That's a freakishly huge drop.


I'm still in therapy from taking this photo....


Now here's an interesting side trip into the slot canyons of the human mind. I'm riding along and I see a big yellow bull snake in the road. So I stop and take some photos, thinking others will see the snake too. But everyone rode right by. No one else noticed it.  I have a theory:

Supposedly when Christopher Columbus' ships popped up over the horizon, the native Americans didn't see them because they simply did not have a mental construct that included ocean going vessels. I'm not sure if I believe that, but if we accept the basis of that hypothesis, I submit that this snake may have registered in the brains of my fellow riders, but no one wanted to see it, so it wasn't seen.  I rolled up to the next stop, halfway convinced that maybe there was no snake at all and I was the one hallucinating. But there it was, preserved in digital memory. One of the girls jumped back several feet from the camera when I showed her the picture of her next to the snake.







The Hardscrabble climb, with the Cleric's Pride in the background.


This pic sort of reminds me of this picture taken halfway around the world.