Nice pix! I think I've been up in that fire tower on a boy scout trip several centuries ago.

Nice pictures. Our kids go to church camp between Weed and Cloudcroft. The area is a beautiful Alpine island in a sea of desert.

You have a good one, Eric!

"It's gonna be a beautiful day in the 'hood!"

It sure is, isn't it? :D

Is it just my imagination, or is a certain segment of this country's population so darn cheerful all of a sudden?

I've noticed this everywhere I've been. Bookstores, supermarkets, public places in general.

There seems to be an unusual number of "happy smiles" around all of a sudden.

I was in line at Borders yesterday and this elderly man was waiting next to me with the "happy smile" humming a merry little tune. Humming, no less. I turned briefly, he took one look at my face and his smile got even bigger. Then he asked me, "You too, eh?"

"Yep", I answered. For some straaaange reason I had the "happy face" too.

As near as I can tell, it's something that's started only in the last couple of days or so.

I'm baffled.

Wallace, I think I saw your initials carved on a juniper! ;-)

Rob, we passed the church camp on our way into Cloudcroft. Well, now that I think about it, there are a couple of such camps on that road. One sits right on the highway; I think it's a Baptist encampment. Then I seem to recall another camp that's not visible from the road, but we saw the sign pointing to it. I don't remember the name or the denomination, though.

Mr. Freen, it is odd, isn't it? Yesterday, we parked next to a beater pickup at the trailhead where we started our hike. The pickup had two bumper stickers, one reading "Bush -- Liar" and the other was the standard "Kerry-Edwards" sticker. I found myself just smiling and moving on. (OK...I'll admit that for just a fleeting second, I wished I had a Marks-a-Lot to add "Loser" to the Kedwards sticker, to complete sort of a bookend symmetry to the decals. But, that would have been wrong. Fun, but wrong.)

Interestingly, Bush Mountain is one of the tallest peaks in the Guadalupe Mountain range. We thought about doing that hike, but it's much longer than we had time for. I wondered if the pickup driver was on that trail.