Wrapping Up Summer Vacation: Cascade Falls ~ Sunday, December 29, 2019

I am determined to finish posing about our 2019 summer vacation during 2019!

On our trip back from Utah to Nevada we took a more northerly route through the Cedar Breaks region, and took a hike to Cascade Falls.

This is a nice, mostly-level (but occasionally slippery) trail that leads to a waterfall. There are great views along the way.

At the end of the trail, you are actually at the top of the waterfall, which comes shooting out of a cave in a cliff.

This looks something out of like human-made scenery from somewhere like Golden Gate Park or Thunder Mountain Railway, but it's real. The US Forest Service says "the water that flows over the falls is supplied by Navajo Lake through an underground lava tube or sink hole."

Along the trail are sugar pines--which earned their name because they really do smell sweet!

Talbot's Toyland is Closing ~ Saturday, December 28, 2019

Xmas Train Season ~ Sunday, December 08, 2019

Slight Detour ~ Tuesday, December 03, 2019

Snow ~ Saturday, November 30, 2019

Happy Thanksgiving ~ Wednesday, November 27, 2019

Blimp ~ Monday, November 18, 2019

Caboose! ~ Monday, November 11, 2019

Cabooses show up around here once in a while. This one seems to have originated on the D&RGW.

The Nevada Southern Railway ~ Tuesday, November 05, 2019

Continuing with last summer's vacation...

Back in Nevada, we stayed in Boulder City (near the Hoover Dam), and rode the Nevada Southern Railway, an excursion train associated with the Nevada State Railway Museum.

A dinky locomotive lettered for the Jackass and Western, a real railroad once operated by the US government as part of a project to test nuclear-powered rockets!

A very large typewriter on a business car, sized for railroad paperwork.

Inside a mail car.

The ride is short but interesting, and the museum is worth a visit either on the way to see Hoover Dam, or if you're just tired of losing money in Las Vegas.

During summer, excursions are limited to mornings to avoid the heat (some of the passenger cars are air-conditioned, but perhaps not powerful enough to handle the most extreme temperatures--and of course the crew has to do some of their work outside, so let's cut these volunteers some slack!)

Pekaboo Canyon ~ Sunday, November 03, 2019

Back to last summer's trip...

Near Kanab is a slot canyon named Peekaboo Canyon. We visited it with the help of a tour company that operates out of "Denny's Wigwam", and recommend them. Theoretically you could get there yourself but it would not be trivial--our tour involved a ride over sandy roads in a Humvee.

Once you get to the Canyon, the walk through it is easy--the floor is sand and there's just a few places you have to duck under a fallen tree.

Official information about the Canyon is available from the BLM Field Office (also note, there's another "Peekaboo Canyon" somewhere else in Utah).

Happy Halloween! ~ Thursday, October 31, 2019

One of these Sounds Good ~ Saturday, October 19, 2019

Grab from Yahoo Groups While you Can ~ Thursday, October 17, 2019

You may have heard that Yahoo Groups is shutting down. Most of my old favorite groups have been pretty quiet for a while now. Facebook Groups seem to have taken over the function of hosting online interest groups, although I never get the sense of an online club from them that niche email groups used to have. But, here is a more practical question: is there a convenient way to grab all the files that people have uploaded to Yahoo Groups over the years? If you want to grab them one by one, you better get busy, because there's not much time left. However, I think I've found a better way.

• Use Firefox. You should use it anyway because it's the best!
• Install the add-on Simple Mass Downloader.
• Clear out the Downloads folder on your computer, so that you can distinguish all the files you're about to download from other ones that might've been sitting around.
• Navigate to the Files page for a Yahoo Group; go to a URL like: https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/carplandrawings/files
• You'll see something like this:
  
• If there are subfolders, navigate to each one one at a time, and for each, do the following steps (it'd be nice if you could grab all subfolders at once, but I haven't figured out a way yet).
• Click the Simple Mass Downloader button in the upper right corner of your window--the down-facing blue arrow in a square.
• Click on the Resources tab, and select files to download.
• Click on the downward blue arrow in the lower right corner of the Simple Mass Downloader control window.
• They will all end up in you usual download folder. Copy them somewhere.
• You can also go to the Photos tab and download pics too. I don't think you need to go to all the albums individually--unlike with Files, photos all seem to be available at the top level.
• You may seem to get a lot of apparent duplicate downloads. But I generally find that with pictures, one version is the actual picture and one won't open (it's probably just some wrapper web page stuff).
• Go to the next group you want, and repeat.

Kanab, UT ~

Near the east end of Zion National Park is the town of Kanab, UT, a town nicknamed "Little Hollywood" because dozens of westerns have been filmed in our around it. We stayed at a hotel filled with movie memorabilia and which shows westerns nightly in a barn behind the building. Here are some pictures from around town, and from the Little Hollywood Museum, where you can walk in and around old movie sets (free admission, but you'll find something you want in the gift shop if you're into this kind of thing).

(I thought even gas-station dinosaurs were extinct.)

Fake western buildings built for movies...

And real ones too:

Catching up with Summer: NV/UT/AZ ~

Last June we started a vacation by flying to Las Vegas. On the way in, we got a nice view of a solar power plant.

This, however, was just our jumping off point. We picked up a rental car and were soon on our way to Zion National Park. Along the road, we stopped in St. George, UT, and happened across the St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site Museum, where you can naturally see fossils, but the biggest attraction is that the building is built over an exposed layer of rock with numerous dinosaur footprints embedded in it. There is also a mural of a prehistoric (OK, I don't honestly know if it's Jurassic/Triassic/Cretaceous, etc!) scene which has a few Easter-eggs:

Zion is, of course, stunning. I won't bother posting pictures of scenery that you can see better views of via Google image search. One less well known thing that we found, though, was "Sacrifice Rock", which has petroglyphs.

The spiral symbol represents the sun, and on the summer solstice, a V-shaped shadow described as "the jaws of a coyote" is supposed to swallow it. In fact, we were there on the summer solstice, but I don't have any idea if this effect is supposed to happen at dawn, noon, dusk or some other time, and we didn't want to hang out all day in the desert heat watching shadows move. Anyway, if you want to find this site, which is not exactly hidden but isn't publicized either, it's an easy walk from the visitor center at the western gate. More specifically, it's across the road from a campground, near an electronic sign (which will probably be telling you that all the parking lots are full).

Since this is a transit-related blog, here are some pictures of busses. Las Vegas has some nice-looking articulated ones:

The airport shuttle busses are a product of our local (Hayward, CA) builder Gillig.

The National Park runs an interesting fleet of propane-powered (they do smell a bit like camp stoves) shuttles with trailers.

These shuttles go the whole length of the canyon, and help with the aforementioned lack of parking by connecting to parking lots outside of the western gate of the park.