Highlights of 2012: Bryce Canyon

I went on several fun road trips in 2012.  One of my favorite stops was a pit stop I made at Bryce Canyon National Park in southwestern Utah.   Like the mountains of Zion National Park and the expanse of the Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon is part of the massive and layered sedimentary Grand Staircase formation which covers much of southern Utah and northern Arizona.

I reached Bryce Canyon at the end of the sightseeing portion of a road trip which had begun in Phoenix.  I was scheduled to attend the spring Association of Government Risk Pools conference as representative of Prism Risk Management (appropriate, as the company was operating the Texas Schools Property & Casualty Cooperative and Oklahoma Schools Property & Casualty Cooperative) the week before SXSW.  Since I was flying to Arizona anyway, I moved the flight back a couple of days to allow for a short road trip.  Sedona, Flagstaff, Grand Canyon, and Zion National Park went on the list immediately   Bryce was a last minute decision.

example of hoodoos

Dixie Nat'l Forest

 Northern Arizona and southwestern Utah are amazingly beautiful parts of the country.  I'll hit a few of the trip highlights later in the month.  Bryce Canyon was definitely the right way to end things.  In order to get there, I left Zion and drove north toward the Dixie National Forest.  The most prominent feature of this area was the bright red sandstone with little hoodoos popping up on the top of pine tree covered ridges.  This was a good prelude to the geologic features of Bryce Canyon National Park.

Once you leave the most scenic parts of the Dixie National Forest, the road seems non-descript without the contrast of the oddly formed red rocks to the evergreens.  At the edge of Dixie, you turn north on Highway 89 and then turn onto Highway 12.  Within about 30 minutes you'll arrive at the entrance to Bryce Canyon National Park, which the National Park Service as:

Bryce Canyon, famous for its worldly unique geology, consists of a series of horseshoe-shaped amphitheaters carved from the eastern edge of the Paunsaugunt Plateau. The erosional force of frost-wedging and the dissolving power of rainwater have shaped the colorful limestone rock of the Claron Formation into bizarre shapes, including slot canyons, windows, fins, and spires called "hoodoos".     

 There is more to the park than the main amphitheater, but that's the feature which upstages everything else and really forms the basis of making the decision to drive deep into an sparsely populated region of Utah.

Hoodoos in the Amphitheater

"Amphitheater" is what best describes the principal attraction at the park.  If you take a look atthe (kind of low quality iPhone) video to the left, you'll see that the amphitheater area gets its name because it looks like a bowl carved out of sandstone with hoodoos jammed in like music fans with standing room only (to me, anyway... I can see how they might look like chairs).  According to the Wikipedia, Bryce Canyon has one of the largest concentrations of hoodoos in the world (The photo to the left is a closer shot of the hoodoos in just below the rim, note the concentration).  Apparently, the geologic formations of Bryce Canyon are 100m years younger than those in Zion.  The rocks which form hoodoos tend to erode quickly, thus we are able to enjoy the hoodoo stage of the rocks which form Bryce Canyon as they are relatively rapidly (geologically speaking) dissolving into smoother formations.
Bryce Canyon was a pleasant and unexpected surprise built into the March road trip.  It took me about eight hours to drive from Bryce Canyon National Park back to Phoenix; however, the route involved a lot of back roads and was rather indirect until I hit Flagstaff.   If you want to take a more direct route to Bryce Canyon (or to Zion National Park), your best bet appears to be flying into Vegas and then driving up I-15 into Utah.  You could also fly into Salt Lake City, but then you wouldn't be able to play craps at the end of your wholesome road trip.
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Travel: Colorado

Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado Springs

[Photos by Dave Floyd]


It's good to be back in Austin after an excellent trip to Colorado.

For the past three years, I've gone up to Colorado for vacation.  In 2009, I hiked to the top of Mt. Elbert with my mountain climbing buddy.  In 2010 and 2011, I went to Denver, Boulder, and Estes Park with friends.  Both of these trips included a lot of fly fishing, hiking, and road tripping around the mountains.

This year, my trip to Colorado was more business oriented as it was center around the 2012 Association of Government Risk Pools ("AGRIP") Institute for Management and Leadership conference.  The conference was held at the Cheyenne Mountain Resort in Colorado Springs.  I hadn't been to that part of Colorado in a long time, but it turned out to be a lot of fun.   Furthermore, the conference was full of very informative seminars.   I have been a regular at AGRIP's Fall and Spring conferences since 2007, but this was the first summer Management & Leadership session I'd attended.  I walked away with some very valuable information, as well as quite a few ideas for tweaking things at Prism Risk Management.  I also left with ideas for the Texas Schools Property & Casualty Cooperative and Oklahoma Schools Property & Casualty Cooperative programs.  I'll get into some of these concepts in detail on the Prism Risk Management blog over the next few weeks.

Mt. Elbet and Mt. Massive in Colorado

Owing to the business nature of my Colorado trip, I had compressed time to travel around the mountains for fun.  I did take a day to drive the following route:

• Glenwood Springs to Aspen
• Aspen to Twin Lakes (via Independence Pass)
• Twin Lakes to Leadville (in the shadow of Mt. Elbert and Mt. Massive)
• Leadville to Frisco
• Frisco to Grand Lakes
• Grand Lakes to Estes Park (via the Trial Ridge Road in Rocky Mtn. Nat'l Park)
• Estes Park to Ft. Collins

This route took me about 9 hours, but there were significant breaks in driving for photography.  The Twin Lakes to Estes Park portion of the contained several portions of a by-way called "Top of the Rockies."  If you have a short time frame and want to see some spectacular mountain scenery in the vicinity of Denver, I highly recommend the route listed in the bullet points above.  

Mobile: ZAGGfolio for iPad 2

iPad2 in ZAGGfolio Case

I have an iPad 2.   I bought it last August for business purposes, although it gets a lot of personal use as well.  After using the iPad Smart Cover for about a year, I decided to try out an iPad case with a built in Bluetooth keyboard.   While I typically use my iPad to read content, there are times when I want to write long emails or take notes.  My iPad is great for travel as well as taking to seminars and meetings.  Thus I find myself typing on it fairly often; in my experience using the iPad's virtual keyboard becomes fairly tedious after writing a few sentences.

I decided to buy the ZAGGfolio case for iPad 2 after it was recommended by employees at a couple of different stores.  I bought my ZAGGfolio for $99 at Best Buy, after considering it as well as the Logitech Keyboard Case.  I went with the ZAGGfolio because it seemed more robust and it covered the back of the iPad.

I've found that the ZAGGfolio is great if you want to use your iPad like a netbook (see photo).  I find the keyboard surprisingly easy to use, and thus I've had a much easier time taking notes on my iPad as well as composing lengthy business emails.  For example,  next week I'm going to the AGRIP conference in Colorado, and I expect to leave my laptop in the hotel room while I use the iPad exclusively during seminars (Evernote for iPad is great for taking notes; afterward, you can attach additional files to your notes).

What the ZAGGfolio is not great at is treating the iPad like a tablet.  The case only allows you to use the iPad in landscape orientation in conjunction with the keyboard.  When you try to fold the keyboard section behind the iPad section (to hold the iPad like a regular tablet) it feel like you are about to break the ZAGGfolio.  Needless to say, this is distracting.  Thus, you are better off taking the iPad out of the case if you want to hold it while you read content.   Also, if you want to use an iPad while walking around, ditch the ZAGGfolio.  While these aspects of the ZAGGfolio seemed to aggravate some of the authors of product reviews I read, so far I've found it to be an acceptable trade off.  If I'm going to sit and type a lot of information into the iPad, the ZAGGfolio is great.  If I want to use the iPad primarily for reading, if you want to use it while walking, or you want to pass it around at meetings then Smart Cover is better option.