joshmorton.com

I got out my old desktop today, and after a little magic managed to get it to a point where it would function well enough to move all my old files off it. I didn’t care for most of them, but there was about 2GB of pictures I desperately wanted from it, and sure enough, I finally got them all off. So in light of yesterday’s pics, which I handily labeled ‘part 1,’ here are some more random pics, part deux. If you watch carefully, you can see me get fat as college goes on

Lakeview H.S. class of 2002 (Altos de Chavon, Dominican Republic)

Ben, me, Ryan, and Aeron… the youth group seniors.

Yep, Rupert Jee and I are good friends. (NYC)

Colts vs. Broncos, 2003 Playoffs. What an incredible game.

Walter Scott’s home in Scotland.

The guys on Harney Peak in SD. This one’s on my wall, I love it.

Jon Billings was expressing his disappointment at Yellowstone NP, so I thought I would demonstrate how great Wyoming can be when you go to the right part of it. Check it out:

Our first look at the Tetons

South Teton, Middle Teton, and Grand Teton


We had the friendly woodchuck take this one.

In other news, joshmorton.com had a great month even though it was forsaken all summer. I logged almost 5,000 hits from August 11 to the 31st (August 11 is when I switched over to my new hosting company, so I have no records prior to that). At that pace, I would have broken my record from April! Thanks for reading!

As many of you have noticed and pointed out to me, I haven’t been writing recently. Well, for any of you who may still look from time to time, I just want you to know that I am off for the summer. Traveling makes it rather difficult just to stay connected, let alone find the time to post on the ol’ website. So, until August, I take my leave of you. When I get back, the website will probably go through a period of change so that I can transform it more into what I envision it to be. One thing I would like to do is write a weekly article. Basically this is the first step in my ultimate desire to be a published author, and I will probably create a website dedicated to my once a week articles I will write beginning in the fall. My personal site will then hopefully become more user friendly, and allow people to post freely without the pains and struggles of using blogger.com.

So for the summer, feel free to check back as often as you like. But if you’re a betting person, I would bet on the website staying pretty much the same for the summer.

Just don’t forget to visit again when summer is over!!!

Friday, May 6 2128 CDT
32,000 ft. - somewhere over Missouri

Our grand trip came to its grand end today, and as much fun as it was (and it was a whole lot of fun) I am certainly glad to be out of the car and done with the 50+ hours of driving we did. At the moment, I’m on American Airlines flight 1288 to Phoenix to meet my stepdad, Richard. My mom and sister should be in Denver, about ready to take the second leg of their flight in to Phoenix. Kinda funny that I was just there, and now they’re in Denver, too.

Anyways, when I last left you we were on our way to Rapid City, SD to meet up with one of my all time best friends, Nate Lail, and spend a day in his home town. We arrived there about 6:30 in the evening, met with Nate, and then went to his dad’s house for dinner. We ate and chatted, and I talked with Jocelyn, Nate’s sister, about our project for Dr. Lennox’s class and how he said himself that our encyclopedia was the best in the class. Yay…all that hard work paid off, I suppose.

We left Rapid and went out into the Black Hills, which I believe is one of my favorite places in the world. We camped the night, complete with roasted hot dogs and two games of poker (what is camping without a little Texas Hold’em?) Then slept very soundly until the next morning. Our morning hike was of Mount Baldy, which is right next to Mount Rushmore. It’s a great hike of about 5 miles, and includes not only your standard trail hiking, but culminates in about 200 feet of bouldering (rock climbing, but not the kind you need gear for) to get to the top.

We also did part of the Sylvan Lake trail, which basically leads to a really cool cave that we climbed down in. You climb up 150 feet or so, and then once you get to the top of rock, then you climb back down about 50 of that into a small cavern, and then squeeze through a really narrow corridor, and then end with a really hard maneuver to get into the final cavern. All in all the whole thing probably takes an hour, and you don’t necessarily go very far.. but parts can be extremely challenging, and the fun part about the cave is the way you have to rely on others to get up and down. It was the only part of our trip where it took everyone working together to get to the destination—and it was a lot of fun.

After climbing, we did some driving through the hills before ending up at Hill City, where the Alpine Inn Restaurant is. One of my all-time favorite restaurants, they serve two menu choices: small and large. It’s a bacon-wrapped fillet mignon, with a baked potato and salad. The salad is fun because all they do is cut up a lettuce head into quarters, and then give you a quarter of a lettuce head with dressing on top. It’s really good, and very much unique. The steak is amazing, and what really seals off the meal is the dessert, which is made in house and unique to this one restaurant, and no where else in the world. It’s amazing. Sheer amazing.

The five of us ate with Nate’s mom, grandma, and Jocelyn. It was a lot of fun, because Nate’s whole family is just a lot of fun to be around. It’s especially great when Nate and his mom start getting into a verbal “war” of sorts (all in love, of course …things can only get funnier when that happens. Mama Lail paid for our dinner, a very blessed surprise, and then we all went and crashed at her house for a couple of hours, took showers, and prepared for a very long car ride back.

We left shortly after 11pm from Rapid City, and began our way home. I drove for about 150 miles, and eventually got to the point where I was fighting sleep too much, so Eric and I switched places. For the time I was driving, and about the first 50 miles Eric drove, we talked about anything and everything, no matter how silly, just to keep ourselves awake. So at first I tried to keep talking with Eric while he was driving, but as the night wore on me, I began to say things which just didn’t make any sense at all, such as “The chef got unclipped, and we could also get unclipped when you’re rock climbing, or driving in a car, you know.” And then I would insist that I was making perfect sense and that Eric just wasn’t paying attention to me. But eventually he told me to shutup and go to sleep, and he downed 60 ounces of energy drinks over 8 hours and drove us all the way to Wisconsin. I sure am glad he had the ability to do it, because none of the rest of us did.

We eventually got to Justin’s house, where his mom had lunch for us and warm showers for those of us who wanted them. We rested for a while, figured our final numbers on trip cost, and then got ready to go the rest of the way home. Our trip came in $150 under budget, thanks in large part to the Jones family’s donation of food, and much better than expected gas mileage in the west, as well as a few things here and there, all of which added up over the week. So, the trip ended up costing me just $158, an amazing price for 3500+ miles of driving, four days of camping, and food for all of those days, as well.

We left Justin’s house a little after four, and I was in O’Hare a little after 6:30. I checked in, and was actually through security and my way to the gate before 7. I had over an hour until boarding, which gave me time to grab some dinner, and also talk to Steph for about a half hour while I was waiting (which was great, because for all the times I had tried I hadn’t been able to talk to her since Monday :). There are very few open seats on the plane, but I happen to be sitting next to one. On the other side of that is a very nice lady from Kankakee, IL. She is on her way to Phoenix to see the birth of her first great-grandchild. This is her first time flying alone, and it’s been quite a while since last time she was in an airplane, so we chatted on the tarmac and during takeoff, just to pass the time and ease nerves. The weather has been hit or miss up here. Right now we’re in some clouds and I can’t see a thing, but it has also been clear, and I even got to see a couple of lightning storms off in the distance when we were leaving Chicago. Our flight is about 20 minutes ahead of schedule, so may actually get into Phoenix before my mom and sister do.

Eric and I are already talking about taking another trip next year. It may be of a slightly different nature, but we definitely want to do something similar again next year, when I’m graduated and ready to move into the next chapter of my life…very, very scary.

So long, farewell, and all those things they say in Sound of Music.

Wednesday, May 4 1251MDT
About 50 miles west of Casper, WY

We’re stopped on the road somewhere west of Casper, Wyoming at this moment. We’re passing through some road construction, and the highway is down to only one lane of traffic. We’re on our way to Rapid City, a day earlier than originally planned—but I’ll get to that in a second. Justin took the wheel from camp in the Grand Tetons, and has been driving for about 200 miles now. About an hour ago, he got pulled over and got out first speeding ticket of the trip, and I pray our only one. It was more a luck of the draw thing… I’ve been going 80 down pretty much all of the highways in Wyoming, and he was doing the same, he just happened to drive by a cop while he was doing it. Honestly, it’s very hard not to go that fast, it’s so wide open out here.

Yesterday we woke up around 8:30, got ready for the day, and then went out on our second hike of the trip. Most of the trails in Grand Teton N.P. were completely snowed over, so we took one of about four different choices we had. It was about a 4.5 mile hike around Taggart Lake, with about 500’ of elevation change altogether. The hike was gorgeous—the first half looking out over the Teton mountains, and the second half was completely different scenery than the first half. About 2 miles in, we watched the rain come over the mountains and dump on us, but it only lasted a few minutes, and then the sun came back out. When we finished that hike, we drove to another trailhead, but stopped shortly into our hike, because of the weather. Combs and I had a fairly bad feeling about what was coming over the mountains, and considering our lack of appropriate gear, I believe we made a good decision in stopping.

After a night of hamburgers and poker, we got ready to go to bed, only to find that half our tent was soaked with water. Eventually we decided to sleep three really close together, and then I slept at their feet, where the tent was still dry. It rained, sleeted, and snowed all night long, and we woke up to a light dusting of snow, and a lot of wet ground. The weather was apparently unpredictable today, with the weather radio giving us options all the way from high 50s and thunderstorms to 30s and snowstorms. So we packed up camp, gave Nate Lail a call, and are now on our way to the Black Hills, where we’ll camp tonight and hike tomorrow. There are a couple of different options we have for hiking, although I’m particularly fond of climbing up to the top of Harney Peak, which is where we climbed last year when I went with a different group of people hiking through the Black Hills. Harney is the tallest point between the Rockies and the Pyrenees Mountains, and the view from there is breathtaking. It’s also an incredible hike.

For all of you who were on the trip last year, I just saw our first Wall Drug sign—some 400 miles west of Wall, SD. Amazing.

I talked to Stephanie for a little while yesterday, and she got her new car, which is awesome. I’m really excited for her, although it might be a long time before I ever get to see it. It only had 13 miles on it when she got it. Incredible. For the curious, she got a yellow 2005 Chevy Cobalt. I’ve never been in a cobalt before, so I’m not exactly sure how big they are inside, but they look cool enough from the outside. She leaves for Virginia this weekend, and she’ll be gone all summer working there and enjoying some time back at where she considers home. I know Lindsay really wants her to come to the wedding next Friday (the one I’m flying back from Phoenix to be at). And of course, I would love to see her there, as well…but it’s a long trip, and it’s only a week after she goes the first time, so I don’t really expect her to be there. Oh well.

The landscape out here is gorgeous, especially Wyoming. There’s such a wide variety of landscapes. At times during the drive today, the left side of the car would be red rock faces, like you expect to see in the southwest, and on the other side would be huge alpine forest covering mountainsides. We drove through canyons, hiked on mountains, drove by winding streams in grassy fields, and now are driving through a flat, arid basin with mountains to the south and all sorts of random rock faces and what not. We truly have seen some incredibly beautiful parts of the country in the past couple of days. Estes Park was gorgeous, Grand Teton N.P. was astounding…there just isn’t words to describe all the beautiful things we’ve seen the last few days, and I know there are more ahead of us as we make our way to Rapid City.

You just can’t help but be amazed by God’s creation when you go on a trip like this. We spread out during our hike yesterday, and each of us took the trail on our own pace, which gave us all some good, quality private time. I took care of some business with God, and also spent a large part of that quiet time just looking and listening for him—in the beautiful mountains, and the song of his creatures, and in the sound of the rain coming and the gleam of the sun breaking through clouds. His creation is so amazing, and is always praising him, and it is incredible. I so much enjoyed just talking with him and being in his presence during that hike! Our God truly is an incredible God. I only hope I live in a way that is honoring and worshiping to him.

I have some great pics to show you when I get home.

Sunday, May 1
Estes Park, CO (Rocky Mountain National Park)

We’re in Estes Park, Colorado, which is quite possibly one of the most beautiful places in the entire country. We got here around 4, and found the info center for RMNP by 4:30. There’s roughly 6-8 inches of snow on the ground, and no more than three other groups camping in the entire park, none of which are doing it the tent way. It’s in the high twenties up at our campsite, so after setting up our tent we came back down to the town to hang out at none other than Starbucks, literally the only place open. And of course, Starbuck’s has wireless internet, too.. thus I am quite content here, even if my colleagues are itching to get bac to camp and play poker.

Since that is the case, I won’t write long today… I’ll save it for the car ride tomorrow. But just so you know, all is well–though not quite as expected–in the Rocky Mountains. It’s beautiful thanks to the 8 inches of snow, but we didn’t exacty expect 8 inches of snow, either. We’ll leave in the morning for Wyoming, and I hope to leave you more then. For now, here’s what it looks like where we’re camping: