Carl Henning

We are traveling in Wyoming with our first stop at the Cheyenne Depot Museum. In addition to the story of the train infrastructure in Cheyenne, it houses a huge model railroad layout in HOn3 scale.. HOn3 is HO scale narrow gauge railroad. The huge layout took 30 years to build.

Along Route 50 in Colorado is Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park. The canyon’s name stuck because at the bottom of the deep and narrow canyon daylight seldom reaches.

Route 50 from Folsom to Colorado Springs is a long, lonely road, but it is coincident with Interstate 70 in Utah. I70 has some scenic overlooks. And boy are they scenic:

The Great Basin encompasses all of Nevada and part of Utah. But the Great Basin National Park is smaller. We were two of the few visitors at the park on this particular post-Labor Day weekday.

Thar’s gold, not in them there hills, but in the sawmill water race at Sutter’s Mill. Discovered in January 1848, the word eventually spread East to start a rush of gold seekers, the 49ers.

Content warning: this is an engineering-related post. We were in Folsom, California visiting friends – no, not at the prison. Time did not permit visiting the Prison Museum with its Johnny Cash memorabilia. But, even better, was the Folsom Powerhouse State Historic Park.

I said in yesterday’s post (Yosemite) that our accommodations in the park were primitive. I should have used a marketing term like “old-fashioned” or “quaint.” I made the Wawona Hotel sound horrible and it was not really, just quaint. The lack of elevators was no treat for older guests, but we never turn on a TV, use the phone, or even the Wi-Fi. So we didn’t miss those. A little air conditioning would have been nice though.

We stayed in Yosemite National Park, although the accommodations were primitive (no elevator, no TV, no phone, and no Wi-Fi – except in the lobby). I took hundreds of photos, then in the last gift shop spotted the book How to Take Photographs in Yosemite.

Sequoia National Park is home to some big trees. It’s hard to do them justice with a camera because you can’t get far enough away easily to take the picture. I tried with the discontinued Photosynch app but it has…

Kings Canyon National Park is administered with Sequoia National Park and they abut. But the real first question is “Where’s the apostrophe?” I thought it should be King’s, but based on the Spanish translation I saw (cañón de reyes) it should be Kings’. Regardless, the apostrophe is missing in the official name. Well I’m glad that’s settled.