Pioneer Names

After last weekend’s extravagant outing, we are enjoying an easy weekend this week. We took a half-day trip to Snow Canyon. (Some of the sandstone is white — like snow.) We saw a cliff where pioneers wrote their names in axle grease in the 1890s. At the bottom of the cliff, other people had written their names, much more recently. The names at the bottom of the cliff are graffiti. The names from the 1890s are a feature.

Snow Canyon

We also took a pleasant walk into a slot canyon. We walked all the way to the end. There was a low lookout nearby. It was quite nice, but it wasn’t quite awesome. I didn’t eat any meals in Snow Canyon.

There was unhappiness in Pipe Spring this week. Running a park is labor intensive. To keep costs down, the parks use a mixture of volunteers, seasonal workers, interns, and temporary contract workers. This keeps the number of permanent employees down. (You know, the kind of employees that get benefits like medical insurance.) The folks at Pipe Spring were bending the rules and hiring people for more months than they are allowed to work by reassigning the people to different jobs at different pay grades. This week, the results of an audit came back. They got wrapped on the knuckles rather hard. Several seasonal employees will be leaving earlier than they planned.

That’s about all the news this week. I hope this finds everybody doing well.