Rebecca M. Douglass, Author

Last month I took a "little" road trip to New Mexico, by way of California. The California part was family business, but once I turned my nose south and east from there, things got fun. For one thing, I spent the first night out in a favorite camping spot, and the weather was perfect. Mono Lake at sunset. The lake and the Sierra Nevada mountains in the morning. I then took some fairly obscure roads south through Nevada. I had to stop a couple of times for the flowers on the roadsides. The next day I stopped at Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona, a place we visited when I was a little kid (I also always have to correct myself when I call it "Petrified National Forest"). I found the locations of a couple of old photos we'd been looking at recently, which was kind of fun. The Visitor's Center area. It was noon, and pretty hot, but the wind was blowing enough to make it bearable to be out for a while. I checked out the short trail and trees by the Visitor...

I'd hoped to have a sneak preview, at least, of my photos from my most recent trip, but I've been a total scatterbrain, and haven't done much more than upload the lot of them to my computer. So we're back to Patagonia. One day we drove to the very end of the road beyond El Chaltén, to Lago del Desierto, where you can take a ferry up the lake and get off in Chile (or walk a trail; either way you go through immigration at the far end of the lake). We didn't do that--we'd already been in Chile--but we looked at the lake, then hiked to nearby Huemul lake. Huemules are a sort of Patagonian deer. Apparently we started the day with another visit to the sunrise viewpoint. These two are my photos. Dave shooting the sunrise. First light on Fitzroy. Trivia note: Fitzroy was renamed from Chaltén in 1877 by the Argentinian explorer Perito Moreno (see Perito Moreno Glacier ), in honor of the captain of the HMS Beagle (Darwin's ship). Only then did we drive the 15 or 20 mi...

I'm not in a position to respond to comments right away, but if you leave one, I'll see it eventually! I've been working my way through our 2020 trip to Patagonia and sharing some of my late husband's photos, with an occasional picture of my own (assume they are his unless I indicate otherwise). Today we'll take a look at the spectacular Lago de los Tres (I don't recall if we ever figured out three whats). The trail was 14.6 miles and nearly 4000' of climbing. I think I was younger then! Glacial river. We definitely made an early start. An intermediate lake with good views.   After climbing up and up forever, you pop over a ridge... ... and there you are! We had some cool cloud stuff going on while up there. Despite our early start, the lake had a lot of people around (some of whom can be seen here if you look carefully). It's a jump-off point for serious climbers, and there's a campsite 3/4 of the way up, so many got there ahead of us.  We saw Andea...

Well, last weekend I got confused and gave you both photos and fiction ! (I also forgot the title!). This is what happens when I try to get things ready ahead of time, and you can consider it advance payment for the posts I'm going to miss later this month while I'm out hiking. I'd forgotten that after hiking to Laguna Torres, the next day we hiked to a viewpoint overlooking the same lake (Loma del Pliegue Tumbado). It was an incredibly windy day; I remember feeling like I needed to hang onto someone or something to avoid being blown off the summit. We started the day with the fantastic sunrise that features in a number of photos I've already shared. Once the sunrise was over, we raced to the trailhead to get going on the day's hike, which was nearly 12 miles and almost 4000' of gain and loss. I believe we took the next day off! Here are some highlights, again all are Dave's photos: Patagonia has some interesting plants. Dave identified these as Calceolaria...