Porquoi? La neige!

I had always promised myself I would start a blog about my travels, or more specifically, about my journeys through North America.  Today seemed like a good day, this being the first snowfall of the season.  My roots are firmly entrenched in the great white north after all, and despite my fascination with warmer climes, I have remained a cold water fish at heart.

So why the blog?  I have a few reasons.  The most important would be because I have a real passion for the landscapes and ecosystems of this continent, which I will define right now as being everything from Alert to the Sierra Madre de Chiapas.  For another, I like visiting and taking pictures of places from different perspectives than the norm; you might see a familiar vista but the focus will be off or extremely zoomed.  Tourist sites and wikipedia pages are great things, but they can sometimes leave out some interesting details.  Part of a different perspective, of course, is a personal outlook on the situation at hand.  This blog will be about encouraging travel and seeing things from your own vantage point.  Why go someplace new?  The sights, sounds, smells, and primal feel of a place cannot ultimately be discovered in another's reference.  That said, I can at least give you mine.

What sparked this interest from a passing thought into something more tangible?  A visit to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.  I have been to many beautiful areas of our continent, and have a very passionate and strong connection to a few places.  One such place would be the north rim, which produced an experience in me that can best be described as emotional, spiritual, and transcendental, if at all in words.  I never understood the primal connection some folks such as John Muir had for certain places.  Now don't get me wrong, I have felt like this before, especially at Cedar Lake (expect a big post on this at some point).  I suppose I never really understood why I felt that way until I was there in the flesh.  In a little while, I am going to give you a post on that experience, along with some amazing pictures.

For now though, welcome to my blog, and I hope you enjoy seeing what is most likely the best quarter of the globe.

Since this post is largely about taking a drive into something new, here is a shot of driving into Rocky Mountain National Park from the Beaver Meadows entrance station.

What you see is the Front Range of the Rockies.  Mind you, at this particular point your feet are already just over 8,000 feet above sea level and have been in the "foothills" for some time no matter what direction you arrived from.  It was about 67 degrees or so there.  Up on those 14,000 foot peaks, or rather, in the lower portions at around 12,000, there was still a good 6-8 feet of snow on the ground and the temperature was hovering around a very cool forty something.