Friday, August 22, 2014

Multiple stops on the Old Spanish Trail

There are probably 50 stops in six states for this trail:  justifiably so- it was a long and important one:



On this trip, I got stamps at 4 locations in Barstow, California, One at the Mojave Desert Preserve, two near Las Vegas, the BLM office and Red Rocks, and also at Lake Mead in Nevada.  

For the BLM office in Nevada:  
Several stamps plus the Trail stamp at Red Rocks outside of Las Vegas:











One at the Alan Bible VC at Lake Mead in Boulder City NV:
One at the Mojave HQ in Barstow:
And several at the 3 other stops in the Metro Barstow area:






Thursday, August 21, 2014

New Park, that probably shouldn't be a park, but is a park...

We actually drove by the entrance for this park, well, building.  To say it is under development would be too kind.  It was like this is an afterthought.  Hope it gets a lot better, but I've at least been there.  



The NM is really just a house, in the middle of nowhere....

Another 50 plus year revisit- Death Valley NP California

Same deal here, last visited here with the family in either the middle 50's or 60's-  Cooper and I drove over on our way out of Las Vegas-  Went to the Furnace Creek  Visitor Center, the other at Stovepipe Wells was closed.....



New Park- Devil's Postpile Mammoth Mountain, California






Finally get to Fort Point in San Francisco!

Took a second try, but Cooper and I got to Fort Point NHS, at the base of the Golden Gate Bridge-  Also got the lighthouse....





New Park Lake Mead NRA Boulder City Nevada

Got to 2 different visitor centers for this park while we stayed at Boulder City-  Also got to visit Hoover Dam-  

It was amazing to see how much the drought had affected the height of the water of the lake, it was down like 100 feet!  




New Site Manzanar NHS

Glad to get here, this is one of the series of Japanese Prisoner Of War camps -  This one was on the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range, in a beautiful location. 









New Park- Mohave National Preserve

Cooper and I got to the Headquarters building for the preserve at Barstow, which is a very pretty new building.  We then skirted several miles of the preserve on our way to Las Vegas 





New Park- Pinnacles National Monument

Had to make basically a long detour to get to this park- we left San Jose, drove about 60 miles, then made our way back up to Modesto for the night.  Sadly, we didn't see any California Condors, which is a feature of this park.