Rebecca M. Douglass, Author

After my trip to the Grand Canyon in mid-April, I met up with my friend Zeke and we headed to Utah, with plans for about 10 days of explorations in the canyon country and the Bears Ears National Monument. The best-laid plans and all that, but I did get some good photos. The Grand Canyon photos: Part 1 of this series was up on the South Rim . Part 2 took us down the Bright Angel trail and out the Tonto West Trail to Horn Creek . Part 3 is Monument Canyon and Granite Rapids . Part 4 took us to Hermit Creek and Hermit Rapids, where we finally saw some decent wildflowers. Part 5 was the trip up the Hermit Trail and a few extra bits.   Grand Staircase-Escalante The Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument is in the south central part of Utah, and abuts both the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area and Capitol Reef National Park. With minimal development and a maze of canyons (accessed by gravel/dirt roads/jeep trails) it's a favorite haunt of mine. In camp along the Hole In the...

While I'm busy traveling in Patagonia... I'm sharing some photos from a very different landscape, from last October! I shared photos from the first two parts of that trip here , and here (and I see I never  finished talking about the New England part of the trip). In the middle of October, we left the fall colors and flew to Denver (where we’d left our car), and continued the trip, meeting my husband’s brother and sister-in-law in Moab. Highlight number 1 was Arches National Park. The low-light was that after all the mountain climbing in the first two parts of the trip, I had to back way off my injured foot, so my SiL and I did some nice short and easy hikes while the guys did the big ones (yes, I was envious). Arches gets over a million visitors a year these days, which puts a lot of stress on the infrastructure (like the one road...). We dodged that by getting up and leaving our campground near Moab very, very early, and enjoying the best hours of the day in the park. Ready ...

A few weeks ago I joined a couple of backpacking friends (Zeke and Walt) for a bike trip up the Marin and Sonoma coastline in California (yeah, a bunch of backpackers on bikes. It happens). The weather cooperated, mostly, and we had a great time. Not an epic ride in terms of miles covered, but enough to see some country and plenty of hills for my flat-lander companions! Here are a few photos to share the fun. One of the fun things was that we got to start riding right from my house (this did mean that most of the trip was routes I'd ridden before, but they are worth repeating). The first day's highlight was crossing the Golden Gate Bridge. Looks like the railing on this side is due for painting! South Tower Moving on into Marin, we had to climb a long way up to our campsite at Pantoll on Mt. Tamalpais. A little humor helped to keep us going. Temperatures that day were warm, and a bit humid (most of CA was absolutely baking, so we were actually in a good place), which made the c...