Dear friends and family,

We finished our tour of Utah with some hiking at Bryce Canyon while we camped at Kodachrome Basin State Park nearby. We thought Bryce was the most spectacular of all the parks with its amphitheatre of "hoodoos" that looked like people frozen in time, sort of like the stone statues of the Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. In addition we enjoyed seeing the bristlecone pine trees that grow there. The bristlecone pines are known to live up to 4800 years - in the White Mountains of California there are some that are that old. In Bryce they have documented them to be up to 1700 years old. Our stay at Kodachrome Basin was beautiful - the campground was surrounded by canyon walls and the night sky was great for viewing the Milky Way, Jupiter, and later in the evening, the moon. But it was cold - one morning Brian poured water into our aluminum pan and it immediately froze. So after three days of rising with the freezing temps we packed up to head for warmer climes - Death Vally NP in California.