It's that time of year again...

And once again, it's time for my annual public service announcement. Things are nice a green, but some of that stuff you don't want to touch. "Leaves of three, let it be." I went on a hike last week in Marshall Canyon and came across a lot of very healthy poison oak. The angle is poor in this shot, but those leaves are as big as my hand. I've seen bigger, but not by much. 

As I was walking I encountered another hiker and mentioned about the healthiness of the poison oak and he nodded. I walked up to where I wanted to go that day and then turned around and headed back to my car. The man was still there, apparently taking a nice break on his hike. As I passed he asked me whether I could point out poison oak to him. It was pretty much everywhere, intermingled with some berry bushes, so I was able to show him the difference between the two since berry bushes also have leaves of three, but also have thorns. Yeah, you never stop being a teacher I guess, but I'm happy he asked.

Also, if you're out on the trail, be ever observant for our slithery friends as well. I went looking for a geocache this morning where the cache was hidden in a large rock pile and the only hint said, "in a hole." I found a two foot long stick (probably not long enough) and probed several holes and looked around for while before calling it. The extra find is not worth it in my opinion. So I headed down the trail, got about half way down and turned a corner and there's a snake lying right in the middle of the trail. I wasn't close enough to it and fortunately, it was a small gopher snake, but it could just as easily have been a rattlesnake. The weather's warmer and they're out and about. Be careful out there my friends.

Which to believe?

Back in early February, I headed to Yuma for the Southwestern Arizona Geocachers annual mega event. Lots of fun was had all weekend long and our geocaching adventures took us all over the southwest corner of Arizona. At one point, we came across this benchmark on a canal overdressing. If you look closely, it's an elevation benchmark listing the elevation above sea level as 132.8 feet. I'm not sure when this benchmark was placed, but it was probably placed sometime in the middle of the last century.

When I saw it, I decided to get out my phone and pull up an app that I have on the phone called My Altitude. I've used it in the past and it's proven to be pretty accurate when comparing it to other spots of known elevation. One summer when camping in the eastern Sierras, my friends and I hiked up to the top of Kearsarge Pass out of Onion Valley. This pass tops out at 11,760 feet above sea level according to the sign indicating you're entering Kings Canyon National Park. When I pulled out the phone on that particular occasion the My Altitude app was within about 10 feet of the same numbers. Several other times I've noted that the app was very close to what was an already known altitude.

Which brings me back to this benchmark. I spotted this one and once again decided to see what the app said about the altitude on this bridge. As you can see, there's almost a 30 foot difference in elevation between the posted altitude and what was showing on the app. I have theory behind this which, I think, offers a possible explanation as to why the app was so different from the posted altitude.

Altitudes are constantly being changed and/or as better technology rolls on to the scene. When I was growing up, I remember Mt. Whitney, the highest peak in the contiguous United States measuring out at 14,495 feet above sea level. Yet today, if you look on new maps, you'll see that Mt. Whitney stands 14,505 feet above sea level. What? An earthquake happened and the mountain grew by ten feet? If that had happened, we'd know about it because that kind of earthquake would be common knowledge, especially in this day and age.

What's happened is, over the course of time, new technology has allowed us to measure things more accurately, hence the change in the elevation of Mt. Whitney and other peaks all over the world. Even Mt. Everest in the Himalayas is a different height than when it was when I was a kid. New technology has caused our measurements to be more accurate.

So if this benchmark was embedded into the bridge before the advent of satellites, which is entirely possible, we're looking at probably outdated information on the benchmark. Please notice on the My Altitude app that the elevation is accurate to plus or minus 11.09 feet. So the benchmark could be as high as 172 feet above sea level or possibly only 150 feet above sea level according to the app. Now if we extrapolate it out and say that technology might have added an additional ten feet in actual elevation to where the benchmark was located on the bridge, then we actually fall into the margin of error, especially if the app was measuring things a little bit too "tall" that particular day. 142 feet as opposed to 132 feet on the benchmark and the app could be as low as 150 feet, which means there's only a difference of 8 feet between the benchmark and the app, which is about what I've been seeing ever since I started using the app.

Granted, this is all hypothetical, but that's my best guess as to why the two were so far apart originally. I guess what I need to do is bring out the My Altitude app more often when I come across things that have a posted elevation so I can get more data.

So what are your thoughts on this? Do you think I'm close? Or do you have a different hypothesis of your own that you'd like to share? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.

Webcams, Memorials and Challenges

This is a continuation of my road trip I took last September to Colorado and Utah. It will probably be the last one I write about this trip since I didn't take any photos on the last day of the trip. As noted in many of my other posts, this one will be entirely about geocaching, so if you're not interested, feel free to stop now. I won't be offended. I mean, how could I even know if you've stopped reading?

After touring around Dinosaur National Monument, I headed over to spend a couple of days in the Salt Lake City area of Utah. One of the goals for this area were the four webcam caches that are strategically placed along Interstate 15 in this area. 

For those of you unaware, a webcam is a cache where you have to place yourself at a certain point in order to get yourself on the webcam that is in that area. Either you call a friend, or use your phone to take a screen shot of yourself on the webcam to get credit for the webcam cache. Because geocaching.com doesn't allow the creation of new webcam caches anymore, webcam caches in general are becoming extremely rare with less than 200 worldwide. With four webcams in this general area, this is a goldmine for cachers seeking out webcam caches.

Because I was here on a Saturday, I started out my morning with a coffee event in the local area. It's always nice to meet the locals because you get some insight into some caches they've hidden or others have hidden. That being said, no one said anything to me about my attempt later in the day of going for those four webcams. As you can see, the first stop which was a couple of miles south of my coffee event was a success as I was able to grab a screen shot of me standing on the corner of State St. and Hwy 89. Unfortunately, that was the only one I was able to score that day.

The second webcam that I attempted was closer to the heart of Salt Lake City, which is where I ended up having a lot of problems. The closer I got to the center of town, the heavier the traffic became. What the heck was going on? As soon as I got to the corner where the webcam had been focused, I realized what was happening. There were massive amounts of people all converging on a spot about 3 blocks away from that corner. The University of Utah was playing U.C.L.A in a football game. No one at the coffee event bothered to tell me that it was football weekend there and so that one ended up being a no go as the nearest parking spot that I was able to see was over 2 miles away. I'll have to remember that the next time I end up in Salt Lake City and make sure I do that one on a non-football weekend.

The next webcam I attempted was virtually impossible to do because the webcam itself had been changed to observe another part of the highway and so getting a shot of me in it was next to impossible, so I concentrated the rest of my day on getting other kinds of caches including working on some Adventure Lab caches and finding some caches that helped me fill out some of the challenge caches I've already signed but haven't qualified for yet.

One of the Adventures that I worked on later in the day took me on a tour of this very nice park. Included in the park was a virtual cache that took me to an exact scale replica of the Vietnam War Memorial found in Washington D.C. I don't have any relatives who are found on the wall, so every time I see one of these, either of the traveling variety or something like this, I always seek out a particular soldier who was killed in the war and take either an etching of his name or take a photograph of his name. I am friends on-line with his sister and I know she appreciates the thought of someone else remembering him when they visit the wall.

The next day, I headed out of town, intending on spending the night in the southwest corner of Utah and geocaching along the way. The last photo was taken at a truck stop rest area in Tooele County, Utah. Why there of all places? Well, it was another county that I'd never cached in in the state of Utah and you already know if you'd been following along that my geocaching tends to revolve around challenges. I've found a cache in every county in California, Arizona, and Nevada, so now I'm working on Utah. I did a significant dent on this trip, but still have to get back there to finish off the state. Anyway, this last shot was a selfie I took at one of the filming locations for the movie Dumb and Dumber. Some of the things that you learn about areas when out geocaching are interesting and some things are just plain weird. I think this one falls into that latter category. Some of you might disagree, but that's what makes the world go round.

After finding this virtual cache, I headed back to Interstate 15 and southward. The next day would be spent driving home, traveling through four states in one day. There's a couple of challenge caches for that as well, but I've already signed and qualified for those challenges, so it was just a standard road trip caching day, which is why I didn't take any photos on that last day. 

Please feel free to comment. As always, I'll try to respond in kind and I promise I won't bite.

Exploration

It's the beginning of the month and although it's a little late, it's time for P.J.'s photo blogging challenge for the month of February. The theme this past month was Exploration. After looking at my photos that I took last month, the explore theme fell right into my lap and the tough part was picking the photos that I wanted to represent each exploration, but I narrowed them down to five and so here we go.  This is my take on the theme Exploration.

First off, I want everyone to know right now that most of this post will be about geocaching, so if you're not interested in geocaching, then feel free to stop at this point in time. All of the photos for this month's theme dealt with geocaching in one form or another, sort of.

1. Exploring Geology

The first weekend in February I took a road trip to southwestern Arizona, most particularly, Yuma, Arizona. The geocaching group down there hosts a large event on the Sunday and there's all sorts of things happening the entire weekend. One of the things I like to do when I'm on a road trip is to get as many different icons (geocaching types) as possible. One of the types that I found that weekend were five earth caches, where you learn about a geologic phenomenon of some kind, then answer some questions regarding what you've seen.

This particular earth cache is located just north of the town square in Yuma. We actually had a little time to kill before heading down to the town square for a flash mob event, so we stopped off here to study the rock and answer the questions put to us on the cache page. Most geologists that I know always carry a coin in their pockets so they can use it as a reference marker for grain size of a particular rock, hence the photo of the quarter on this rock. We ended up finding five different earth caches that weekend, not a large total, but it was enough for us with all of the other things that we explored that weekend.

2. Exploring History

One of the newer types of geocaches are the Adventures. They are kind of a cross between a multi cache and a virtual cache. We did quite a few Adventures on our way down to Yuma, mainly because it was raining all the way down there and the Adventures tend to work better, because you're looking for information, as opposed to an actual container and so you can usually get the answer much more quickly.

However, several of the Adventures that we'd chosen to do that day were quite moving and we ended up getting pretty wet in the process. One Adventure in Cathedral City had a stop at a Cancer Survivor's Park, which, for obvious reasons, was quite emotional for me. I chose not to post a photo for that one, mainly because I didn't feel a got any really good photos and so I opted to post this second photo instead.

This Adventure was in Palm Desert and explored a huge park in the city. One of the stops along the Adventure was the Desert Holocaust Memorial. This particular sculpture was right in the middle of the spot and I felt the sculptor caught the essence of the tragedy of this event. I hope I was able to convey with my photo what I felt the sculptor had already done.

3 & 4. Exploring Food

In our local geocaching community, I have a reputation of liking my food and I also have a reputation that when I say I'm hungry, that's usually the signal that we need to stop very soon and find a place to eat, otherwise "Webfoot" is going to get hangry. And hangry Webfoot is not a pleasant individual to be around. On this trip, I don't think I ever had to worry about being hangry, or even hungry because we ate well.

We were in the Palm Springs area on the first day and my daughter, when she heard that we were going to be going through Palm Springs, recommended Sherman's Deli and Bakery. The menu was extensive and I eventually settled on Sherman's Philly, with brisket, peppers, onions and provolone. Then of course, I almost had buyer's regret when I saw the man at the next table get served his Reuben sandwich. Man, that looked good, but once my sandwich came, I was all in. I guess what this really means is I need to go back there again to try the Reuben. Yeah, I can do that.

We had an asian buffet later that weekend and the last night we were there, we had fantastic Mexican food at this place that used to serve up from a Taco truck, but in the past year or so have found a brick and mortar building to serve great food. After we finished there, I mentioned that we really needed to go get some ice cream and so we ended up driving up to Mooos Creamery.

The wait was a little long, but the ice cream was worth the wait. My friend Kami had already decided when we walked into the place that she was going to sit on the ice cream bench as opposed to a booth, and so that's why we ended up there.The place had so many choices, that this is one of those places where you're going to have to go back more than once to really enjoy yourself. I had two different flavors and I could have probably chosen six or seven different ones; they all looked so good. Once we were totally satiated with that, as always, we checked our geocaching apps and realized there was a geocache right behind the building, so we walked out and around to the back of the building to score one more find before the night was done.

5. Exploring Geography

If you don't already know it, then I should tell you that I majored in Geography in college. I ended up taking a physical geography course while in community college and I was off and running from there. I'd found a subject that really interested me and I took more and more courses there and when I transferred to Humboldt State University, I continued to take courses in Geography pursuant to my degree.

I can honestly say that most of my hobbies revolve around geography in some way or another. I discovered Where's George? the dollar bill tracking web site. You enter your dollar bills, mark them in some way telling people to come to the website and then you spend your money in the hope that it will show up again. This hobby led me to Geocaching and although I still find Where's George? interesting, it's more of a passive type of hobby since you can't really control where your bills go.

Geocaching, on the other hand, you control what you do.  You want to go on a road trip to find geocaches? Go for it. You want to find urban micros? Go for it. I guess the point I'm trying to make is you can decide how your geocaching hobby works for you and that's why I like it so much more so than Where's George? I think that I like geocaching so much more because it involves all sorts of the different types of geography that I studied when I was in college, physical, historical, political, and many others.

Geography in general is a combination of different fields that sort of overlap. For instance in this last photo, we can see the physical geography of an area, what the lay of the land is doing and how those mountains in the background might be influenced by the river that you can't quite see behind me (that's an irrigation canal directly behind me). You can also see the political and human implications if you explore more deeply into this photo. I found this photo interesting from that point of view. Here I am, exploring my hobby of geocaching in Arizona, with California over my left shoulder and Mexico over my right shoulder.

And there you have it, my interpretation of the theme for this month Exploration. Please feel free to stop by P.J.'s blog and see how he and others interpreted the same theme. Please feel to comment here. I promise, I won't bite.

Dinosaur Stew

This is a continuation of my trip to Colorado and Utah from last October. This particular day was mostly a travel day, getting myself from Grand Junction, Colorado, over to Salt Lake City, Utah where I would spend several days. When I worked out the itinerary of this trip, I realized that I was close enough to Dinosaur National Monument that it wouldn't make sense not to stop and at least whet my appetite on the fossils there, and so this particular spot also made the list of must sees. And as always, I usually bite off more than I can chew when I'm on trips like this, but it just gives me an excuse to come back at a later time.

I think if I were to do this monument up right, I'd spend several days here, probably camping. The monument has lots to offer including whitewater rafting, something that I'm not into, but I do know other people are and so I've mentioned it. For me, I was most interested in seeing the quarry of dinosaur fossils. I did not come away disappointed.

The park straddles the Utah/Colorado border and so is sort of broken up into two different unique areas. Since the quarry where the dinosaur bones can be seen close up is in the Utah side, I chose to head there. As I approached the monument border, I noticed a geocache outside the park boundary, so I decided to stop and find that one. It's very rare to find a physical geocache inside a national park area, because the National Park Service views it as litter. There are a couple of exceptions as there are several hidden in Petrified Forest National Park but they are maintained by a ranger in the park. Most geocaches you'll see in national park area would be either earth caches (geology based) or virtual caches which I've written about previously. In this case, the quarry area of the park had one of each that I was interested in finding.

I spent a good amount of time in the quarry area taking in all there was to see. The earth cache I working on asked me to examine the fossils along the wall of the quarry. It's estimated there are over 1500 fossils still embedded in the wall. I talked with a ranger and he told me that it's really more of a Dinosaur stew than anything else. The herbivores would be killed by the carnivores and the bones would be left after the carnivores had their fill. Eventually, the bones would be carried downstream where they were caught in this area by a large sand bar. Over time the bones were buried and eventually fossilized, hence the jumble of different kinds of dinosaurs all in the same area. 

The two bones you're looking at in the second photo are the femurs of a diplodocus and an apatosaurus (what we would call the brontosaurus back in the day). The photos don't really tell the tale, but both of those bones are about 6 feet in length and 18 inches in diameter.

The third photo gives more of a scale size to it. One of the tourist there was from Germany who was slightly taller than me, probably close to 6 feet tall. I asked him if he would stand near the fossil so I could get a size comparison, which he obviously obliged. This particular dinosaur, a camarasaurus, was the most common fossil found in the quarry area. This was one of the most complete camarasaurus ever found anywhere. The camarasaurus is part of the long necked dinosaurs commonly referred to as sauropods.

After taking in the quarry and finishing up the earthcache, I decided to drive further down the road to a virtual cache. I did a small hike out there to get what I needed to get and then headed back to the car and the exit so I could get to Salt Lake City in a timely fashion. I caught a little bit of rain on the drive there, but that was about all of the inclement weather that I got on this particular trip. All in all, I was very glad I stopped as this was one of those "new" places that I promised myself that I wasn't going to miss if I was in the area. It's not new anymore, but that doesn't mean I won't come back again sometime in the future.

When is Graffiti not Graffiti?

Every now and then I stumble across things that make me go "Hmmmmm." I'm sure most people have a working definition of graffiti, but I thought, why not write about it anyway. I'm sure most people would recognize the artwork on this truck which was parked on a street in San Francisco as graffiti.

According to most sources, "graffiti is a form of visual communication, usually illegal, involving the unauthorized marking of public space by an individual or group." In each of the three examples I'm posting with this, I'm pretty sure that the image makers were not given permission to create what they created, although some will argue, and I think rightfully so, that the middle example probably didn't need permission before creating what they did. But are we sure that the first example of the truck isn't a piece of art that's on display on the streets? I did not research who created the artwork on the truck. I didn't feel like I had to.

What I wanted to do was examine each piece and try and figure out if it's art, graffiti, or something else entirely. I think I would argue that all three pieces are art and graffiti. The phrase, "One person's trash is another person's treasure" comes to mind immediately. I think most people would say that the first piece is graffiti, but some graffiti is wonderful art at the same time. If you don't believe me, then look at the last photo I've attached to this. Those images, on the last four columns, are original graffiti that was placed on the Berlin Wall during the Cold War era.

The second one is the most interesting, I believe. If we look at the definition that I wrote earlier we can makes some judgements about it. Visual Communication?  I would say so. Illegal? Hard to say, but probably not. Unauthorized marking of a public space? Probably, but then again, the Ancients of Utah and Colorado probably didn't have the concept of ownership of land, so it was all public space and who's to say they didn't have permission to create those symbols on that rock outcropping? Today, I know that almost everyone who sees this would view it as artwork, not to be disturbed. I mean, the state of Colorado has viewing points set up alongside the road where you can look at these pieces of art from afar. There are also posted signs stating that the defacement of the art is considered a crime. 

So I guess, time plays an element in all of this. Even the National Park Service has weighed in on this issue. While they don't condone graffiti, they actually preserve graffiti in some of the areas they are set up to protect. I know of at least one instance in Great Basin National Park where writing inside of Lehman Caves inside the park have been preserved as part of the history of the park and cave. The writings (mostly signatures and dates) were done by employees of the National Forest Service over a hundred years ago. Time heals all wounds?

What it boils down to I guess is the public's perception of it or maybe the authority's perception of it. The Berlin Wall, when it was all in Berlin was a striking example of this. The western side contained all of the graffiti. The eastern side was pretty much pristine. Different forms of authority obviously made this a reality. People in West Berlin let their feelings known about the wall in the one way they could at the time and that was by drawing on it. People on the east side didn't not have that kind of freedom since there were barriers in place that prevented people from even getting close enough to it to place graffiti on it.

And while I don't like the gang related graffiti that is so pervasive in some areas, I'm not going to deny that some of it is amazing artwork. What's your take on this? Graffiti? Art? A combination of both? As always, comments are welcome.

Checking on Caches

Today, I went on a hike up in the Claremont Wilderness Park. It was the first 5 mile hike doing one of the loops in several months and it really felt good to get out on the "trail." You'll notice I put the word trail in quotes. Park of the trail, as you can see here is a maintenance road leading up to a microwave tower on the hill overlooking this part of the wilderness park. When I hike, I always come up that way as it's pretty slippery and I'd rather slip going uphill as opposed to downhill. I very rarely take that particular trail downhill for that reason.

Anyway, part of the purpose, besides just getting out and enjoying the 75 degree January weather we're having, was to check on some of my caches along the trail since I hadn't been up this way in awhile. I'm happy to report that the ones that I checked on, all were right where they should be. 

I used to always worry about cache maintenance a lot and didn't have many cache hides, because I felt that if I had a lot of cache hides, then all my time would be taken up in cache maintenance and not cache finding. But over the years, I've gotten a different attitude regarding caches. First, you don't have to check on all of them all of the time. Second, pick an area and just check on the ones in that area. It works for me now and I'm still able to maintain a good balance between the two aspects of geocaching.

After checking on the caches along this part of the trail, I then headed into the interior of the park. Most of the hard part, the uphill slog along that slippery road was done and the rest of the hike was predominantly downhill on good dirt fire roads. I got to enjoy the views and the good weather. 

As I started working my way down the other side of the canyon, I descended into one of my favorite parts of the trail. It follows a stream that is intermittently wet and dry depending upon the season. There's lots of sycamore trees lining the creek bank which means it's usually cool, green and shady in the summertime, but today I could see lots of sky since the sycamores have dropped their leaves. I've also encountered several snakes and other wildlife in this section, but saw none today. Even the lizards which seem to be everywhere were only venturing out in the really sunny areas and this part wasn't sunny because of the lateness of the day.

I noticed some of the first weedy plants were starting to grow in this area too. I was particularly intrigued by the patterns on the leaves of this plant. I'm not sure what kind it is and I'm sure I wouldn't want to bushwhack through it. Look closely and you can see some nasty spikes on the end of each lobe of the leaves of this thing. Whatever it is, it definitely wants to protect itself, although, I seriously doubt it would stand a chance against a deer if they wanted to partake in eating it.

With more rain expected in the area in the next 10 days, the next time I get up on that part of the trail, the growth will be substantially lusher and taller. That's perfect, in my estimation.

Black Canyon of the Gunnison

 

It's been awhile since I've written in here, but as I look back over the calendar of blog entries, I missed a couple of other months last year too, so now I don't feel so bad. This is a continuation of the series that I started back in October for my road trip I took in the middle of October to Colorado and Utah. 

Back in October, I wrote about my first full day in Colorado and my visit to Colorado National Monument. I had hosted a geocaching coffee event that morning, then toured the monument for most of the day afterwards. The next day, I drove southward out of Grand Junction heading for Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park. I'd been to the park previously, before it had been upgraded to national park status, but the time gap between visits of over 50 years made me want to go back and see it again, as all I could recall of the park was that it was very vertical.

On thing that I noticed as I got to the park was that it was surprisingly busy for it being the middle of October. I figured that I'd have the park mostly to myself, with maybe some other senior citizens traveling around the country visiting sites in the "off season" but that was not the case, at least the day I was there. There were plenty of families and many of the viewpoint areas were filled to capacity with cars. 

As a kid, you don't remember things like parking problems, but I couldn't help but wonder what this would be like in the middle of summer during the height of the tourist season. And of course, my mind went back to that summer day over 50 years ago when my dad hopped us all in the station wagon for the trip north from our base camp in what I believe was Durango to visit this seldom visited national monument. Perhaps, the upgrade to national park status has boosted tourism to the place, but I still couldn't help but think that the minuscule parking lots during the summer would not be a positive experience for the average person visiting the park.

Because it was October, the park was beginning to experience multiple signs of fall with many of the park's deciduous trees and bushes showing off their fall colors. I saw photos from a national park group on Facebook that I frequent where someone posted similar photos, but had been there about 10 days later and they were even more spectacular in color than the one I've posted here. Being from Southern California, almost any color is amazing, so I guess you could say I was impressed with what I saw that day.

As I noted above, the park is very vertical. The Gunnison River carved through the volcanic rock and carved it very deep, but not very wide. At points in the park, the canyon is only about there quarters of a mile wide, but almost a half mile deep. Contrast that with the Grand Canyon in Arizona which might be a mile deep but 10 miles wide and you can see where this little canyon can be quite impressive.

As always, part of my reason for being there was to learn some geology and what better way to do that than through some of the earth caches that had been placed in the park. I did many of the tasks that were required by the different earth caches and walked several trails to get closer to the edge of the canyon. As I drove out to Painted Wall, the crowds thinned tremendously. I was actually surprised at this since I felt that the Painted Wall section was the most spectacular in the park, but it also meant that the trails were less populated and so there was time for some solitude, so I wasn't complaining.

It was also in this section where you could really see where the canyon got it name. The walls of the canyon are composed mostly of gneiss, but had bands of intruded light colored pegmatite running through them. This area is also the deepest part of the canyon. Imagine being in Paris. You could stack two Eiffel Towers on top of each other and they still wouldn't reach the top of the canyon from the river below.

I know the nostalgia of wanting to come back and retrace my childhood steps might seem silly to some, but I was glad I came. I can remember being not very impressed with my dad's photos of the park at the time and I know why now. With little to no clouds directly overhead, the sun made for very harsh lighting conditions. Lots of deep shadows so you really couldn't see a lot of detail in some of the photos and my own photos are very similar in appearance.

I enjoyed my time in the park and if I'm ever in the area again, I'll make sure I spend some more time on the opposite rim for a different perspective. There just wasn't enough time to squeeze both rims in on the same day with all the driving that entailed. After spending several hours in the park and enjoying a light lunch there, I headed back to Grand Junction, geocaching all the way back to my motel.