Still Gravity

Moab downtown.  We went back to Utah and arrived to the famous Moab.  The small city screams mountain biking, off road travel, and the super crowded Arches National Park - this excessive crowding reminds me of the warnings of Edward Abbey in his Desert Solitaire.  Moab bike trail.  Action packed design here.  We went to the visitor center of Moab and got lunch in town - also ice cream.  Colorado River through Moab.  In the afternoon, we grabbed a camping spot in BLM land and planned our visit to Arches National Park for the next day.  Our lonely campsite.  View of our site from the rocks.  We have to be at the park before 7 am or would need to buy sort of a $2 permit through the famous or infamous - depending on who you ask - Recreation.org.  They adopted this system to somehow control and limit the excessive amount of visitors. View from our campsite.  Why everybody wants to go know to Arches?  In the times of Edward Abbey, the place was mostly empty. But being the spot with the most

Waking up for a day of hiking.  We hiked over 6 miles after adding the Rim Trail from the visitor center to the campground in Colorado National Monument . The Alcove Trail.  The Alcove Nature Trail is short and easy. It ends at an "alcove" without a roof at a corner of a small ravine.  Inside the Alcove.  No roof in this "house".  Black Ridge Trail goes climbing in elevation when one starts from the visitor center.  Section of Black Ridge Trail.  In a short time, we were up over the Saddlehorn. Soon it crosses into McInnis Canyons National Conservation Area. This wilderness is managed by the BLM. Later, the Black Ridge Trail returns to Colorado National Monument.  The trail following a cliff.  The Black Ridge Trail intersects with an unmaintained trail that goes by Kodels Canyon.  View towards Kodels Canyon.  We walked a short section. Big ants out there.  Big ants nest.  We hiked a little over two miles in the Black Ridge Trail - four roundtrip.   We got to the poi

Rim Rock Drive seen from a trailhead. Rim Rock Drive is a well maintained twisting road that follows the cliffs of the canyons of Colorado National Monument .  Sign at the western entrance. The road has stops along the way to all the canyons it crosses and interesting rock formations.  Most of the rocks here are from Jurassic times - they scream dinosaurs. They are between 150 and 200 years old, but the Precambrian rocks at the bottom of Monument Canyon are over a billion years old.  Independence Monument seen from Otto's Trail.  The biggest and most interesting canyons in terms of structures are Wedding Canyon and Monument Canyon.  Independence Monument from another angle.  They have the Independence Monument - the spot where John Otto married (check the previous post) -, the Pipe Organ and Praying Hands rocks, and the Sentinel at the entrance of Wedding Canyon.  Pipe Organ and Praying Hands.  The Sentinel.  Further inside are the Coke Ovens, formations that look like charcoal ove

Breakfast in the campsite and reading about the state of the web.  Having a relaxed breakfast today in my dispersed campsite, I grabbed the phone and took a look to the state of the Internet search:  All came more or less the same than last year. Independent publishers not ranking in Google Search, manipulations and parasite SEO by big websites, Reddit as the new search engine - even if some are publishing misleading information. -, and on and on.  But something caught my attention.  Some statistics point that most of the web doesn't exist for Google Search and, therefore, doesn't exist for most people.  According to Ahrefs, 96.55% of web pages get no traffic at all from Google. And only 1.94% get between one and ten monthly visits. It may surprise many folks - not me, because I wrote about this before focusing on small blogs . There are many gems out there, but you need to know how to dig to find them.  Great that I left the circus.  (Posted from the phone.)

Colorado National Monument.  We drove to Colorado National Monument through Douglas Pass Road - Highway 139.  This route goes through the Canyon Pintado and also crosses the impressive Douglas Pass through the Book Cliffs - elevation of  8,205 feet (2,501 meters). The Canyon Pintado.  No services or towns for almost 80 miles until our arrival to Loma, Colorado, near the Interstate 70.  We stopped for lunch at a picnic area of the Canyon Pintado.  Our truck in a small rest area of the Canyon Pintado. The Dominguez-Escalante expedition of 1776 gave name to this place after the Native American rock art they found.  Here lived the mysterious Fremont people of Utah and Colorado and later came the Ute tribes. Early in the afternoon, we arrived to Colorado National Monument.  Our gazebo in the campsite with the Book Cliffs in the background.  Secured a site in the Saddlehorn campground for three nights, we did a scouting hike of the area around the camp and the visitor center. C facing the Sa

The monument entrance.  While camping in the Flaming Gorge , we drove sixty miles south for a day visit to Dinosaur National Monument. We watched a short film about the place in the visitor center.  This area of Utah has an impressive wall preserving fossils of dinosaurs and other ancient species - the Wall of Bones and the Quarry -, old petroglyphs from Native Americans, and the cabin of Josie Morris - the lady that lived 90 years in the wild West and had connections with the famous gang of Butch Cassidy, the "Wild Bunch". The Wall of Bones. You are allowed to touch the ancient fossils.  The wall of the mountain is protected by this building. Gigantic femur of a Camarasaurus . One of the best preserved skulls ever found of an Allosaurus .  The landscape of Dinosaur National Monument is wild, strange, and spectacular. It's a big salad of rocks from different times, mixed and twisted  in every possible direction.  The terrain layers bent here revealing ancient remains of t