Moab, Arches, Stehekin, Maui, Las Vegas, Bears & Fiery Furnace Hikes With Nephews & Slow Modems

I think I mentioned I spent a few hours in the past couple days re-doing a lot of my biggest website. I updated old stuff to make it look slightly less ancient.

But, I did not realize, til thinking about it this morning, that some of those old webpages are well over 10 years old. No wonder they looked so dated.

Another thing with the old webpages is they were made back way before anyone had heard of the concept known as broadband, back when you thought you were being superfast when you upgraded from a 14.4 BPS modem to a 28.8, and then the unthinkably fast speed of 56.6. Was it .6? I dunno. It's been a long time.

So, back then websites could take a long time to load. If you made websites you kept graphics to a minimum. If you used photos you sucked as much resolution out of them as possible, while still managing a semi decent image.

That first picture you see above is not too bad. That was a scanned image, re-scanned during the era of broadband. That is Fiery Furnace in Arches National Park. I've done that hike twice. If you are ever in the Moab zone, do not skip Arches and do not skip hiking the Fiery Furnace, even though it will cost you a few dollars and it's a group, ranger-led hike. It's fun.

The worst pictures are those I used for one of the funnest things I've ever done, that being taking the Lady of the Lake on Lake Chelan to Stehekin in North Cascades National Park. I have never seen so many bears. Not even in Yellowstone, when bears were still allowed there. I think I still have the original photos of the Stehekin trip, though that is well over a decade ago. I could find them and re-scan them. But I am drawing a blank as to where the photos are.

Actually, now that I am looking at them, the absolute worst are the pictures from Maui with my nephews, Chris and Jeremy. They now live in Phoenix. Recently my sister was thrilled to have both boys moving back home again. Temporarily. I do not have the originals of the Maui photos, so I am stuck with these badly damaged images. Damn the early days of the Internet and what it made us do.

I have the originals of photos taken in Las Vegas when my nephews, Jason and Joey, took me there soon before I moved to Texas. I re-scanned one of them recently when I wrote a blog about Death Valley. The nephews and I went out to Death Valley on a HOT August day that had the potential to break the temperature record. But it did not. We got plenty HOT though.

It seems so recent that the nephews took me to Vegas. Joey was 15 then, Jason 18. Joey is now 26, which I guess makes Jason 29, married, divorced and with the cutest kid I've ever seen, my great-nephew, Spencer Jack, who has a blog, but it is viewable by invite only, so I won't bother making a link to it. That is Joey on the right, with his big brother, standing in the Excalibur pool, with the skyline of New York New York behind him.