Cliffs and guns: two new lows

Our neighbour and Morwenna's friend Eden is off to Hawaii today for Christmas and we are looking after her enormous rabbit Pepito, and inheriting their Christmas tree.  President Obama is also in Hawaii, and I hope he is having a good Christmas.  I am imagining him with his head sunk in his hands, as he tries to work out how to make progress when he has to deal with the Republican party and the NRA (National Rifle Association).  

The Republicans have flatly refused to raise taxes on millionaires, and the NRA's response to the Connecticut shootings was to advocate armed guards in every elementary school.

No doubt this was reported in the UK.  But when your own children go to one of the elementary schools to which the NRA must be referring, it brings it home more.  How can these views be mainstream (the NRA has 4 million members) and yet so removed from rational thinking?  

After Dunblane in 1996, hand guns were banned in the UK.  Even a small step towards that here - e.g. changing licensing laws for automatic weapons, would be a victory for Obama.

Canyonlands

Small boy, big landscape.

Our route into the next canyon, to the left of the large butte on the right - improbably? 

Up the slick rock

Another album cover shot at our lunch spot.  Where's my head?

We had an amazing day in Canyonlands National Park in Utah.  It's a wild and remote park (as those of you who have seen the film '127 Hours' will know) and during our five hour walk we saw only a couple of people. We were glad to be hiking in November, as there isn't much shade, it's a desert and gets very hot in the summer.

We walked through one canyon and then had an exciting ascent on 'slick rock' over to another, with lunch with a view of both.  The scenery is a geologist's dream.  The whole area rests on a thick layer of salt from an evaporated sea, which was covered in sandstone by the next sea which came along. The sandstone is now being weathered by wind and ice into all sorts of weird and wonderful rock shapes.