2006

The Christmas-New Years holidays allowed me to make great progress on processing panoramas and building web pages, as well as the conversion to fullscreen versions. All my panoramas taken up to December 2005 are now on the site.

A brilliant sunny weekend in January 2006 allowed me to greatly expand the guidebook to Big Sur and the Central Coast of California.

2005

There was a lot of activity on the site in 2005. It was a record year, with over 800 panoramas taken.

I finally caught up on all my panoramas in January 2005 - everything I had photographed up to that time was finally on the site, over 4000 VR panoramas. Well, everything except for some shot on film and never scanned, including the Big Island of Hawaii. I may never catch up on those.

I also began converting everything shot digitally (i.e. since March 2000) to fullscreen format. A special home page has been created for them - see Fullscreen versions of the panoramas.

The winter and spring of 2005 saw unusually heavy rains in California, especially in the deserts. I made several trips to photograph the wildflowers in February and March. They can be seen in the guidebooks to Death Valley National Park and The Southern Deserts of California, and the Carrizo Plain and Cuyama Valley sections of El Camino Real.

In March I suddenly realized that there was a national park in California that I had never been to! So my wife and I took the boat out to Santa Cruz Island in Channel Islands National Park, for a memorable three-day backpack. Later I went to Santa Catalina Island for a whole week. The results can be seen in the completely new Virtual Guidebook to the Channel Islands of California.

I made three trips to Yosemite in the summer: two long weekends; then a relatively relaxed week-long trip, which included a short backpack. My longest summer trip in 2005 took me east then north through Nevada and Idaho to Glacier National Park in Montana. From there I travelled through Kananaskis Country to Banff and Jasper National Parks.

Don