The Southwest

Three years ago today I was on the road home from 2 weeks of sightseeing in Arizona and New Mexico. Disregarding that I have taken very few significant trips in my life, it was the best trip of my life. From the depths of Carlsbad Caverns to the rim of the Grand Canyon, with various other sights in between.

Hotel room drinking, a foray into a Mexican border town, watching a police fugitive search in the field behind our Tucson hotel after having just seen the mugshots on room TV, New Years Eve bombsquads, and some of the best sights nature has to offer.

I'm not sure what blew me away the most. The scale and intricacy of the Carlsbad Caverns; the pillars of Chiricahua National Monument that wouldn't have looked at all out of place in a scene from The Lord of the Rings; or the immensity and awe of the Grand Canyon, both with feet planted on the rim, and with feet ankle deep in the Colorado river at the bottom.

Of the time we spent there, we spent the most at the Canyon, where I got to take in two sunsets, and a sunrise on our day hike to the bottom and back out of the Canyon. Its not generally advised to make the hike in a day because of the heat, but being early January at altitude, it was only 4 degrees celcius at the rim when we set out. By mid day, and coinciding with reaching the river, the daylight and change in elevation combined to warm the air to a toasty 20 degrees.

I think its the strangely warm weather around here lately that has me feeling extra nostalgic about the trip, or perhaps the fact that I haven't been outside of Canada in the 3 years since then, but I woke up this morning and just felt like hopping in a car and driving down there. Being as my funds are somewhat limited at the moment, although I have almost all the time in the world, I had to settle for re-scanning the old photos I lost in my harddrive crash and reminiscing here.

The pictures in this post are links to the rest of the pictures I scanned. My one regret is not having owned a digital camera at the time because a lot of the quality of the pictures is lost in scanning, and I am just too lazy to sit and adjust the contrast, sharpness and dust filtering in each one. Maybe one day I will get an adapter to scan directly from the film negatives and digitize all of my pre-last summer photos. And when I do that, I finally might get one of my favourite pictures that I have ever taken blown up:

Following a duststorm at a truckstop outside Albuquerque, New Mexico