Posts tagged trails
Zion National Park (Day One): Watchman, Pa'rus, & Canyon Overlook Trails

It’s my eventual goal to hike every national park in the U.S, so for the past couple of years, I’ve been asking my in-laws for a National Parks Pass for Christmas as a good motivator to wrangle Ryan into a couple NP trips throughout the year. When my NP pass was bestowed on me for 2022 and we didn’t have any Spring Break plans, I knew we needed to go on another camping trip. Popular national parks tend to fill up quickly (like 6 months out), but by some miracle, there were still a handful of spots available in March for Zion, one of the parks we’d been wanting to make it out to. So at the start of my Spring Break, we packed up all our camping and hiking gear and made the 27-hour drive from Kentucky to Utah.

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Cherry Blossoms on an Extinct Volcano: Mt. Tabor Park (Portland, Oregon)

While you might not think of Portland as a particularly volcanic area nowadays (especially compared to other western states like Wyoming), turn back time about 5 million years, and the story would be very different. In southeast Portland, nestled at the top of a quaint neighborhood is Mt. Tabor, an extinct volcanic vent and remnant of this volatile time in Oregonian history. Its cinder cone (a steep conical hill of loose pyroclastic fragments) is part of the Boring Lava Field, an extensive network of Plio-Pleistocene era cinder cones and small shield volcanoes ranging from Boring, Oregon to southwest Washington. This park was my destination for my second nature excursion in the city while visiting for the AWP 2019 Conference.

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