Our beautiful country

On this Memorial Day, I find myself thankful for the beauty of our country that so many have fought to preserve. During our time in the desert, the song "America, the beautiful" wafted through my mind many times.

You may notice that we often stop at K's Rock first when we go to the Utah desert. The reason is that we love it there, and it's the closest great campsite that we know of. It makes a peaceful and beautiful place for me to recover from the spine pain that traveling always evokes. This past trip was especially hard because the disc just below my lumbar spinal fusion is getting worse and worse. Sitting in a car seat was agonizing.

Movement is key to controlling the pain so Shyla and I mountain biked to a favorite overlook while we stayed at K's Rock.

One of the best parts is being able to share the mountain bike ride and the view with Shyla. I shared it many times with K, but not over the last couple of years of her life. It had become too hard for her to run up to this viewpoint by then. That fact makes me appreciate this phase of Shyla's life even more.

After we girls mountain biked and the boys ran, all of us hung around camp, reclining in our super comfortable La Fuma chairs. We watched a pair of bluebirds working hard raising a brood that seemed to be stashed in a crevice in K's rock. It was warm, sunny, and so quiet.

Each day, clouds rolled in at sunset so I never got true "sunset golden light" while we were there but Shyla and I had fun with mini-photoshoots anyway. In this photo, she was just about to wave at the camera!

After darkness fell, the clouds sometimes cleared out so that I could photograph the stars. The second night at K's Rock was very special because my time lapse photos showed both the stars spinning around Polaris and moonrise. At the start of the series of photo, K's rock was completely dark because the moon hadn't risen yet. By the end of the series of photos, K's Rock glowed red, bathed by moonlight.

Here's a very short time lapse video of the stars spinning and the moon rising that night. You can watch it at Youtube if you have trouble with the embedded version here.

And here was the final photo after an hour and twenty minutes of photos. The moonlight made it look almost like daytime.

The beauty of our natural world astounds me.