Teton Trip 1
Show us your…
“Slow Blogging” this week as we are vacationing in Grand
Teton National Park. My wife is climbing the Grand Teton peak as I
write, and we’ve had a week of outstanding hiking.
Bandwidth here is nearly non-existent, as our cabin does not have a
phone. The reservation office will allow me to take my laptop in and do
a dialup connection, but my on-the-road ISP does not have a local
number for Jackson, WY. I have resorted to using my cell phone to
connect and pull down my email, and that provides a nominal 14.4 k
connection. Anything graphical is painfully slow to download, and I
swear I can see dollar signs flying out of my USB port. I am curious to
see what the Userland upload will take - don’t know whether it
publishes just the changes, or if it publishes the whole damn blogsite.
I’ll find out soon.
For August in a national park, the hiking trails really aren’t that
crowded. This may reflect the fact that most of them involve a lot of
elevation gain, and the trailheads start at about 6,500 feet above sea
level. For once, I am sort of happy to see other hikers occasionally,
as it lessens the chances of a surprise bear encounter.
We did see a small black bear off the trail on one of our hikes, but
he paid no attention to us hikers. However, the sad state of affairs in
our national parks is that privatization, franchising and outsourcing
has accelerated under the Gale Norton regime to the point where one
can’t simply snap a picture of an animal. You must first contact the
animal’s agency in Beverly Hills and negotiate a royalty. Fortunately,
they’ll accept your credit card number over the phone. I did get a
picture of the bear on our hike. Because the bear was merely grazing
instead of charging at me, the cost was reasonable. Another picture I
took of a moose was more expensive, particularly because it was a bull
with a full rack of antlers. I hope not to have to deal with either a
grizzly bear OR his agent in my remaining days here.
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