Dave Floyd is an attorney, real estate broker, real estate investor, and trivia host in Austin, Texas. He works with the Foskitt Law Office and is an owner of Floyd Real Estate. He lives in the Zilker Neighborhood, and is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin and the Washington & Lee University School of Law.
Maybe you have driven on the I-40 De Soto Bridge (aka M Bridge) over the Mississippi into Memphis and reveled in the glory of the giant pyramid that is a Bass Pro Shops (better or worse that the giant pyramid that is a casino? You be the judge.). Unfortunately, you won't be able to do this until at least July (but probably for a while after that). Why? Because on May 11th a contractor found a large crack in the bridge which resulted in it being closed down. Now the 40,000+ cars and trucks per day which usually cross the bridge are routed through West Memphis to the older I-55 bridge. Why did I take the time to write about this? Because on a recent road trip I was stuck in West Memphis for a few hours whilst on the detour to the I-55 bridge. It was not pleasant. I have another road trip (to Nashville) in the works and if the bridge isn't fixed I'll take an alternate route to avoid Memphis altogether. If you have road trip plans through Memphis, I recommend you take the possible 1-3 hour wait into consideration when planning your route.
You can visit the Wall Street Journal for more information about the bridge closure and its economic effects. Like many things in the past year, it hasn't been good for supply chains.
The Wall Street Journal has written up a nice guide for a summer road trip in Colorado. I've been to Denver many times, as well as Salida (it's where I've stayed while skiing at Monarch). The road in between makes for a nice drive. Telluride and the surrounding areas also make for a good drive. One I'd suggest adding on to the list from the article is the "Million Dollar Highway" (aka US 550) from Silverton to Ouray. That one packs in some amazing views and goes by a few trailheads worth checking out (with the caveat that it should not be done towing a large trailer or in an RV).
Many of these impact craters are now filled in, covered up, or otherwise unable to detect without having done some kind of geologic surveying. A glaring exception is the Barringer Crater (aka, Meteor Crater) in northern Arizona (shown above, in a photo from a point and shoot camera I bought in 2006). I went there on a whim back in 2008 when I was in the Flagstaff area. The crater was much more fun to visit than I anticipated (though not on the level of the Grand Canyon, which I also visited on that trip).
The crater I have "visited" more recently is the Sierra Madera Astrobleme. I used the quotes there because said visit involved driving to Big Bend National Park on US Route 385 (which runs through the 8 mile diameter crater). The cool parts are visible from the highway, but on a private ranch. Thus, it's a cool road trip anomaly to encounter on the way to Big Bend (a place I'll write more about in a future post).
Do you like the idea of owning rocks which have traveled through space? Earlier this evening I read that starting on Tuesday Christie's will be auctioning off 72 meteorites. Thus if have some spare cash lying around, you can potentially get your hands on a meteorite without having to wait for one to fall on your property. And if you do buy one, consider letting a museum display your new meteorite (at least from time to time) so that the general public can enjoy getting to see it.
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. View Larger Map
[photo (by Sara): me in front of Elvis' jet, The Lisa Marie]
Since buying the bikes, I've been doing a fair amount of riding and not much photography. Well, that and I've been busy with planning the Catalyst 8 Mad Hatter Tea Party and working on strategic/tactical/operations plans for Prism Risk Management (but unfortunately, not much on the Prism Risk Management blog). And, I read a lot of legislation these days.
However, I totally love photography and thus I finally made some time to add a few shots to the wdfloyd Flickr page (you can access it through the Flickr widget on this blog's sidebar). Mostly, it's more stuff from my trips to Marfa, the coast, and then my road trip (with the gf) from Illinois which included a fantastic layover at Graceland. I won't say any of this is my best stuff, but I think a lot of the shots are entertaining, somewhat interesting, and/or representative of the subject matter.
Meta-info:
If you are curious about my camera equipment: most of the shots posted on this blog are done with my Nikon D90. The cheap Nikon 18-55mm f3.5-5.6G AF-S VR II zoom lens is my workhorse, although I do own some swankier stuff.
