Road Trips and Hike Reports

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 vi...

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 M...