What Happened There Didn't Stay There

What happened in Vegas isn't going to stay in Vegas, because I'm going to blog about it!

First of all, I hate playing catch-up, but the crappy Riviera Hotel wanted to charge an extra $10/night for Internet access and I refused on principal to pay for something that most "lesser" hotels give away for free.  Besides, we were too busy to blog.

 

These two deer saw us off on the way out of town.  We frequently see deer right outside our house.  I managed to snap these with my camera phone.

We expected to take a lot of pictures on this trip, but I didn't expect to be taking them less than a block from our house!

 

We went west into Arizona, through the Navajo Nation, and hit some heavy snow just a couple hours into it as we climbed into higher elevations.  The snow completely disappeared by the time we got to Glen Canyon.

Glen Canyon is gorgeous.  (Or gorge-us, if you don't mind the pun.)  The pic on the right is the Glen Canyon Dam, which creates Lake Powell north of it.

Strix taking pictures of the odd rock formations here at the edge of Glen Canyon.  We noticed that the rock was very different in texture throughout Arizona and Utah than it is in New Mexico.  It's less worn and more jagged.  I'm no geologist, but I would guess that to mean that the formations are younger here.

There's a railing here to help you down the steep walkway to the lookout area.

I think it's amazing that these steps just naturally formed like this through geological forces!  Isn't that proof enough of intelligent design?!

This little guy was our tour guide for a short time.

Just another shot of the interesting rock formations here.

The pictures don't do it justice, and it's also hard to see it when you haven't been living in a dry area for a while, but right after a rain what greenery we have looks extremely green, almost blue in their intensity.

Actual pics of the canyon, with the Colorado River flowing down at the bottom, making this an up-stream preview of the Grand Canyon.  I didn't take these pictures from the viewing area.  Much to Strix's consternation, I climbed a little higher and took them from a sheer dropoff with no railing.  Great pics, though, don't you think?  I think good photography is worth a little risk to life and limb.

Another thing pics don't do justice to - shots straight down a several hundred foot drop.

 

The Glen Canyon Dam.  See the little white dot at the bottom right?

This is that little dot on 10x optical zoom.  Looks like fun, doesn't it?

These people had to see the dam from a much lower vantage point, owing to their fear of falling to their water grave.  Suckers.  You'll notice the guy on the left decided to walk out past the railing, but he still didn't get a good a view as I did.  Ha!

See, look at the fun I'm having.

A view from a little bit lower allowed me to get a shot further downstream, although with the cliffside in the way.

A pic of the dam from the "official" viewing point.  How boring.

Strix contemplating the long walk back to the highway, up the stairs that were predestined for us to climb.

After getting back to the car (and panting for breath for a moment), we headed on to the bridge that crosses the gorge just downstream of the dam.  This is a picture from the bridge of a geo marker that was placed here, on a little concrete platform, overlooking the dam.  Why they decided to put it there, I do not know.

A view from the bridge down to the bottom of the dam.  At first, I thought the green stuff was shallow river water, but on closer inspection it appears to be grass.  Why?  I don't know.

A view down the very long bridge crossing Glen Canyon.

Views of the canyon from the bridge.

A boat launch seen from the bridge.  I'm definitely going to have to go back and do this.

A view of the dam from the bridge.  The structure to the left is the visitor's center, which we went into briefly.  This is the only time I've ever had to go through a metal detector to get into a visitor's center.  Yes, I know it's a dam, but what difference does it make?  If I can take out the Glen Canyon dam with my 3" pocket knife, I think we ought to just pack it up and go home.

A display of fossilized dinosaur tracks outside the visitor's center.

A view of the bridge from inside the visitor's center.  It is 700 feet above the river and 1,028 feet long.

A view of the bottom of the dam from the visitor's center.

A view of the marina, upstream from the dam, as seen from the visitor's center.

A model of the lake and dam found inside the visitor's center.

A view of the power plant from farther beyond the bridge.

More views of Lake Powell.

Rain out west of our location, where we were going.

And now, some images from Google Earth, so you can see where we were:

 

Okay, this one is actually kind of funny.  If you look at the dam from an angle in Google Earth, it looks like the bridge goes down into the river and comes back up.  Doh.

The marina upstream from the dam.

The visitor's center, outline in read in the bottom left of the frame.

Okay, this concludes the first post from our trip.  Watch for more!