Bad Knees Travel,

There is a lot of news right now about fires in many parts of the world. I am just back from helping a friend move back onto his property burned last year. I want to let you know in some way how this feels. These photos are from one remote mountain area, but the story is the same all over Northern California, Oregon, much of Canada, Australia, Portugal. Hawaii is starting their journey into the fire life. We have not been good stewards of our wild lands, and Global Climate change is real.  I think that it is difficult to deeply understand what living in these areas means. We may have experienced, or had a friend that experienced a single family fire, but until you spend time in one of these areas it is hard to understand the way it feels to be in, to live in a vast area that has been seared. These photos are not meant to be the best photographs ever taken.  And the chronography is backwards. The first  photos you see are towards the end of my journey. Much of the time I just shot out t

  Slot canyons are one of my favorite geomorphological features. Jasper and Banff are littered with them. As much as I hate the tourist aspect of the parks, they have done a fantastic job of presenting them for the hiking public while protecting their fragile nature. These are not actually "canyons." The proper term Ben Gadd reminds us is "gorge." But I will use the more commonly used word. Either way, these narrow slots can be tremendously deep. The rock layers and the features cut into them are spectacular. (I am running out of superlatives here, and there is a reason for using them all.) When a terrain of sedimentary rock is young or newly exposed,  it is susceptible to rapid erosion. When you add a  lot of water these steep, deep canyons develop. Not only is there plenty of rain here, but there were and still are, lots of glaciers high in the mountains. Glacier melt not only releases lots of water at the same time in a summer melt, but this water also carries lo