from rscottjones

Medicine Lake, as the day dips towards night.

Twilight views along the Modoc Volcanic Scenic Byway last night.

Habitat “restoration”

One of the best things about being in a remote national monument, well outside of cell coverage: no new messages.

I asked for some ketchup for my single order of fries and got 33 packets. If you find yourself at a Wendy’s drive-thru in Klamath Falls this week, don’t order fries because they’re certainly all out of ketchup packets.

Well played, slow driver. Well played.

While stuck in a traffic at the start of our latest roadtrip, I decided to try something new: record an audio version of a personal update post. In this case, a little about our current roadtrip plans.

It was off-the-cuff, conversational, and conducted without any sort of forethought while I inched along in an interstate backup. And my goodness does it contain an extraordinary nunber of uhs and ums! Sorry folks, I’ll get better at that.

I used micro.blog’s Wavelength companion app, which makes it super easy to record simple audio posts like this one. I’ve long considered recording short audio updates like this, which you can subscribe to in your preferred podcast app. So now that I know how easy it is to record and post one, I hope to do it more regularly. And hopefully with fewer filler words…

Anyway, you can listen using the player below:

Transcript

Time to refuel and hydrate. #LostNeededDirections

This graffiti is really moving.

Made it to Bakersfield last night, though a bit too late for my planned brewery stop across the street from my hotel. I’ll have to remedy that failure later today.

First time packing up the Grand Highlander for a tent camping roadtrip (and I still managed to include a Subaru item—but hey, it’s a nice blanket).

One of the small yet nice advantages of having an electric cooler is that I can plug it in inside and stage the food I’m bringing well ahead of time, instead of having to go get ice on the morning of the trip and then pack the cooler.

I’m celebrating National Park Week by camping in 5 national parks: Yosemite, Oregon Caves, Olympic, Mt Rainier, Bryce Canyon.

The National Parks aren’t America’s Best Idea, but they are a close second. Visiting and defending all 433 of them is among the best ways to celebrate our national heritage.

I spent much of the weekend updating and transitioning the Treasured Places website from wordpress back to html.

I made lots of improvements, most notably a filtering mechanism for the list of objectives. Still a few more things to improve, but a solid upgrade.

I’ll re-complete this quest soon!

I’m excited to mark off these 6 unvisited counties on my upcoming trip—wrapping up California and teeing up both Oregon and Washington for completion.

My initial county quest goal was 100% of the West + 50% done in every state, and I’m probably only 30 counties and 4 easy trips from that goal.

No questions please.

I’m finally returning to Olympic National Park during our upcoming road trip. My only visit was back in 2003 and I absolutely loved it. So much so that I hand-coded a dedicated html website to show off our trip photos to friends (the partial site renderings are courtesy of wayback machine, which only sorta archived it). That site would eventually expand to a few national park trips before I eventually moved it all over to scottspics.com, which ran on a php photo gallery.

By 2005, I was primarily posting to Flickr first—which featured a great community of fellow roadtrippers—and uploads to my own sites started to taper down a bit. Eventually, I was nearly exclusively sharing to facebook and twitter. That’s too bad, as the fragmentation meant that I’ve never had a single library of all my trips. I’d eventually like to change that.

I figured I’d test out a new micro.blog crossposting feature with ten shots from our Norway trip earlier this summer.

“We could have never known how much this trip would change our lives."

—from Out There: A National Parks Story (which debuts online on Aug 22)

Oh man, I know how that feels! I felt the same way when I visited 100 National Parks in 100 Days to celebrate the 100th Anniversary of the National Park Service (sorta accidentally).

Here’s more about the film:

In the centennial year of the U.S. National Park Service, a young filmmaker and his childhood friend set off on a 10,000-mile journey through America’s national parks, leaving home with little more than a camera and a desire to understand what draws people to these wild places. What begins as a summer road trip evolves into a stunning journey of discovery, uncovering the stories of those who protect, visit, and find meaning in the parks.

Along the way, they meet rangers, conservationists, and everyday visitors whose lives have been shaped by these places. Through intimate interviews, sweeping cinematography, and a moving original score, Out There weaves their stories into a portrait of the national parks as more than extraordinary landscapes, but as places of healing, reflection, resilience, and connection across generations and cultures.

Both a cinematic tribute and a grassroots love letter to America’s public lands, Out There explores what it means to find belonging in the natural world, and the enduring power of these shared places to bring us closer to the land, to one another, and to ourselves.

Have a personalized license plate?

In some states, if your personalized plate is stolen, you can’t get the same one as a replacement—you’ve lost it forever. So to make mine just a bit harder to steal, I changed out the license plate screws for security screws that require a matching tool to remove.