SNOW?????????????

I suppose that is the final indignity when you come here just as their season opens. I overheard a conversation in which snow was mentioned in a town 30 miles away.
Sure enough, a few hours later I was in a flurry. Fortunately, the guardian angels did their thing and the skies cleared.

The 90-mile long Flaming Gorge reservoir was formed by building the Flaming Gorge Dam:

Behind the dam, the lake stretches its sinuous way North.

Driving North on a great sweeping road, I stopped (between snow flurries) at some sublime overlooks. One of the most impressive is that at Red Canyon:

There is a promontory between that view and this next one, so it won't all go in one big panorama. I hate falling from great heights.

Yes, a pair of speedboats were cruising down the Green River as it flows Southward toward where I was in my last post. After taking that shot, I headed North on the highway toward where the snow had been reported. I did take a couple of videos, but they are too depressing to show.

Instead, here's a view from a mountain about 30 miles North of Red Canyon:

As you see in some of these, I was really dodging clouds looking for any breaks to get some color in the images,

Just stepped outside to look at the new day, and saw--clouds. Sigh. At least there's no snow yet...

Oh, look! Aren't they just adorable?...

Oh, well. I suppose not. But in their day, very effective.This is the Cleveland Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry, a major source of fossil exhibits for museums around the world. There are many thousands of bones here, representing 70 individuals of 11 species, including more than forty Allosaurs.

The location of where every bone was found, color-coded by species, are on this chart. That's a lot of (veeeery careful) digging! This gives new meaning to the word 'meticulous.'

The star of the show, and a creature of great personality, is an assembled Allosaur.If you can even try to imagine being in the neighborhood when forty of these were hunting you won't sleep tonight. Apparently, they hunted in packs and could swarm and overwhelm larger dinosaurs.

When I look at these, I keep being reminded of big sharks and barracuda I have met. Very large barracuda develop thick brow ridges and massive lower jaws similar to these. Clearly, Mother Nature doesn't throw away good ideas.

This place is in the middle of nowhere in southern Utah, dirt road for many miles--but it is worth experiencing if only for that primordial dread it summons from deep within us. I mean, 'aren't they just adorable?'....

Of course, if you are Diplodocus, Apatosaurus, Barosaurus or Camarasaurus, Immense, meaty plant-eaters, you were like the chum behind the shark boat. Barosaurus reached lengths of 70-80 feet--lot of tasty meat there. Diplodocus reached 90 feet, a very large sub sandwich indeed. Side of fries?

Off to Little Wild Horse Canyon tomorrow, deep in the San Rafael Swell. More adventures ahead! 

It's hard to have much more fun than this...

Arthur C. Clarke once said that the product of any sufficiently advanced society is indistinguishable from--magic.

So, for a little magic, my panorama from above Hoover Dam was criss-crossed with all kinds of power lines.

What to do? With a bit of advice from Jack Drafahl, the Photoshop guru, I went to work with the latest release, Photoshop CS5. Look what its feature known as 'content-aware fill' was able to do...

Voila! Cables gone!

Panoramas of Canyon de Chelly

While my webmaster Patty struggles with a mountain of new material, I am enjoying the power of fitting enormous tracts of desert into single photographs. This first one is the colossal view from the Mummy Cave overlook.



And yet, the original image is so huge it retains the detail of the centuries-old ruin under the ledge. I just love this software!

This next one is the amazing vista one experiences from the Antelope House overlook. If you look very carefully to the lower right, there are three trucks and a gaggle of visitors crossing the bridge to walk by the ruin.

It is an astonishing retention of detail--which of course comes from using 18 shots stitched together to make the large image.

These will soon be in a gallery in the Desert Photography section of my web site--with a lot of other fascinating views!