Yosemite National Park, California

My first view of Yosemite was from Glacier Point. The views were amazing, and it gave me a good sense of where we were on the hikes that followed. Right in front of us Half Dome loomed, and off to the right three waterfalls: Vernal, Nevada, and one other that we couldn’t recognize. After glacier point we took a hike called Sentinel Dome.  It was a three mile hike that provided a different view of Yosemite Valley and Half Dome. We saw several climbers on the side of Half Dome as well which looked terrifying.

On day two we hiked an incredibly steep trail to upper Yosemite Falls.  The cool thing about the trail was that we saw the waterfall several times, so we knew we were getting close.  The only problem was that we also knew the waterfall was all the way up there.  The trail

reminded me of Walter’s Wiggles in Zion. It was almost all traverses until the top two tenths of a mile when it 

straightened out and (finally) brought us to the falls.  At the top there were naturally eroded pools that my mom

soaked her feet in while I did some bouldering.  There 

was a crevasse about ten feet up the wall that was a very relaxing place to sit. On the way down I heard some very interesting conversations. Most of the time I was running, but I got stuck behind two women who were talking for at least five minutes about different Patagonia locations asking, “Have you been to this one?” “No, How about

 this one?” until I couldn’t stand it anymore, so at the first chance I passed them and ran as fast as I could. Honestly, if I heard “Patagonia” one more time…

On day three we did another hike called the Mist Trail. It is called that because it went by two falls, and when the river is raging it kicks up a ton of mist. When we were there the river was lower, so there wasn’t much mist. The first fall, Vernal, was kicking up a little mist, but my parents told me that when they were there the mist drenched them. On the way down we took a short section of the John Muir Trail. The John Muir Trail is a 211 mile trail running from Yosemite to Mount Whitney in Sequoia National Park, and it was named after John Muir. John Muir was a man who was involved in making Yosemite, Sequoia, Mount Rainer, and the Grand Canyon national parks. 

 

On day four I got to sleep in. That alone would have been enough for it to be a great day, but it got even better.  We went to Swan Slab, and I did my first lead climb. A lead climb is when one person climbs up with a rope behind them, placing protection behind them and clipping the rope in.  Pieces of protection are little metal triangles that jam into cracks in the rock. When I hooked up several pieces they made a line that the second person can use to climb.

On day five we visited two groves of giant sequoias. We went to Merced Grove first. It was a three mile round trip hike through 20 sequoias, each several feet wide and 300 feet tall. It was kind of terrifying to stand next to trees that tall.  The bark was really soft, and we read that it could be a foot thick.  Tuolumne Grove had more attractions. There was a tunnel in one tree, and one fallen tree had a hollowed out trunk that I walked through.

Las Vegas, Nevada

Las Vegas was a lot more fun than I expected. When we pulled up to a hotel to get directions I didn’t suspect a thing. When we went in I was still oblivious. I became a little suspicious when we went out back and my mom asked if I wanted to go swimming. When I asked where she had gotten an access pass she told me that dad had just asked for one and they had given it to him.  Wow, at that point alarm bells should have been ringing in my head, but cut me some slack. I was hot and tired, and we had stayed in one hotel the entire trip so I wasn’t expecting my mom to tell me that we were staying the night at a five star Vegas hotel. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. The hotel had a pool and a 1/8^th mile long lazy river. In addition it meant we would have more time to explore the city of sin.

Needless to say I spent an hour in the lazy river before realizing that there was so much more to do. When I got out I ordered a sandwich and a Sprite, then kicked back is a beach chair in the sun.

After a while we finally went into Vegas.  My first reaction was “wow,” some of the things in Vegas were just inappropriate. In fact, I don’t think teachers would be OK with me talking about them. There were lights everywhere, and all the things that I had heard about before, such as the Statue of Liberty, the MGM, the Eiffel Tower, a giant Harley Davidson, the pyramids with a sphinx, and a giant balloon that was completely lit up. 

Public art on about five benches,
completely made out of Legos

 
We started walking through the city and before long we came to Hershey World where everything was chocolate. There was the world’s largest chocolate bar, Hershey kiss, and peanut butter cup. There were also two statues of liberty, one made out of chocolate, one made out of Twizzlers.

When my parents finally managed to drag me out of there we started looking for a place to eat.  Eventually we settled on a place called Margaritaville. Thankfully there was more than margaritas. I gorged myself then for desert I got key lime pie. Everything had something to do with lime, Key Lime pie, Lime dressing on the salad. It was all really good and made me wish we could eat like that every night By the end of dinner I was so full that it hurt to walk, so we took the shuttle back to the hotel and turned in for the night.

Zion National Park

Zion is considered one of the most beautiful places in the world, so naturally it was high on my to-do list. The problem is that it’s high on everybody else’s to-do list as well. In order to get a campsite we had to wait in a line for an hour and forty-five minutes. When we finally did get a campsite we set up our house, then drove another three hours to Vegas to pick up my mom at the airport. Some of you might be wondering why my mom was at the airport.

Let’s go back. About a week ago she flew home to find our cat. Now let’s go back even further.  One of my mom’s friends is living in our house while we are away. And about three weeks ago she told us our cat hadn’t been seen since we left. Naturally this made us sad. After a few days my mom was so worried about her that she flew home to find our cat. She told us that she got home at eight o clock and the next day she got up at four in the morning and kept looking. After finding nothing she went back to bed. At about eight she woke up again and kept looking until she heard a meowing. She thought she was imagining it until our cat came out of the ferns. After a while my mom got our cat in the house and turned on cat pheromones to calm her down.  When all was said and done she flew to Vegas and met up with us.

Back to the present.  On day one we did the Narrows. The Narrows is a hike through a canyon carved by the Virgin River. The river is still there, so we had to walk through freezing water for several miles. Overall it was

pretty fun. Half the time I felt like my feet were going to fall off but getting to hike through a canyon was worth it. The trail also has frequent flash floods so the walls are smooth. The smooth walls made it a little scary, because if there was a flash flood the walls would be impossible to climb. On the way down we saw a buck mule deer grazing right next to the river. We had no idea how he had gotten there because there were sheer cliffs on either side, and we hadn’t seen him on our way up.

If you look closely in the center of the picture you can see the buck

Day two involved another hike and a visit to the human history museum.  The hike was called Emerald Pools. It was a two mile hike to three pools that looked green because of the algae growing in them. After Emerald Pools we visited the human history museum. The human history museum told us about the people who settled Zion. We watched a 22 minute film on the park and how it was formed. Afterward we learned that the visitors’ center and museum had WiFi (score)!

Day three we did yet another hike called Angels Landing. Overall it was my favorite. The view was unbeatable, and the terrain was my favorite type: rocky and steep with sheer thousand foot drop offs on either side. The first part was called Walter’s Wiggles.  It was a set of 21 paved traverses that went up a ravine. When the traverses stopped they gave way to the rockier terrain which I practically ran up. At the top there were about a half dozen chipmunks that seemed not at all afraid of people.

Now I’m in the car writing about this on our six hour drive to Los Angeles. Honestly why does everything have to be so far apart. Just once I’d like to drive 10 minutes to our next destination. 

Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah

First of all Bryce Canyon shouldn’t be called that at all. It should be called Bryce Amphitheater because it was formed by many different streams and rivers so it isn’t technically a canyon.  First my dad and I decided to explore the area.  We biked to the general store, and I asked the question that I had been asking everywhere. “Is there WiFi here?” I’m sorry if it seems a little out of the camping spirit, but the southwest has almost no WiFi, and I was way behind on my Netflix shows. Luckily we learned that there was WiFi, and even better, it was in a pizzeria and coffee shop.  That evening I went to the pizzeria and got a pizza. Then I watched an hour and a half of Netflix.

The next day we did two hikes. First we went on the Queen’s Garden Trail to the Navajo Loop. On the Navajo Loop there is a place called Wall Street.  Wall Street is a canyon carved into the rocks with a traverse that gave a nice view.  The second hike was called the Fairyland Loop. This one was an eight mile hike that reminded me of the Badlands with all the flat, smooth, whitish rock and the lack of plants. When we got to the end we had to walk a mile to the nearest shuttle stop because it didn’t come out to where we were.

Day three was spent driving. My dad rolled me out of bed at seven in the morning before the sun was even up yet! Then we had to take down the camper and drive three hours to Zion National Park

Antelope Island State Park, Salt Lake City

Antelope Island is the largest island in the Great Salt Lake. It is named that because the first thing the guy who named it saw was antelope. Getting to Antelope Island reminded me of Vermont.  My family owns a lake house on South Hero, and the only way to get to it is a causeway running from the main land to the island. Similarly, there is a seven mile causeway that leads from Salt Lake City to Antelope Island. When we got there we checked out the visitors’ center to get information on where we should bike.  While my dad did that I went to the bathroom.  Wow they were awful.  Admittedly they were better than some of the vault toilets we had at the other campgrounds but still, ugg.  Everything was made out of concrete and corrugated steel.

After getting information we decided on a trail called Elephant Head Spur. To get to the trail we had to take an old Jeep road that made me wish we had a Jeep. The road was dusty and full of sand, so it was almost impossible to bike through. On top of that it was slightly uphill the entire time.  Compared to the road, the trail was a walk in the park.  It was all hard-packed relatively flat dirt with a few large rocks. Some of the rocks looked like coral, so my dad and I figured that it must be fossilized from when the lake was covered in ocean. That led us to think that that’s why the trail was called Elephants Head because it might have all been elephants head coral.  At the end of the trail we got a great view of the Great Salt Lake and part of the island that looked like a golf course.  We sat and took a break then started back. 

When we got back we took a swim in the Great Salt Lake because we just had to. The lake was incredibly floaty because of all the salt in it, so it was denser. The walk back to the car was really painful because the entire beach was made of calcium carbonate, some of which had hardened in to sharp rocks. The beach felt exactly like a normal beach, but when we looked closely we saw that all the granules were perfectly round. This happens when a tiny particle gets encased in layers of calcium carbonate. This is called oolitic sand where as the sand in Maine is made of silica.

The Tabernacle and Antelope Island State Park, Salt Lake City, Utah

The Tabernacle is a oval shaped building in the Mormon temple square. It used to be used for meetings of church members, but since the amount of people grew the Tabernacle has not been big enough to hold everyone. Now it is used for choirs and organ recitals. The first demonstration in the Tabernacle wasn’t with the organ at all.  The first thing was a customary demonstration of the buildings acoustics.  To start off the person up front ripped a piece of paper, and sure enough I could hear the tear at the back of the building.  Next he dropped two pins and a nail.  The first two sounded like someone beating small drums right next to my ear.  The third sounded like muffled thunder. As he did the demonstration I read the brochure about the organ and how it was built. I read that it used to be much smaller until a series of developments grew it. Now it is huge with over 1000 pipes.

When we finally got to the organ part of the organ recital he played six songs: Hymne au Soleil, Wachet auf, Ruft uns die Stimme, Angelus, hymn: Come, Come, ye Saints, An Old Melody, and Orb and Sceptre March. I personally would have been fine with just two songs, because by the end I was getting a bit board and drowsy.

After the organ recital was over we visited the Joseph Smith Memorial Building to research our genealogy.  I didn’t find much. I had to put my name in to an I-pad then hooked it up to a computer and got information. I learned that there were 18000 people with my first name, and 186 people with my last name. My dad started a family tree on his parents.  

The Leonardo Museum, Salt Lake City, Utah

This museum made me feel like my baby cousin. Everything fascinated me and made me laugh.  For instance, the first thing I saw when I got in was four huge tables covered in Legos.  Unfortunately we had to bypass that section because it was a big building, and we only had about four hours till the museum closed.   The next thing was a display that I learned about scientists who studied starlings and analyzed how they flew. Using this data it was possible to put together a display showing it. The entire idea was that the starlings would follow your hand through a motion sensor.  I really liked the green screen part where I looked like I had been decapitated on the moon. 

After the opening exhibits there was more relating to Leonardo Da Vinci.  Since Leonardo was interested in flight most of the exhibits were on flight and his original ideas.  There were exhibits showing the contrast between his prototypes and the modern airplanes. Surprisingly he wasn’t that far off. 

After the Leonardo section we moved on to the aviation section.  In the aviation section there was a model of an old C-131 that I went in to.  I sat in the pilot’s seat and started pushing random button and switches.  One small part of my brain was worried that I would roll away when I started messing with the parking brake, but luckily nothing bad happened.
On the second floor there was a marble track and a section dedicated to illusions.  The marble track was

magnetic, attached to a metal wall, so my dad and I each built our own.  Some of the illusions were not that good.  Some of them were so good that they made me want to buy a new brain because I thought mine wasn’t working right.  The illusions section gradually turned into a fear section talking about how the brain interprets fear and reacts.  Some of the fears we saw seemed kind of weird to me.  The first was fear of the color or word yellow. The second was the fear of drafts or breezes.  At that point we had 15 minutes until the museum closed, and we had to go.

Hello Everyone
I am thinking about applying for a travel writers program, and I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions about how to improve my work.  Any ideas are welcome, please leave them in the comments.
Thank you

Park City, Utah

We saw the site where the 2002 winter Olympics were held. It looked like any other mountain except that there were still the jumps and courses from when the Olympics were held there.  There was a museum about the Olympics with the skis used and a lot of videos about the gold medalists from 2002. 

I thought that one display was especially cool.  At the Olympics they have big puppets, the biggest of which was a huge buffalo puppet.  From pictures it looked like a

normal size buffalo, but in real life its head was about the same size as a cow, its eyes easily as big as my head. 

Despite the fact that this place was used 14 years ago it is not abandoned by a long shot. This is where we are training our Olympians for the 2018 winter Olympics, so hopefully we can bring home the gold.

Slickrock, Moab, Utah

Some of you might be wondering why I decided to dedicate an entire blog post to one bike trail.  For those of you wondering that I’m assuming that you’re not serious mountain bikers.  Slickrock is arguably the number one trail in the U.S.  It boasts over 100,000 visitors per year for a reason, it is the ultimate achievement for bikers.  This is why it has been number one on my list since we started this trip. 

The trail started out more difficult than I would have liked.  It took a lot of energy and wasn’t all that fun.  At about mile four we stopped and took a break to eat.  Let me tell you, it made all the difference.  The second we started up again I took off. I ditched my parents at around mile five and kept going for about two and a half miles until I finally doubled back and found them.  A few minutes after that, my mom (who was dealing with a sore neck) got just the pick-me-up that she needed - my dad falling in a big sand pit.  We had crossed several of them, and very few had been easy to cross.  This sand pit was several inches deep which made it almost impossible to go more than a few feet through. Anyway my dad tried and failed, falling sideways into the sand.  Queue the laughing fits from mom.  I tried and had to get off my bike then walk through it.  The only downside was that I needed to empty out my shoe after I was through.  The rest of the ride was pretty uneventful, but it was still really fun.  At the end of the trail I felt victorious, also a building pressure in my bladder.