2026

What am I going to do in 2026 with regards to my hobbies, the on-topic topic for this blog? Probably lots of things, but I'm not going to set goals or resolutions, because I can't know what I'll want to be doing in a few weeks, much less through the whole year. I can predict pretty accurately, though, I suspect.

First off, we executed a successful big family holiday. I went back to my house in the upper Midwest where my son and his family are living, and where my wife was helping as the twins were born. Her task was mostly helping with the other kids, who are still quite little; three, four and five respectively, and my daughter-in-law mostly handled the babies. My son had very little paternity leave, so was mostly at work. My daughter and her family also live sorta nearby with their baby, and my other two younger sons and their wife and fiancé respectively all came home for Christmas. Although the youngest and his fiancé were here the shortest amount of time, We did at least have the better part of a full week with literally everybody in town, and then another week with mostly everyone still in town. My in-laws even blew through town briefly. And then my wife and I took our two cars and caravanned back home together. Our cars, due to the weather up north and the long drive, are super dirty and covered in road salt. One of my tasks in the next evening or two will be to take them both through the car wash and vacuum them out. Today, though, is grocery shopping, which is a more immediate need. Yesterday was unpacking, mostly. My wife was gone for three months, so she had lots of stuff to unpack. My trip was only two weeks, so mine was shorter. Of course, I had to both pack and unpack both cars with all of the stuff, and I'm not that young anymore. Taking twenty five or so heavy loads up and down the stairs from the basement to the car and then from the car into our rental here wore me out. In spite of that, I haven't really slept super well. So, this'll be a relatively slow week, but then I'll get into stuff shortly. 

Firstly, I don't intend to stop my reading plans. I'm in the middle of a novel, and I've got long lists of gaming books in particular to read, plus plenty of fiction and even non-fiction on my docket. I haven't done much of any of this for two weeks, and I ended up capping the year off without finishing anything new that I hadn't finished before I left town, so about 110 total books. Some of those "books" were 32 page modules, so that's not quite as impressive as it sounds, but that was only a few of them; the rest were all legitimate books. This is by far my biggest year since I started tracking my reading, but I suspect that 2026 will at least look similar, if maybe not quite explicitly as many titles. In particular, before the year is out I want to finish the Freeport Trawl, the first one I started. I'm hesitant to say that I'm going to finish any other of my trawls during the year, but I will certainly make progress in them. It's reasonable to hope that I get close to finishing the 3e Eberron and 3e Forgotten Realms trawls, as well as get close to finishing the 3e and Pathfinder 1e adventure paths. But reading actual Pathfinder setting books and physical game books will slow that down. For other books, I intend to read at least a dozen novels or anthologies as well, but that's just a guess, not a goal. As I finish reading some of these, I'll document my progress on my offline tracker, and discuss it here, on my online "dear diary."

Secondly, of course I'll keep gaming with my current group. In fact, our next session is this Saturday. I would like to talk to them, though, at least the two most reliable parts of the group, if they think that the other two less reliable are going to keep our frequency low if we can't increase our frequency by running an off-bi-weekly game for those of us who would like to game more but are "throttled" by the less reliable pair. This, honestly, may be my best play to actually run something this year. My second best play is to try and do something online with a few people that I know who are interested in gaming and who may have some free time, like my son-in-law. But we'll see how it goes. Again, this is less a goal and more just thinking about what I think is likely to happen in the new year. What is for sure is that I will at least continue playing in the campaign that I'm in, although we're lucky if we play once a month for about four hours, so it's not really a lot of gaming.

Meanwhile, I'll continue to plan my campaign 5x5s here on the blog. Maybe I'll be focused enough to actually finish them this year. 2025 was not a year where I made a lot of progress on that front. No pun intended.

Thirdly, my passion for the outdoors isn't limited to the American west; the Rockies, the high deserts, and the southwestern deserts, but it's certainly concentrated there. I don't know for sure what our vacation schedule will look like, but I'd like to at least have one hiking/site-seeing or backpacking trip to the area. I'll probably end up having a wedding out west in the summer, although whether it's early or late summer is still TBD, and I'll probably try and take advantage of the fact that I'm already there to take more time off and do it then. But where exactly I go and what exactly I do depends on, among other things, when the wedding ends up getting scheduled. If I'm there in late May or even early May, or early June, then that's quite different than if I'm there in late August or early September. Many of the mountains won't be available due to snow in May or June still, and even if the snowpack is low and they are available that early this year, the chances of it being really wet, boggy and swarming with mosquitos because of snowmelt is quite high. High priority targets are the Red Castle area of the Uintas, and the Lost Creek wilderness in southern Colorado, as well as the Mill Castle trail in the West Elks Wilderness of Colorado. I've been to the West Elks before, but not to the Mill Castles area, much to my chagrin. I've always wanted to get back there. If I can convince my wife to come along for at least part of it, I've also got different plans; she's not up for anything really very tough, and she's not interested in sleeping in a tent. She's up for drive up hikes and site-seeing, though. Maybe I can take her between Black Canyon of the Gunnison and Royal Gorge, and we can even see Mesa Verde. She's always wanted to see the latter in particular. I'm a little less impressed with Injun ruins, but I did get to spend a few hours there this last year, and I wouldn't mind seeing more. Mostly because I like the scenery, though. I prefer that to the ruins. Colorado is really an incredibly beautiful state, and always has been. I fell in love with the place as a teenager in the 80s, and I'm incredibly bitter that it's turning quite rapidly into the next California. Which is also a beautiful place that I'm bitter that it's been ruined by liberals.

As a brief political aside, I'm coming around to seeing liberals more and more as actual enemies. They're not just our neighbors who disagree with us on a few points of policy. Even the nicest, most naive liberals are guilty of the equivalent of criminal negligence at best, while the less nice, less naive are guilty of aiding and abetting some of the worst political actors in the world, promulgating the worst political ideology in the world. Even Islam, Nazism and Communism are less destructive than globalism, feminism and liberalism. Of course, there's no real legal liability of criminal negligence or aiding and abetting a political ideology, not matter how dangerous it is. But there is certainly ethical and moral liability, and in 2026, I'd like to see a continuation of social liability. You position yourself as an enemy of your people, your family, your heritage and your nation, and you should be considered an enemy.

Anyway, aside over, like I said, only one western hiking trip, and then early in 2027 we're going with some friends of ours to Argentina, where we'll see the Bariloche region. The Andes in summer isn't the same as the Rockies in summer, but then again, their summer is the dead of our winter, and they are impressive mountains, with lots of Swiss settlement, leading to Swiss architecture and stuff. It's a good alternative to Wyoming, Colorado, Montana, Utah or Idaho, I guess. 

Also, I'd like to do some shorter trips closer to where I currently live, in eastern Tennessee, western Virginia, and the Carolinas. This progress will mostly not be logged here, but on my very quiet Lone Star Hiker blog instead, though, honestly. 

Fourthly, the two images below will probably foreshadow what I'm into again right now...

Hutran Thanatos in his "black ops" work gear.

Hutran Thanatos relaxing in his retirement gear.

Star Wars: The Old Republic. I'm back again, after I think nearly a year and a half of not touching it. I have a brief month-long subscription that I just started, and I've played just a bit. I'm going to be making a video shortly where I review all of the eight classes, and have backup footage playing on silent in the background while I talk and have a synthwave backing track playing. White Bat Audio would make sense, but I'll probably use Lazy Laser, Neon Odin and/or Xurious tracks, because that's been my go-to for most Old Republic videos I've made. I'll probably re-up the subscription again before I quit playing, and I'll even buy the same month-long deal if it's available still. Otherwise, I'll just get the standard non-recurring two-month deal.

I won't be recording any story playthroughs. I'm just getting footage here and there of some of the cut-scenes and walk-around outfit showcases. I can use them in the background for discussion videos (like swtorista does) or I can use them for outfit showcase videos, which I've made a small number of back in 2023.

Let me briefly note my characters. I have a page dedicated to this, but I don't think it's completely up to date. In fact, I know for sure that it is not.

First off, my retired characters. I keep them around because they are either 1) doing new expansion DLC stuff, 2) they're crafting people who make all of my gear when I need to craft stuff, 3) very useful when I feel like jumping into a flashpoint or doing conquest or seasons or whatever. (Speaking of which, I re-joined more than halfway through a season. Needless to say, I'm not going to bother trying to catch up; if I'm still playing when the next one rolls around, I'll do that instead.) Some of these old characters have funky names with apostrophes and stuff so I could get them to take. My strategy now is to add first and last name to get that uniqueness, but y'know. My first pass was a much more primitive version of the game, and if I remember correctly, it had strict character limits. I'm leaving out the apostrophes and other weirdness and just writing them like normal names, so they're either more correct than the game, or not technically correct—depending greatly on your point of view.

Retired characters

• Maark - The Jedi Guardian and most played single character, probably. Certainly he's gone farther through the expansion stories than anyone else. Not that I really even care much about the expansion stories anymore. But y'know; there's scenery to admire and daily areas and reputation tracks to do, etc. He also does my synthweaving.
• Graggory - literally my oldest character, a powertech hunter, and armormech crafter. I think I stopped playing his story somewhere on Makeb, but he still does a lot of events and other stuff, and I love his look still.
• Mat Thew - one of my least favorite character names, but I love the Sith Warrior two-bladed dude. He's also the guy who crafts my crystals and dyes—artifice, I think that crafting is called. I'm reluctant to take him into Knights of the Fallen Empire because I don't want to lose my companions, but that would be the next step for him, and he'd be the obvious character to do it next. 
• Luukke - my original smuggler, a gunslinger (all of these predate the decoupling of mechanics and story) and my gun crafter—armstech. 
• Johhn - My original agent (a sniper) and my cybertech. This means that he makes most of the stuff that brings in the cash, so he gets more use even now than any other character, although I think I'm still farting around on Makeb with him in story terms. I honestly kind of don't care anymore after finishing the original story, and those characters mostly go into semi-retirement. Only one character has played through all of the expansions. Where I really lose steam is right before the Fallen Empire and Eternal Throne. Losing all of your companions sucks, and I don't love the Odessen companion menu, so I tend to only push characters beyond that if I really want to play the Valkorian story again.
• Phillippion - my Jesse Ventura guy from Predator trooper. He also does the biotech crafting. Of my OG characters, he's probably the one I play around with the least, because the biotech isn't really all that useful. He's my only commando. Maybe that would be another option if I'm looking to add another character. 
• Actsion - my OG inquisitor assassin dude. Now deleted.
• Corinthion - my OG Jedi shadow dude. Now deleted. I might even have gotten these names backwards. Don't remember or care anymore.
• Galation - my second hunter, a pyrotech. More reluctantly but eventually deleted because he was superfluous and I wanted the slot for a new character. I now have more slots and don't care, so I wouldn't probably delete him if it happened again, but whatever. He looks a lot like Graggory, and I played him the same, and before I changed it, they even had the same combat spec. He really was pretty superfluous. Plus, he doesn't craft anything or anything like that. 
• Hutran Thanatos - part of my second wave of characters, a Mirialan operative. For this wave, I went with unexpected racial mix-ups on the classes and gave them actually good names, I think. For whatever reason, I think this is the first of the second wave that I finished. He's in semi-retirement and I still use him for stuff, but he's not a crafter, and I don't need him. I just like having representatives of all the classes. Not that I don't stuck operative on many tech classes as a secondary class, but I honestly don't think about the secondary class all that much anyway. Pictured in the screenshots above.
• Taul Kajak - another Mirialan (by coincidence) who's finished his story. A Jedi Sentinel who was part of my second wave. I was actually recording his story at one point, but forgot to hit record for a section of it and abandoned the recording. Since that was still important to me at the time, I started another Jedi Sentinel, but I kept Taul around, because he's pretty cool. Only these two of the second wave have actually completely finished their class stories. I've been quite slow. I do have several other characters who are max level but who haven't finished their stories, though, in the second wave of characters.

Still in play Second Wave characters

• Embric Stane - my first attempt at using the big bruiser body type as well as the mercenary class. I thought about deleting him several times, but decided to keep him anyway. I have another mercenary hunter instead that is more advanced. I don't even think about Embric very often, but I'll get around to finishing him one day.
• Phovos Maledict - my next Sith Warrior, a juggernaut. I like this character a lot, but my advancement through the story hasn't been all that fast, really. He's only 35th level. I'll play with him some while I'm subscribed again, and advance him a bit. 
• Vant Galaide - the mercenary bounty hunter who "replaced" Embric Stane as my iconic representative of that class. Fully leveled second wave character who is on Hoth, I think, in the story. I'd like to finish him and move him into semi-retirement while I'm still playing right now.
• Anstal Tane - a sith species scoundrel. Again, in the second wave, the most "weird" thing we could do was play an unusual race, not an unusual class with the stories. He's also fully leveled and pretty close to finishing his story. On Belsavis or Voss, I think. Since he's fully leveled, I've mostly just been playing the story missions not the planetary ones. I don't need to grind for XP, so I can move them pretty fast. Mostly, the planetary stories aren't as good as the class stories anyway. With a couple of exceptions, like maybe Tatooine.
• Revecca Arden - Sith inquisitor sorceress. She's sadly behind for a second wave character and I need to give her some love. She's on Balmorra and is level 39, IIRC. Her last name should be an obvious call-back to Flash Gordon.
• Elemer Kell - Darth Maul-looking Jedi Sentinel. Because I was playing him and Taul Kajak at the same time, well obviously one of them needed to get more attention than the other. Sorry, Elemer. He's level 42 and either on Taris or just finished it. He's the last (in this list) of the second wave of characters. The third wave, below, were launched after the game decoupled class story from mechanics, and almost all of them—actually, I think literally all of them—are mismatched in terms of using some other class's mechanics with their story.

Still in play Third Wave characters

• Mirabeau Tane - a gunslinger trooper. The trooper by story is more of a James Bond special agent if you will than he really is a soldier, so I prefer to play him like one. He's actually fairly advanced; I just finished Tatooine with him and he's level 63. One of my most advanced third wave characters, and I've been enjoying him more than I thought I would.
• Codon Veile - a chiss sniper trooper. Operating on the idea that from a story perspective, the trooper is really the mirror of the Imperial Agent, I thought making a character that's the iconic race and mechanics from old promotional material for the agent, but playing him as a trooper would be fun. He's not really very far in, though. Still on Coruscant, I think, and only level 35.
• Wulf Hengest - I wanted to play a vanguard bounty hunter, where his signature weapon was a bowcaster, and Wulf is the product of that. I could play him more, but he's moving along nicely, for a late comer third wave character, honestly.
• Haul Romund - a mercenary smuggler. Although the hunter and the trooper are often considered mirrors because of their mechanics and "expectation" that they're heavily armored, I think the smuggler and the hunter are better mirrors (not mechanically, obviously) because of similar armaments, and the concept of them being semi-neutral free agents and Old West gunfighters in space. I actually rarely make my hunters heavily armored, and treat them more like typical gunfighters. Haul is my first attempt at doing that. He's been a fun one to play. 
• Vash Galaide - my favorite agent, although I need to play him more and move him along a bit. He's actually a powertech mechanically, though, although as noted above, none of his outfits are heavily armored; he's got a mix of black ops sneaky gear, disguises, and uniforms.
• Gandalf Greyhame - I wasn't sure that I even wanted to play another consular, but I decided to give one a go. I made him look like an old man, as close to the Gandalf archetype as I could get, and I'm playing him as a sith sorcerer blasting folks with lightning all the time. 
• Beorn Hengest - another bounty hunter, this time using the Republic zabrak race and the sniper mechanics. I've only played him a very little bit. He's one of the newest characters. I think he's still on Hutta even. 
• Gael Heckett - my powertech smuggler. Another one of my favorites. I just finished Taris with him, and he's level 66. Probably the fastest moving of my third wave characters, although Mirabeau is nearly as high level.
• Saxon Hettar - a sith species agent using the gunslinger mechanics. One of my newest characters. Still on Hutta in his Red Blade guise. 
• Karr Tanus - my rattataki scoundrel playing the trooper story. Kind of an odd one, but I wanted to fill up on some of the class specs, so he's a different type of scoundrel than Anstal Tane. I haven't done jack squat with him yet except run around on Ord Mantell leveling up, so he's nearly as much at the beginning as Vandal below—the only reason he's not is that the trooper is the only class story that you can't escape out of the first cut-scene, start playing, and then come back and restart from the first cut-scene. I had to at least go through the first cut scene with him, but that's all I've done.
• Vandal Guent - my very newest character, and the lowest level, 18. I literally haven't even started the story with him yet. Although I did run around killing trash mobs and doing heroics so he could get a head start. I do that with all of my characters. He's a vanguard, because I wanted to try another combat spec for that class, doing the smuggler story. 

All of these characters are fairly old; there are a lot of cosmetic customization options that have been added to the game since I created them. I'm tempted to start a fourth wave of characters. But I've got a lot of other stories to finish playing before I should think about that. I may look for a few holes in my line-up in terms of mechanical specs that I don't have a character playing, but realistically, I could just get them on my secondary class load-out if I wanted to do that. I don't know what any of these fourth wave characters would be, though. And I have so many characters still to finish that it seems silly to do so. I probably won't until at least I finish some of my second wave stories and move those characters into semi-retirement. 

All of my characters have a sneaky option in their secondary class, so if I feel like skipping trash mobs I can just turn on stealth and go past them. But I honestly don't use that very often or even remember that I have it. Needless to say, I don't enjoy playing the sneaky characters as my main class all that well. Anstal Tane has, for some reason, been the one exception to that so far, and he's max level and honestly almost done with his story. Hutran Thanatos as an operative is even further along, and I liked him well enough I suppose. 

All that said, I do have a Capes & Rayguns blog dedicated to space opera like my own setting development, and Old Republic, which are tied because I often use concept and images from Old Republic to work on my setting. While I'm into Old Republic, I'll probably update this blog less frequently and that one more frequently as a consequence.

YouTube and Classical. No relation.

I've found that as I've stepped away from spending so much time on YouTube that what I'm actually interested in on YouTube is changing. I went through a phase where I quite liked background watching livestreams from Diversity & Dragons and Black Lodge Games; I now find that I have little interest in doing so. They spend at least an hour before they really "start" just chatting with the regulars in the comments, and then they say stuff that I'm either not that interested in, or already know and agree with. I don't want to spend hours just validating my tastes; they need to do something more for me. Since they don't, I don't think I'm their target anymore. And I'm not as validated in my tastes as I used to be anyway. I think the BLG guys are more interested in system for its own sake than I have been in years (if ever) and although they come across as very similar in what they want a game to do—very paleo-trad, if I can use my own term. But then again, maybe not really. They rave on that channel about ACKSII, which is exactly the kind of game that I abandoned in the mid-80s precisely because it wasn't very trad-focused, and was all about domain management and other rulsey minigames that I have little to no interest in. They're also insistent that Mythras doing high fantasy is completely different than anything d20-based, and you can't convert from one to another. I fundamentally disagree that you can't play any given game in one system vs another. Sure, sure, there are a lot of implicit things in the mechanics, but those are the details, which are swappable and easy to modify; the actual core mechanics; who cares? If Pathfinder can be run successfully in Savage Worlds, if Traveller can be run successfully in GURPS or even d20, if Star Wars can have three completely different systems that all work well, if Rokugan... well, you get my drift. You can work any setting, tone, and theme into any system. It's not that hard. Their insistence that you can't is completely contrary to my experience and desire.

Anyway, this is an increasingly long-winded way of saying that I'm not watching a lot of this stuff anymore, and I might even unsubscribe. No offense to them, but I'm just not getting much of what I personally want out of their content anymore. Even as they do seem to be growing their channel and finding more of their audience, it's becoming more clear that it's not me as much as I thought it might be. Oh, well. I'm actually feeling that way about a lot of D&D content on YouTube; either they're repetitive and I don't care what they're saying anymore, or they're too OSR for my taste, or they're too 5e for my taste, or their too... just reading fluff straight outta the books (AJ Pickett, I'm looking at you) or their just too long-winded in general, and they're making 45 minute to hour-long videos on topics that don't need more than 10-15 minutes.

All in all, I'm enjoying spending much less time on YouTube and much more time with my books. Like I used to. That's the real Old School Revolution, right there. 

I didn't get to read as much as I hoped last night, because I had to do my taxes (I don't think I've waited this long since I was a teenager. If I'd known I was actually due a big refund, I would have done it weeks ago. I was worried I'd have to pay! Luckily, my new company kicked in a fair bit to counter the value of the relocation package, which counted as income, so I was due much more money back than I expected. I ordered two new sets of metal dice from Amazon to celebrate.) But I'm making progress in Darkness & Dread, which I have read before, but not in many years. It's always good to revisit how to play the way that you want to. I have some upcoming work travel, which is usually good for reading too. And this coming weekend, my wife will be traveling without me. Also good for reading. I hope to finish two books by the end of the week; Darkness & Dread and the novel which I'm technically reading but haven't actually started yet. Maybe the pdf Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting (3e) that I'm reading too; I'm more than a third through that.

I'm also hoping to pop into Seminole Canyon for a couple of hours for my work trip, since I'll be nearby. Now that we're in daylight savings time, I can probably do it. It's late enough already in the season that it'll be hot, but hopefully not crazily so. I can already get a forecast for the day of the 28th, although I don't trust it that far ahead, but it has a high of 87°. Not terrible. If I have sunglasses and a water bottle or two, I'll be good.

Next up to read, in all four categories: 1) Elder Evils (game book), 2) Magician: Apprentice  Raymond Feist (novel), 3) Epic Tales: Greek Myths & Tales (actually what I'm currently reading, but I just started it. It won't be done anytime soon) (non-fiction), 4) 5e Iron Kingdoms Requiem (pdf). By the time I travel, I hope to have both the gamebook and the novel listed next both finished and I can read... I dunno, Fiendish Codex I: Hordes of the Abyss and Magician: Master. 

Finally, music. The last several months, I've hardly listened to more than a few pop songs at all, mostly older ones from the 80s that popped up on my YouTube recommendations list. I haven't listened to any on my phone at all. Maybe I've finally grown up or something, but I have been significantly less interested in pop music lately. I've listened to some synthwave; the closest to pop music, but mostly I've been listening to "orchestral" (sometimes synthesized) stuff, and of course lots of movie soundtracks and classical music.

I've always liked classical music, even as a teenager. Because I had just enough of a musical background that I could appreciate the musicality and artistry about it, I presume, but also because a lot of it is, in my opinion, objectively beautiful. My favorites have always been "Romantic" rather than strictly "Classical" but by and large, orchestral art music is always called classical regardless of the time period or style. My favorites for many years have included a lot of Russian Imperial composers; Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, even Mussorsky. I've also liked a lot of German/Austrian composers: Liszt, lots of Wagner (especially Der Ring without words arrangements, so which I have many) and Tannhäuser pieces, and yeah; I know Liszt claims to have been a Magyar rather than an Austrian, but... y'know. I love Les Préludes and Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, and have several recordings in particular of the latter, both as a piano piece and orchestral. And of course, I like Beethoven, although I'm a bit less interested in his more famous 5th and 9th symphonies; my favorite by far is the 6th. And plenty of other Italians, French other composers; Vivaldi, Von Suppe, Ponchielli, Grieg, Dvorak, Bizet, Berlioz, etc.

I do sometimes find classical music catches my attention more than I'd like, and it makes it poor background music for reading or writing. It really—usually—deserves to be listened to more attentively. That's why the movie soundtracks, and other amateur soundtracks get more attention from me than they deserve on pure musicality alone; I don't feel like I'm missing too much if my mind is otherwise occupied. Not that they aren't worth listening to as well; I don't like purely boring ambient stuff, I do like music that has enough musicality that I can listen to it. But the classical masters are true masters and few of their modern follow-ups are doing anything as interesting as they were.

As an aside, I've had the Tannhäuser Overture "stuck" in my head all day long. I think the version that I'm listening to is the Szell recording. There's a couple of other really nice classic ones too; Stokowski, I think, did one, and Karajan.

Southern Utah

I've spent most of the last two weeks out of town, although I am now back, back at work chugging through all of the missed emails (and finding out that I'll likely go back to El Paso/Juarez for a quick work trip next week; right before Christmas. Sigh.)

That said, I love the American West, and I'm not averse to spending some time when the weather's relatively nice in El Paso. I spent most of last week in Southern Utah. I saw a number of sites, and the pictures below are only a small sampling of the places I visited, including:

• Little Wild Horse slot canyon
• Valley of the Goblins
• Canyonlands Island in the Sky Unit
• Factory Butte
• the "Long Dong Silver" geologic feature
• Swing City
• Moonscape Overlook
• Arches National Park
• Natural Bridges National Monument
• Bears Ears National Monument

I'll make a more detailed set of posts on my hiking blog later. For now, this'll have to do.

Looking at a pass out of the moonscape region

Hiking towards the absolutely barren "Long Dong Silver" feature, also called the Dark Spire. But not by anyone online.

One of the views from the Moonscape Overlook

Another Moonscape Overlook picture

From behind the Dark Spire. It's not really a spire; from the side angle it looks more like a shark fin

The cliffs of Moonscape Overlook with Factory Butte looming in the background

"Presidential" natural bridge, the largest of the three. I hiked to the bottom of all three and stood underneath them

On the trail down to Sipapu Bridge

The Bear's Ears themselves

I didn't realize I had another view of the same bridge. I do have more pictures of the others, but they'll have to wait for another post.

A kiva on the way down to Sipapu bridge

Petroglyphs near Wolfe Ranch in Arches National Park

Me standing under Delicate Arch, the most iconic scenic formation in the entire state

Some Anasazi ruins in Bear's Ears. Yes, I know they don't like to say Anasazi anymore. I don't care

The whole place was crawling with ravens. I got this close up of one of them

Trans-Pecos

Got to see just a bit of fun stuff driving across the Trans-Pecos region of west Texas. In particular, I spent time in the Davis Mountains.

Environmentalism by PA and Heartiste

I don't often do this, but this is one topic that intersects between many of my interests, and to which I've given a fair bit of thought.  The original post is here:

Environmentalism is complicated. As left wing vanguard politics, it’s the devil wearing a human skinsuit. But in listening to our healthy European voice deep inside, we recoil at the destruction of forests. The European soul loves the forest. Poor is the White man who knows not the joy of time alone deep among trees, the moss, the lawless cries of birds. The European subraces have their own customs with regards to the forest. Teutons, Celts, Slavs… we northeastern Slavs (I’m not that familiar our Balkan brothers, whose spiritual landscape is rocks and mountains, unlike our vast snowy plains) we forage for mushrooms. Every child is an expert on the prize-find vs something that can kill you. 

Special People are desert people, khazar nomads. They hate the forest. They love money and especially monetizing (liquidating) the forests, parceling them off, clear cutting the wood, selling and settling them with alien biped economic units that they bring in to keep the economic churn at high percolation until it all withers like a dead branch and then they move on. The land developer is a particularly loathsome insect. Even if he’s of our ancestry, his soul is twisted in the image of the Special.
[...]
Regarding PA’s comment, I think we all have our personal mystic connections to particular environments — natural and cultural — which reverberate in our souls and likely derive from ancestral memories encoded in our DNA. 

The Special loves the dry, hot, cacophonous market bazaar. 

The NW European loves the forests and verdant meadows. 

The Med Euro loves the rocky shorelines and rolling hills of the interior. 

Highlanders are at home in mountainous terrain. 

We can break down these preferences even further, along ethnic lines. 

This is why, I believe, in a future disaggregated America, the ethnics and races will organically find their way to the regional State which suits their environment template for contented living. I wonder most about White Southerners, if they stay where they are or migrate to a climate and ecology more in tune with their ancestral heritage.

I think it's more complicated than that.  I don't have to look back to my ancestors in the Chalcolithic to see what kind of environment best suits me by genetics.  To me it's very clear; culturally, I'm most at home in the American south—especially Texas, with its hybrid Western/Southern nature.  Environmentally, I prefer the American west; the American savanas, the Rocky mountains and their aspen and pine forests, the red semi-desert cliffs, etc.  I don't need to go back to the Hadrian's Wall territory to feel at home.  America is my home.  It's the nation best suited to me.  My ancestors were brought here by the Lord himself, I strongly believe, and they built this nation for their posterity in what to them was nothing less than a Promised Land, set aside specifically for them.  In any case, the American South is the ancestral heritage of the American southerner.  They've been there for centuries now, and they belong to the land as much as the land belongs to them.

I'm not really too interested in delving too deeply into my spiritual connection to the land of America (lest the swine find my pearls, so to speak), but it is deep.   (A small flavor of what I mean can be seen here.)

On environmentalism, yes it’s a shame that it’s been co-opted by lunatic leftoids when the natural home of nature preservers is on the right (and never more so than today, as leftoidism becomes increasingly the ideological accoutrement of deracinated and denatured urban rat racers). “Climate change” is the way in which the modren shitlib White, who has lost his connection to nature, accesses a path to an ancient racial longing that embarrasses him when spoken of or thought about in reflective moments. 

In the end, the environments beloved by Whites will be ruined by open borders, so all this climate change sanctimony will come to naught. The result of virtue signaling is always a boosted signal at the expense of the virtue.

Conservationism and responsible stewardship of our homeland is the natural position of the Right, actually—not the feckless libertarianism of throwing it all away and privatizing it.  Environmentalism, on the other hand, is nothing more than a mystery cult of virtue-signaling and flagellation.  The more you listen to the prophets of the Green Cult the more obvious it becomes that they are absolutely ridiculous and insane and far removed from any kind of objective reality.

Hiking near Grand Junction

I'm back.  I doubt anyone will want to watch all of this, but here's my trip reports.  I don't know why my second and third videos are low res.  I did them with a different app, but the file size is quite a bit larger than the first movie, so if anything, they should be higher resolution.  (Nevermind.  Got that fixed.)  Anyway, since nobody's going to watch these all the way through anyway, it's probably a moot point...

B&W

Just a quick note.  Just because Ansel Adams took some iconic black and white photos (in a time when color photos weren't very good, mostly, I'll point out, although certainly he stuck with black and white long after he could have migrated) doesn't mean that they're better, or more artistic, or anything else.  A big part of the reason Adams did black and white and continued to work with it was because of technological limitations of his time, and the solutions that he developed to deal with them, which led him to continue to prefer black and white.

When you post black and white pictures in this day and age of your hiking trips, you just look like a poser.  We all know that 1) you took those pictures in color, because you don't have a black and white film camera, 2) you turned it either black and white or sepia in Photoshop or some other comparable image manipulation software.  It's not a question of some artistic technique, it's a quick drop down menu, and 3) it looks better in color.

I seriously wish hikers would knock it off with the fake Ansel Adams black and white shots.  They look ridiculous by now.

Ansel Adams' famous shot of the Tetons and Snake River

A modern color shot from almost exactly the same spot—albeit admittedly with much less dramatic lighting in the sky.

PCT

Last night I watched the Pacific Crest Trail documentary made nearly ten years ago by National Geographic.  It's a bit cheesy, and focuses too much on "human interest" stories that—honestly—aren't that interesting.  I bought this thing years ago, and I watch it from time to time, mostly because it's short and plays quickly, while showing some great scenery.  That said, most of the people that it focuses on are not very likable (they really seem to think that the stubby packrat girl is cute or something, but I find her irritating.)  Honestly, I've had better experiences watching amateur thru-hikers on YouTube, although a lot of those folks are weird too.  I wonder, sometimes, if what motivates people to do those YouTube videos is some kind of social dysfunction and desperate need for attention, but some of them are tons worse than others.  Usually, but not necessarily, watching the videos by guys is better than watching the videos by girls, because the guys will tend to focus more on the actual trail and the scenery, and the experience, while for most of the girls, it's all a "Look at me!" exercise.  But that's only a trend, not an absolute, so caveat emptor.  In spite of the technical difficulties he has in the first video or two, I think I like Backcountry Banter's PCT and CDT hikes series the best.  Homemade Wanderlust does OK, although she does tend to do more "Look at Me While I lecture you about something idiotic," moments than I'd like.  But she does also actually show the trail, the scenery and the experience better than most even so.  And Baskets is pretty good too; his videography is as good as anyone's, and he really focuses on the experience of hiking—although sometimes he obsesses maybe a little more than most about what day it is, exactly how many miles he's walking, his water sources, etc. and while I actually really appreciate that he hooked up with that guy Nope and kind of took care of him, I didn't find Nope a very compelling character to watch in the youtube channel, if that makes sense. Not that that's all he is, which is why what Baskets did in taking him on and staying with him so long is so admirable, and I can really respect that.  I've only watched his CDT video, but he's done an AT one in 2017, and he's doing it again this year.  With a more charismatic hiking companion, although they're kinda coy about exactly the nature of their relationship.  His female "hiking companion" that stays with him all of the time and sleeps in his tent?  Hmmm...

An interesting thing about the National Geographic video is that it's also sloppy in its claims and inferences.  It suggests very strongly, and unless you know better, you'd believe this based on what they claim, that the PCT spends the better part of 500 miles trekking through the Mojave Desert, which is the hottest desert in North America.  Neither of those inferences are really true; the PCT skirts the edge of the desert but doesn't really go through it; it goes through the semi-desert mountains and chaparral of Southern California without going through the actual boundaries of the actual desert.  Plus, the Mojave is normally considered a high desert and is relatively cool compared to, say, the Sonoran or Chihuahuan deserts.  On the other hand, Death Valley is in the Mojave Desert, and it is a singularly super-hot location because of its super-low elevation.

So due to a nit-picky technicality, I think they can get away with making a claim that's factually incorrect in general about the Mojave Desert.  But they're still on the hook for suggesting that the trail plunges right through the desert rather than avoiding it by staying in the higher, wetter country around it.

Hiking 2019

I don't talk all that much about hiking anymore.  Part of that is because I have a blog specifically dedicated to hiking (http://lonestarhiker.blogspot.com/) but even there I haven't talked about it much lately either.  For a number of reasons, my yearly hiking trips have been a bit scarce the last two years; 2017 I actually went to the West Elks about a year ago, near Gunnison Colorado.  Late September, actually.  Fall color hadn't quite peaked, but I had beautiful weather rather than being cold and wet, as I could have been.  All in all, I can hardly complain at all about that hike, except that it was a bit drier than I expected, and as is sometimes my wont, I bit off more than I was really in the mood to chew on because hiking all day and seeing new things all the time sounds great when I'm in the planning stage, but less so when I'm actually there.  2018 was a bust year for hiking, because we went to Hawaii and I went rafting on the New River Gorge with a bunch of teenagers and stuff.  Not that I don't like doing that, because I did, but those two trips alone consumed three weeks of vacation, and when some family commitments and other things got mixed in, that left me without a spare week to go out west and hike.  This has actually been harder for me than I thought.  I recently ditched Facebook (although i haven't canceled my account like I probably should; I just got rid of the app on my phone and haven't logged on from a PC in weeks) and my blogging and online activity in general has slowed, oh, for years, really.  But being completely unplugged for a while is wonderful.

For that matter, I don't really like people in person all that much sometimes either.  Although I've taught myself, mostly, to be outgoing and social, I do so because it's a learned skill, not because it comes naturally to me.  And, frankly, I don't always like it very much.  I find I usually do better by myself.  It's one of the things that I like most about hiking; the solitude and the quiet, quite honestly.  But I also love the outdoors, especially the Western outdoors.  Although I usually tell people, only partially joking, that I'm a native Texan; the son of the exact same type of stock that settled Texas in the first place, but I'm probably also formed somewhat by events of the last few generations.  When my family joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, it was still at a time when people gathered physically, so my great-grandfather actually picked up from his home in the backwoods of the American South and moved to the frontier (although it was very rapidly becoming not much like a frontier anymore by that time.)  Southerners, especially the descendants of the backwoods Southerners (as opposed to the plantation Southerners) are my people, and I feel most at home culturally with them, but the West and Southwest is my true home, even though I find many of the people there, especially in the Utah centered "Mormon West" to be little more than Yankees in a better setting.  They have all of the foibles associated with the Yankees of more traditional Yankee territory in New England—nannying busybodies and community-scale totalitarians, too focused on "right-thinking" policing and virtue-signaling and with only a dim understanding of the concept of individual sovereignty.  Luckily, the more rural folks have an environment that mitigates this to a great extent, but in the urban and suburban communities... ugh.  My son and his wife, who is also a solid, multi-generational Texan herself, and so he gets her and vice versa much better than someone from another cultural tradition ever would, have lived in a college town in the West for a couple of years now, and they're still shocked sometimes by the busybodyish nature of life there, and their earlier enchantment with many aspects of the community has faded somewhat due to the incompatible cultural personality of the locals.  Sigh.

So, I find that the West and Southwest feels like home to me.  Wandering around the small towns, hiking, camping, sightseeing, I feel like I've been a stranger my whole life to everywhere else I've been, in some ways.  Until I start interacting beyond a certain threshold with the people.  There, I feel like the smaller town in Texas I grew up with and similar places in backwoods Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina, etc.—y'know, the places my actual ancestors come from—I feel at home with those people, if not necessarily in love with the place.  And even that is, of course, under siege, because so many people live in those states now, especially in the larger cities, who have no cultural or genetic connection to the place, so they don't behave like the true locals.  They're colonizers and strangers, even if they've been there for decades.

Of course, where I live now, I'm surrounded by Yankee scenery and actual Yankees all the time, so it's lose/lose in some ways except when I'm talking to my better friends, many of whom, if they aren't the descendants of Appalachian Borderers themselves like me, are at least iconoclast in their personality type.  But there is no ideal place for me to live; I can either pick the people I get along with the best and hope that that doesn't change, or I can pick the scenery and environment that I prefer and take second-best rural Westerners as neighbors rather than Southerners.

Here's a couple of pictures from my last hike in the West Elks.

Here's a few pictures I took while spending the day at Palo Duro Canyon.  Maybe parts of West Texas would be ideal for me, or at least they would have been a generation or two ago before they got swarmed by migrants and colonizers from south of the border.

And the trip I took with my 17 year old three years ago.  When he was still actually not quite 14, and therefore not invited to participate in High Adventure, even though he was between his 8th grade and freshmen years.  At first that kinda ticked me off, but I got over it, in part because it gave me the excuse to take him with me on a solo trip anyway.

Of course, when I started typing this, I wasn't intending to ramble on about why I don't like people, what people specifically I don't like, and how I get away from them so I can come back ready to deal with them again for another several months, or whatever.  I was going to talk about what I hope to do in 2019 and maybe 2020.

I do have a few family commitments that will require some vacation time; a cruise to the Virgin Islands and elsewhere in the Caribbean, I think, is on the itinerary for around Spring Break time (or maybe it's a little later, early in the summer.  I can't remember.)  There will be requests on my time for High Adventure, since I'm in the Stake YM's presidency, although the nature of how we're doing it this year means that I might not be required to go, unless my own son goes.  (My youngest is a Type I diabetic, and although he's gotten pretty good at managing his blood sugar on his own now, my wife still can't handle the thought of him going on a trip like that without my direct supervision.  And he probably does still need it.  He's barely 15, after all.)  But it's not clear (yet) that we'll do that or won't.  This may be influenced also by the fact that a good friend of mine has been trying to reserve some time to go backpacking at Isle Royale with me, and my wife is even interested in going(!) and we've nailed down this summer as the time when this will finally happen.

All in all, that books at least ¾ of my vacation for the year, so my intention is to reserve the rest of it for a hiking trip.  But what to do?  And when?  Summers are always kind of tough because there's so many other things going on, but of course, it's the best time (only time, you could say, if you extend summer into at latest early October) to see the mountains.  But I also love the desert, which gives me the spring and fall, and maybe even the winter to some degree, depending on which desert I'm willing to go visit.  Fall also looks possibly rough; my oldest son still at home will have just graduated high school, will turn 18, and will leave on his mission service for the Church.  My wife will no doubt feel sad and lonely about him going.  Although I did take a backpacking trip shortly after my oldest son left for this same service in 2014, in retrospect, maybe it wasn't the best time to go.

I think my options boil down to maybe three possibilities:

1. I could go for my birthday in January or early February to West Texas and see either Guadalupe National Park or Big Bend National Park a lot better than I did in the past.  I could use my folks' house in Lubbock as a kind of base from which to strike out, although I don't really need a base, and Lubbock is hardly close to Big Bend, and not really all that close to the Guadalupe Mountains either (7 hours vs 6 hours driving.)  I also have a brother who lives in Phoenix; if I flew to Phoenix and got him or his wife to drop me off at Saguaro National Park or the Supes or something, I could make a trip out of that too.
2. I need to check on the timing of our cruise, but no matter what it is, I can probably work out some kind of Colorado Plateau trip in the spring and/or early summer.  The Needles district of Canyonlands National park beckons, for instance, or a more thorough exploration of Arches (although ugh, the people.)  Capital Reef National Park is a quiet one, although a bit farther, and a bit closer and many hours less driving gets me Colorado National Monument in Grand Junction.  Of course, there's also plenty of opportunities on BLM land or elsewhere in the same general vicinity of southern Utah and/or western Colorado from as far north as Dinosaur National Monument, to well into New Mexico and Arizona.  And as a potential spoiler, it would be fun (and closer) to do something very different from either, and explore the Black Hills, Badlands or Theodore Roosevelt National Parks too during this same time frame (April/May, probably.)
3. August could potentially be viable too, which gives me all of the Rockies options.  There are so many; I'm not sure which ones I'd favor at this point.  Leading contenders at this point in time include a return to different areas of the Uintas, the West Elks of Colorado, the Sneffels area, and the Wind Rivers

Arizona Trail Thru-hike

Although I don't talk about my hobby of hiking here all that often, it is still one of my favorite things to do, especially in the American west and southwest, which I consider my true home (as opposed to the upper Midwest where work has me living.  Not that I'm not happy enough living where I live, but I don't get out and hike very many weekends in Michigan or Ohio, needless to say, when it's the deserts and mountains of the Rockies and the Colorado Plateau that I love.)

Here's a long-distance hike that's maybe a bit more doable for someone like me that can't afford to take half the year off to do one of the "big" hikes of the Triple Crown; the Arizona Trail.  At 800 miles, it's only a third the length of the Pacific Crest Trail or the Continental Divide Trail, although it offers a very similar experience to the first third of either of those, in many ways.  Plus, taking a 6-8 week sabbatical from work is a more doable option than a six month sabbatical, I think (not that I've done any investigation whatsoever into what's required for either.  I just know that 6-8 weeks of unpaid leave is more affordable than six months of it.)

Chris Berry, or @hikerslim, is the guy hiking this YouTube compilation of the trail.  I really like how he's by himself.  To so many hikers, getting into the "hiking community" and moving as a group seems to be part of the experience; I don't like that.  If I take a group of friends and family with me, that's one thing, but otherwise, I don't want to meet up with people that I only know by their trail names and we travel together.  If this is a true solo hiking experience, it's already much more appealing than even the CDT or PCT, and certainly much more appealing than the AT.

He seems like a nice guy.  Much of his commentary is fairly mundane, even banal, but he says it with a smile and a mild attitude that reminds me of a slightly hippier version of Bob Ross or Mr. Rogers.  It's a relatively enjoyable experience to hear him talk about how clear he expects the water in an upcoming stock tank to be compared to the stream he just filled up in, or giving oddly precise mileage counters as he obsesses over the starts and stops of the "passages" as defined by the Arizona Trail Association.  Very relaxing.  Pleasant fella.  I do laugh a bit at his constant discussion about passage starts and stops, which in most respects are somewhat arbitrary anyway.  Unless you're stopping for a night in town, or a resupply, then crossing a passage boundary means very little, after all.

Of course, I've probably ruined the experience—because his videos don't have a musical soundtrack; just his talking (plus the occasional bird call or wind noise, although his gear does a good job of keeping that down) I've gotten to playing background music on my own with Windows Media Player, and the experience is somewhat less relaxing, needless to say, when you've got face-melting acid techno like "Mad Cows on Acid" or "Acid Air Raid" playing in the background.  Oh, well.  Why not?  He doesn't really say anything except whether or not he's stopping for water or not, whether or not he's stopping to make camp or not, and whether or not he's passing the end of the passage or not.  You can get that without the audio from context, for the most part.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoxRGRZrEckxAg05-MansFK7RbFZ0c8W3

As an aside, if I ever do hike the Arizona Trail, and make a video diary of it, I will almost certainly avoid the hiker video cliches of recording my feet from directly above; a view that consistently gives me a headache to try and watch, and I'll probably actually stop and talk, rather than hold out my camera or phone and record myself walking.  I also doubt that I'll put my phone down on a mini tripod and take a video of myself walking past it, because then I'll just have to go back, get the phone, and trim that out anyway.  I tend to think; who really wants to look at me, anyway?