The bad news is I won't be updating this photoblog anymore. The good news is it's only because I've finally created my own which is now incorporated into my web site at www.cavaroc.com/plog/. Please update your bookmarks and links.

Thanks!

Tom's Thumb is a rather adventurous hike located in the McDowell Mountains northeast of Scottsdale. The hike is on the other side of the mountains it's a pretty rough road to get to the trailhead. Once on the trail there are boulders to climb, bushes to avoid getting scratched by and a trail that seems to disappear a lot. The trail is actually very makeshift in places especially once you get to the top of the mountains and are making your way toward Tom's Thumb. The view however is amazing and makes it all worth it. There's also a couple of neat little caves where large boulders hang or are supported up by other boulders. This is taken looking northeast from the Tom's Thumb which is the large boulder extending out of the left of the photo. It's stitched together from 9 photos originally.

These photos are of my parents house in New Orleans and a couple others are a couple of houses away. This is what my parents house and neighborhood looks like four months after Hurricane Katrina. These are all in uptown New Orleans and no post-processing has been done on them just yet. Plenty more are on the way of other areas of uptown.

I was a little disappointed in the weather when we started our ascent up the Echo Trail of Camelback Mountain. From there it only got drearier and the brown cloud of pollution that sometimes comes out was making a pretty prominent appearance. I wasn't really too excited about the conditions until I started playing with a couple of the photos when I got home and wound up with these two. It makes me wish that I had taken more.

Last weekend a couple of friends and I headed up to Camp Verde to visit the Out of Africa Safari Park. It's a really neat park with a lot of expansion in the works. We also discovered while we there on that Sunday that on Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays they let people watch them feed the carnivores. I unfortunately didn't get as many pictures as I would have liked because my battery was only half-charged and went to low after ony a few minutes there. So I only got one or two shots of each area. Luckily there were lots of tigers.

The fire in this area this past summer took out a lot of the plant life that lived here. I hadn't been back here since before then and it looked entirely different. This was taken on my out as I was coming up over the hill.

Well my First Friday show has come and gone after having an insane last week involving lost sleep, stress, 3 stitches in my right index finger and all sorts of last minute shenanigans, I decided to take a small road trip into one of my favorite areas: Tonto National Forest. It wouldn't be a long one though, the last gas station along the way wouldn't take my debit card so i was stuck with only about 1/4 of a tank. Oh well. I got some good shots anyway. More to come also!

This is a 14 photo panorama taken of Phoenix at night on top of Squaw Peak in the Phoenix Mountains. For those familiar with the area, or wanting to learn, the big highway running across the middle is highway 51. To the left is South, straight ahead is West and to the right is North. The two main roads coming toward the camera are Glendale Ave and Northern, respectively. The small red light floating in the left of the image are actually the towers on the South Mountains. In the hi-res version you can also see the 101 and I-17 north of the 101 in the distance.