground five feet from me. I had to stand guard over the bikes. When they came back, I told the riders that they needed to secure their stuff.

Every time an elk crosses the road, dozens of cars stop to take pictures. It gets to be a real nuisance. Yet when we walked a half mile from the road, we found a whole herd of elk, just doing their thing, and no photographers at all. People need to learn to get out of their cars.

We watched Old Faithful go off at night i the dark. We also watched it from the hotel balcony. We watched it from a little porch just around the corner from our room, in pajamas, drinks in hand. I really recommend the Inn. It's worth the extra money.

Thinking about how much energy is required to pump all that boiling water 150 feet up in the air
for 45 minutes.Man thats an amazing amount of power and its never been harnessed in any way
and probably never will be.Thanks Nick for the wonderful pics and making me want to go west
right now!
Jim

Actually, people try to harness that energy all the time. Someone said that he knew the official park geologist, and a large part of his job was trying to keep the surrounding states from sinking geothermal wells for cheap energy.

There used to be a geyser-fed warm swimming pool at the Inn at Old Faithful. It screwed up the geysers, so the park removed the piping. Morning Glory pool isn't as pretty as it was when I saw it as a kid, because tourists threw trash into the pool. It settled into the plumbing underground, and got cemented into place with calcium deposits. That was enough to change the flow rate of the water, and that changed the color of the pool.

The geyser system is quite fragile. I hope the 'drill baby drill' people don't sink wells around Yellowstone and ruin the park.

We drove through the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. It was more my vacation than Mrs Danger's, who was just along for the ride.

We stayed three nights at McGregor's Mountain Lodge, in Estes Park. I highly recommend the place. It's a half mile from the park entrance, and backed up against the national park. There were so many hummingbirds at the feeder outside the window that the sound of their wings woke me. We watched foxes walk across the parking spaces. They only have a dozen cabins, so I made my reservation a month in advance.


Our cabin


View from our cabin

There are two roads up to the top of Rocky Mountain National Park from the east. One is paved, and one is dirt. The dirt road doesn't have as many spectacular overlooks, but there are no RVs or buses.


Fall River Road

We came down the paved Trail Ridge Road. By then it was drizzling rain, and the views mostly of mist. But the clouds were beautiful. Lots of people were on the trail, and we were all planning to leave in a hurry if the thunder storms got closer. At 10,000 feet, you're awfully close to the lightning.

Tundra Communities Trail

Estes Park is the home of The Stanley Hotel. You won't recognize the exterior, but the interior was used for the movie The Shining. Back in the day, it was a very expensive hotel.


The Stanley


Albert Falls is off the Glacier Gorge road. It's only a mile from the parking lot, and a few hundred feet up, but the altitude was really starting to make Mrs Danger sick. She barely made it to the falls.

Albert Falls

About 1200 elk live in the park during the summer. Wintertime, most of them go downhill and live in Estes Park. I guess people are used to seeing elk grazing in the high school fields. This guy was right at the side of the road. I snapped off a few photos out the window and then got out of the way so the next driver had a chance.


Elk on Trail Ridge Road

We drove as many of the Colorado Scenic Byway roads as we could. We stayed one night in Leadville, above 10,000 feet. Neither one of us slept well. But the town was fun to walk around at 6:30 in the morning. I saw another tourist doing the same thing, photographing architecture in the early morning light.


Downtown Leadville

A couple of days later, we drove up Pikes Peak. It was a first for me. The road has a 7000 foot altitude gain in 19 miles. It's as steep as Mount Washington, and there are more tight turns. I can't drive like Al Unser, and so I spent a lot of time at 20 mph or below. The road is rough on cars. I kept seeing oil stains in the middle of the lane, which started suddenly and ended in a puddle at the next available pullout.


Road up to Pikes Peak


Car at Pikes Peak


View from Pikes Peak

At the top is a Army test facility, where they take soldiers from Natick Massachusetts, put them at 14,000 feet, and make them exercise or solve puzzles. On the way down, there's a checkpoint where a ranger checks your brake temperature and waves you over if they're too warm.



On this map, we drove: Trail Ridge Road, the paved part of Colorado River Headwaters, Top of the Rockies, Collegiate Peaks, part of Gold Belt Tour, and Highway of Legends.

These are GREAT pics!! I miss Colorado a lot. Lived in Englewood for three years and still love it there. So cool you went to The Shining hotel!!

I want my wagon back!!!!

-Mike

While we were in Estes Park, I kept seeing another white RMW. We met at a gas station a block from The Stanley. I gave them the url address of this forum. I hope they show up.

If I'm not so alone out here, I'll change the color of my pushpin back to blue.

Awesome! Drove my old 92 RMW out to Co Springs and Rocky Mt National Park in '03. I so wanted to do Pikes Peak...but the (now ex) wife was too scared. Man I wish I would have anyhow...luckily my wife now is a bit braver.

Awesome pics as always!