Canyoneering
Our recent trip to the canyon lands of the western United States was a feast of spectacular panoramas. We started at Bryce Canyon, jogged over to Zion National Park, rerouted to the Grand Canyon, then day tripped to Oak Creek Canyon. We stayed in small towns including Kanab (Utah), Springdale (Utah), Williams (Arizona), Sedona (Arizona), Pangewich (Utah). You can still get a nice, clean motel room in some of these towns for - hold on to your hats - $39.00/night double occupancy! 
Most of our hikes were in 100 plus degree temperatures. The rim at the Grand Canyon which sits at about 7000 feet above sea level was a pleasant 105 degrees. A mile down, or so, the thermometer was hitting 115 degrees. On one of our hikes into the big canyon we stepped aside to allow one of the mule-trains-in-training pass. 
The sign in the background warns hikers to stand to the inside of the trail when being pass by mules. Makes sense to me. A few weeks earlier someone ignored the sign to pet one of the mules from the outside of the trail. The mule sort of pushed him off the cliff. Luckily it’s only a thousand feet down from this point…
As beautiful as the Grand Canyon truly is, I’d still have to give the awards for most “Awsome” views to Bryce Canyon. From the fairy-like toadstool shapes and driving colors, it is my favorite. At 9000 feet above sea level, it really takes your breath away and requires some acclimatizing to get used to the 38 percent lower oxygen level at that altitude. Luckily, I carried my asthma inhalator with me, because coming back up from the 6500 foot level tested my lungs pretty heavily.
I actually came down with altitude sickness for a day or so. At these temperatures I was going through 150 ounces of liquids in a 4 mile hike. Had to take salt tablets to boot because even 150 ounces will leave you dehydrated at these temps. The trick is to hydrate and eat salty high protein food regularly. I used beef jerky and Gatorade to fill that bill. Speaking of bills, the National Parks are so overpriced when it comes to food, you’d better have a hefty bank account. Who says businesses gouge the public at these places? The park service does a better job. And don’t forget, you’re already subsidizing the feds with your tax dollars - thank you very much.
All said, it was still a remarkable journey. I am thinking we probably hiked, walked, tripped, fell, stumbled somewhere around 25 miles altogether. No blisters. Milage was 3100 round trip. I’ll be putting all the pictures onto CD. Video is still being looked at. We’ll put more up on the blog as time goes on.
Changing of the Guard
We launched our new Website Monday, July 23 at about 6:00am. For the most part it has been painless - a few misspellings, a couple of wayward images. We felt a need to clean up a lot of work and then meld the information on our Flash-based site into a much more friendly and quick loading format. Websites are a lot like closets. When you first move into a new house the closets are neat and tidy. After about 6 months, there’s no room left and it’s all a clutter.
Our site was like our livingroom closet. Some things we jettisoned such as the old calendar and the Flash calendar. They just never received enough hits to justify the upkeep. The old “About” page was pretty much information covered in a couple of other pages, so we opted out of that redundancy. And the look was too “yesterday”. We are now concentrating on the blog.
After a lot of thought it just seemed too few people were doing too much work, and there simply were not the numbers showing up at our monthly meetings held at Hannah Bea’s Poundcake & More. Miss Anita & Saan were working long hours as it was, adding these meetings once a month was really going beyond the call. In January and February we had the biggest crowds ever. It looked like folks were starting to see the value we were bringing into the small business community, but then the numbers rolled back to what we had seen in the early phases of the forum. That was not encouraging. We made the decision to continue the blog, but bring folks into our studio to tell about their business. We’ll upload the video for viewing as usual.
We would like to thank the many outstanding speakers who have graced our project over the last year. If we forget anyone, be sure to let us know. It certainly is not intentional. Thank you to: Sunshine Dixon, Della Rosenthal, S. Renee Mitchell, Shareefah Abdullah, Dr. Laura Torgerson, Stewart Kent, Anne Denecke, James Gordon, Lisa Arveneaux, John Doherty, Edwina Wasson, Don Anderson, Naim Hasan, Pamela Weatherspoon, Bridget Sullivan, Gordon & Terry Burkett, Yvonne Payne. And not to be left out by any means, Miss Anita R. Smith and Saan Patterson without who’s help and support none of this would have ever happened.
Small Business Forum - July 2007
Each month seems to roll around pretty fast. It doesn’t seem all too long ago we were getting ready for our trip to Bryce Canyon and beyond. Now it’s July and I have thousands of photographs and hours of video footage to edit from our trip. Where to start?
I am thinking about changing the format of this blog. Over the next couple of months I hope to introduce more small business owners to the community. We’ll be putting together short videos of businesses and making them available for download and reference. I am sure we will continue to bring outstanding speakers on the hot button issues businesses deal with. In the meantime we’ll be editing and pouring over the photos and video from our trip. Til next time…
