Road Trips and Hike Reports

 I picked last night's hotel based partially on being near Starved Rock State Park.  Starved Rock is, for a park within a few hours of Chicago, a very interesting park full of large boulders and falls and caves etc.  Stuff you don't usually see in Illinois, especially Northern IL.  When I got up this morning it was 18 degrees and the snow from the days before was hard and sharp and my motivation to try to tackle it all early this morning for a hike was very low.  The other destination I toyed with fitting into my trip home was the Hocking Hills area of Ohio.  I could have gotten there today then had 2 nights at a hotel in nearby Logan Ohio. Temperatures were predicted to be warmer there and it is someplace I've been wanting to go for years.  I actually started heading that way this morning but another winter hike by myself seemed like a poor trade for pushing my trip to the limits and only getting back to home Saturday late.  Then I realized that Indianapolis has Skyline Ch

Tuesday:  My charming evening in O'Neil became a bit less charming the next morning.  There were several inches of snow and little plow pushed mounds of snow in front, behind and on one side of the car which was parked on the street.  I shoveled for a few minutes using a borrowed snow shovel from the hotel.  I got so focused on the snow that I didn't remember to buy gas in O'Neil but I had enough to easily make it to a mini market in Orchard, Nebraska.  I also got a drink and breakfast burrito while I was there. The drive East on US-20 was mostly snowy but there were some small and some slightly longer stretches of roadway that were dry, protected by little drifts of snow in on the side of the road.  So there was a lot of alternating between 45 on the snowy stretches and maybe 55 in the clear spots.  It was only about 120 miles to get to Sioux City Iowa but conditions got worse as I got nearer to Iowa and there were ominous warnings about massive snows predicted for central

After yesterday's hike, Brian dropped me off at the Rochester Airport Best Western   and I did my best to go to bed very early.  First I had a short but intense workout in the increasingly precious fitness center which, unlike at our apartment complex, was still open.  Then I took a bath using the Epsom salts I brought from home.  Finally I watched a little Hulu in bed before trying to sleep.  The sleep quality was somewhere in that vast middlle between great and awful.  It took a while to fall asleep but once I fell asleep the few times I woke in the night were brief.  As is often the case, the best sleep was probably the minutes just before my iPhone obediently blasted 'Rich' by Maren Morris .  The 45 minutes I allotted to get ready this morning flew by and I was borderline frantic for the last few minutes before heading out to the van for the very short ride to the terminal. I was pleased to see that Dunkin was open and not busy so I got a Beyond Sausage sandwich which i

 I think and hope that today is the most difficult day of the entire drive home trip.  I ended up just having a bath butt a really good one in my room.  The mineral pools will have to wait until next time.  Thermopolis was thermally minimal this morning (about 6 degrees) when I headed back down Wind River Canyon at about 6 am.  The canyon was icy yesterday and I imagine it was still icy this morning so I drove cautiously.  After the canyon there was a bit of mostly dry and clear pavement (easy fast driving) but after turning East in Shoshoni where US-20 and US-26 become one road, conditions got worse as I headed East.  By the time I was half way to Casper it was basically an icy mess.  It wasn't just icy spots but a constant silvery reflective glazing of ice that got worse the closer I got to Casper.  Thankfully there were almost no cars until I got to Casper and since there was almost never another car around me and little opportunity for surprises on US-20, I felt ok going 45 or

Today was an exciting and scenery filled day.  I woke up to thankfully only a few more inches of snow more than were there when I got to the hotel in Idaho Falls.  The roads in town were awful just like they were when I arrived the night before so I was concerned that the entire day could be difficult.  Amazingly, the highways improved dramatically, seemingly at the city limits.  I had hoped to go through Cody Wyoming today to visit the museum my friend from Oregon recommended but ID-31 had a chain control in effect so I stayed on US-26 which took me further south and added miles both.  I did get to go over top of 9500 foot tall Togwotee pass and I had a good walk along the river in Dubois WY.  The photos do a pretty good job of showing the types of scenery I experienced today.  Other than than snowmobile recreation users at very high altitudes there were virtually no other cars.  I mean many minutes between even seeing one oncoming vehicle and virtually no following or being followed

 I had a weird 2 hour awake spell in the middle of Christmas night.  After blowing my nose 2 dozen times and taking a decongestant and watching a Good Wife episode on my laptop, I finally fell asleep again.  I had gone to bed very early that night so overall I got enough sleep but I wasn't exactly an early bird this morning.  I think it was about 8:30 when I left Redmond.  My first stop was McDonald's in Prineville for a drive-through breakfast. It was unseasonably warm this morning, about 40 in Redmond and it had at least sprinkled overnight.  I wanted to take US-26 from Prineville to either US-20 in Idaho (to go to Craters of the Moon) or as a fall back plan, just stay on US-26 further until I had to do whatever I would have had to do to get to Idaho Falls, the one location on my week long return trip where I actually made a reservation ahead of time.  It turned out that temperatures dropped fairly quickly as I climbed out of Prineville and between about Mitchell and Unity (~

I won't get into a ton of details about my time with family. I spend most of my time in Eugene as the main point of this entire trip was to see my grandmother.  I did spend once nice evening with her at my parents house playing games and eating dinner. Unfortunately, I couldn't go to her residence since I'm from out of the area and frankly, given the risks, slight though they may be, I'd rather not wander through her group living facility.  Also unfortunately, that 1 evening was the only time we had together during my trip so far other than a few phone calls.  Being 98 is rough.   I enjoyed seeing my dad and step-mother for a few days and we had some nice meals together etc.  Christmas Eve I picked up my rental car and in view of the rapidly worsening weather forecasts I asked if there was any non SUV vehicle available with all wheel drive.  I really don't like most of the sub-compact SUV's and I want to keep the MPG as high as possible.  They had one AWD car a

 We wanted to make sure I got some exercise on this day because I was going to be dropped off at an airport near the Rochester Airport at the end of the day for very early flights to Oregon Sunday.  I had been hoping to get Brian out with me on a group walk and this one was about as close to Rochester as the Buffalo based Foothills Trail Club ever gets.  I really enjoy the club hikes because this club in particular often goes on relatively obscure hikes in places I wouldn't discover on my own.  In this case, the Erie canal and its associated trail are very well known and we're already been to Lockport and looked at the eponymous lock downtown.  But this hike started 4 or 5 miles from downtown and I would never have known about the nature preserve across the access road.  Our group leader, Carol, started by walking us on a 2 mile loop through the Lytle nature preserve.  It was snowy and pastoral feeling and we went through the most densely treed part of it instead of walking th

Update: October 15, 2023... It turns out that this hike is NOT in the Labrador Hollow Unique area at all.  Its very CLOSE to it.  But now, almost 3 years after having gone here thinking I'd been to Labrador Hollow I can confirm that this hike is actually in Morgan Hill State Forest.  Original entry: As we headed East on US-20 (for quite a while), the weather went from 37 down to about 30 and a little (very tiny) bit snowy.  Not something we expected since it was early in the day and the temperature usually goes up as the day goes on but Syracuse is a little further from Lake Ontario and the Finger lakes that help moderate our temperatures in Rochester.   The trailhead was a few miles down a very bumpy but not very hazardous dirt road at a pond.  From there the trail back tracked just a few hundred feet back towards where we drove in and then went up the hill on the other side of the road from the pond. Almost immediately this felt like a more woodsy/mountainous feeling hike than mo