update: photo essays are up!

The photo essays are up—the photos, anyway, if not all the commentary.  If I do add remarks to the pics (which promises to take a million years), I'll do so quietly and unannounced, so it'll be up to you to decide whether you want to wade through a sea of photos a second or third time just to catch the added verbiage.  I assume most of you will not want to do this; it's hard to enough to slog through someone else's slide show without getting bored.  And truth be told, I'm not looking forward to adding tons of prose to twenty-some days' worth of visual narrative.  So the commentary will happen when it happens.  Don't hold your breath.  In the meantime, feel free to go through the photo essays as they are now; if you have questions about any of the pics, leave them in the comments, and I'll do my best to explain them.  Enjoy!

And now, I'll turn my attention to writing the epilogue to this adventure.  Look out for that sometime during the coming week.

PS:  I've learned that there are indeed snakes other than rattlesnakes that twitch their tails when threatened.  See more here.  This was an educational bit of research, and it's obvious—if it wasn't before—that the tail-twitching snakes I'd encountered on the trail were not rattlers.