We made a Yellowstone roadtrip this June and we saw an incredible number of animals. I was able to photograph a ridiculous number of bears, and I even got some distant photos of a wolf in Hayden Valley.
I’m getting all the footage together from the trip. In the meantime here are a couple videos I made from the trip. I have a few more to make, including in Grand Teton of the Lake Solitude trail.
I might make one specifically about locating and photographing wildlife in the parks as well.
I made this wood-burning a few years ago of two pronghorns on the prairie. We often see pronghorns when we venture into Wyoming and occasionally here on Colorado, and this scene is typical for how we encounter them.
There was an unusual leaf-shaped knot in the wood which I managed to incorporate into a plant. Can you find it?
I often do sketches in my free time between other projects. I decided to add them to this page on an ongoing basis.
This is a fun painting I did a few years ago depicting the Midnight Ride of Paul Revere after a trip to Boston and several New England states.
We like to start the summer season ‘test camping’ at the nearby state park, Chatfield State Park. It’s a nice reservoir just outside the Denver metro area along the foothills with trails and lake access.
Last year we were considering getting a new travel trailer but decided instead to invest in a spacious inflatable tent instead. There were several reasons for this:
So we bought an $1700 inflatable Panda tent from RBM and also made various purchases of cots, sleeping pads, a heater, a shower pump, and more. And I bought a new 60 quart Blue cooler that can keep ice and food frozen for multiple days and a 6 ft x 2 ft cargo carrier for my truck.
I decided to take a crack at building my own collapsable camping kitchen using plywood, pegboard, and PVC pipes. We bought a collapsable sink to set in it and pegboard hooks to hold utensils, as well as a light. It worked great in the trial camping trip.
We don’t often take the dogs with us, but they came with us on this camping trip and we all had fun.
We’ve got more camping planned for the coming months and years. We love the new tent and the possibilities it brings.
My newest painting (literally just signed it) is of Zion National Park. I love this park and the trails are some of the best in the national park system.
This is an overlook viewpoint with Angel’s Landing and the Temple of Sinawava in the distance. Last time I was in the park my son and I hiked the Angel’s Landing trail. We’ve also hiked the Narrows, the Weeping Wall, along the Virgin River, and Observation Point.
I’ve added new photos from our trip in October to the Bahamas to the Wildlife of the Caribbean page. We had a great time snorkeling there and were able to see a diverse array of fish species along the reef, as well as a green sea turtle and a conch. We also saw a heron and a curly-tailed lizard on land near the Atlantis resort. Check out the gallery…
In Colorado there are four national parks and numerous national monuments, historic sites, and recreation areas. Florissant Fossil Beds is a small national monument in central Colorado, just west of Pikes Peak.
Florissant Fossil Beds is a unique and enjoyable place in a relatively quiet spot in Colorado. This December we made our second ever visit to the monument and saw that it had a new visitor center and a more expansive trail system.
We were last at Florissant Fossil Beds in 2012. At the time Shelley was pregnant with our youngest son Evan, who was born in December of 2012, almost exactly twelve years prior to our most recent visit. For Evan, this was his first real chance to visit the monument even though he was phyically there the last time 🙂
We found that in the intervening years a nice new visitor center had been built and we took some time to peruse the exhibits inside, learning quite a lot about the history of the monument and the many fossils that have been found at the site. We learned for instance that more butterfly fossils have been found at Florissant than anywhere else in the world.
Once we stepped out of the visitor center we made our way to the primary attraction that makes Florissant famous: the great, fossilized redwood stumps.
Redwoods?
Yes, Fifty million years ago the climate of central Colorado was warmer and more humid, though the elevation was still quite high. The climatic conditions allowed huge redwood forests to thrive in what is now a dry, alpine environment.
The redwoods were fossilized by a volcanic eruption that happened about thirty miles from the current site of the monument. That volcano is now extinct, but the ash fall that accumulated at their base ensured that the stumps would remain to the present day.
There are several redwood stumps to be seen within a one mile perimeter of the visitor center. Two are only about one hundred feet away, covered by the protective roof. One of these is a triple trunk that originates from a single base.
To see the others, we took a leisurely stroll along the one mile Petrified Forest Loop Trail. Along the way is the most famous of the stumps, called the “Big Stump”. This stump still bears the rusted remnants of a saw blade from a century old attempt to cut into it. Fortunately that attempt failed and the stump remains for our enjoyment today.
I highly recommend visiting Florissant if you are in this area of Colorado. It’s quiet and relaxing compared to many of the more famous attractions in the state and quite interesting. For us it was also kind of fun to bring Evan there so close to his birthday to reminisce and give him the chance to appreciate the park.
Colorado has many terrific national park sites and we decided to try our best to visit as many as we can in 2025. We think we can visit all four national parks in 2025, and we’ll hit many of the national monuments as well. We’ll share our journeys as we go.
We made a red fire ant cake for my son Evan’s 12th birthday.
When I need to break out of a rut I’ll do sketches. Here is one of a girl from a photo. I liked the angle of her pose.
