What the Hay!

I’ve added a new Haw Creek travel page and  on the What the Hay hay art contest in Montana, as well as a What the Hay photo gallery.

Note: some of the photo pages have links to larger versions of the images.

Held the second Sunday in September, What the Hay is a central Montana hay art contest stretching over 21 miles in Judith Basin County. It features around 50 or more creative hay bale sculptures in fields between the towns of Hobson  and Windham.

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wide display

I am implementing new photo galleries which will be used on the Haw Creek website in conjunction with travel pages on places we have visited.  The gallery pages are designed to be viewable with most browsers and computer displays.

Currently, the only galleries in place are from Arkansas:

• Buffalo National River

• Lake Fort Smith State Park

• Petit Jean State Park and Petit Jean Mountain

• Woolly Hollow State Park

narrow display

I will be adding more galleries from Wisconsin, Illinois, Wyoming, Montana, Texas, Utah, Colorado, and other places.

The travel pages associated with each gallery will provide useful content related to the places visited, including description, activities, phone numbers, directions and links to related, and useful, websites.

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In revising the “Haw Creek” website, I moved some RV content to a new page: Fifth Wheel Camping Trailers - Some History.

A fifth wheel trailer is a camper that is designed to be towed using a special hitch mounted in the bed of a pickup truck.  In this arrangement, the trailer is attached over the truck’s rear axle and wheels, which then supports a significant portion of the trailer’s weight.

The phrase fifth wheel refers to the connection of the trailer to the hitch in the bed of the truck. –more–

Continue reading about A new page: “Fifth Wheel Camping Trailers - Some History”

A new theme has been rolled out with revisions to the following pages:

Recreational Vehicles

• Class B Motorhomes and Vans
• Class C Motorhomes
• Fifth Wheel Trailers
• Travel Trailers
• Tear Drop Trailers
• Tent and Folding Trailers

Continue reading about Site page revisons

Continuing to make progress on the new Places and Images part of Haw Creek Outdoors, with a new index page and a renovated Buffalo National River page, including a small photo gallery of pictures taken in 2005.

Using flikr for photo storage and presentation really reduces the amount of time I have to spend working with the images. It should make it easier to publish while on the road in the future.

Continue reading about Buffalo National River - revised page

It’s been almost 2 weeks since I posted last. At that point I had intended to start posting material related to our trip out west here on the blog as well as building content pages and photo galleries on Haw Creek Outdoors.

I wasn’t satisfied with the process and wanted to figure something out a process that I could use for publishing material in a relatively short period of time.

Forty-eight hours ago, we were on our way home from a hike at a Woolly Hollow State Park north of Conway. Between then and now, I’ve edited all of the photos that I took and put together a new web-site format that will present the photos along with information about the place(s) where they were taken, with a fairly rapid turn-around.

The new format includes a wide center column where I’ll be including information and links relevant to the location that is being presented. Instead of having a separate photo gallery, the right hand column is used for that. Each image is linked to it’s respective page on flikr.com. An option is also provided to view the flikr slide show of my pictures.

Ideally, in the future, I’ll be able to research information in advance of our visit to a location and have the web page(s) up and ready for viewing much sooner than I’ve been able to do before this.

Continue reading about Figuring out a process… and making progress!

Judge, then, what must have been our astonishment, as we entered the basin at midafternoon of our second day’s travel, to see in the clear sunlight, at no great distance, an immense volume of clear, sparkling water projected into the air to the height of one hundred and twenty-five feet. “Geysers! geysers!” exclaimed one of our company, and, spurring our jaded horses, we soon gathered around this wonderful phenomenon. It was indeed a perfect geyser. The aperture through which the jet was projected was an irregular oval, three feet by seven in diameter. The margin of sinter was curiously piled up, and the exterior crust was filled with little hollows full of water, in which were small globules of sediment, some having gathered around bits of wood and other nuclei. This geyser is elevated thirty feet above the level of the surrounding plain, and the crater rises five or six feet above the mound. It spouted at regular intervals nine times during our stay, the columns of boiling water being thrown from ninety to one hundred and twenty-five feet at each discharge, which lasted from fifteen to twenty minutes. We gave it the name of “Old Faithful.”

(The Wonders of the Yellowstone by Nathaniel P. Langford of the Washburn Expedition, published June 1871 in Scribner’s Monthy.)

This is from the second of two articles that were published in 1871 about the journey that had been made into the Yellowstone country. I will be publishing the entire article at Haw Creek Outdoors in the Historical Perspectives section, where the first article and several other Yellowstone related vintage articles are published.

Continue reading about How “Old Faithful” got its name.

October 19, 2007

Updates:
motorcoaches and class A motorhomes: completely updated.

New Images:

• Lower or 2d Cañon of the Yellowstone by William Henry Jackson (1871)
• President Theodore Roosevelt at Liberty Cap (c. 1903)
• Cavalryman Guard at Midway Geyser Basin by Frances Benjamin Johnston (c. 1903)
• The Punch Bowl (c. 1918)

I’ve also added a new page called Site News Archive where older material from the Haw Creek Outdoors news column will be moved. The page will serve as a record of changes to the site.

October 17, 2007 10:32 P.M

• Wonders of Yellowstone by Nathaniel P. Langford (May 1871)

October 17, 2007 8:30 A.M.

New Yellowstone National Park material.

article:

• The Yellowstone Geysers by F. Francis (April 8, 1882)

Images:

• The Canyon of the Yellowstone by Thomas Moran
• Lower Falls of Yellowstone by Joshua Crissman (c. 1876)
• A jolly crowd enjoying the refreshing waters of Apollinalis Spring, (1905)
• Yellowstone River, Below Tower Falls (c. 1909 - 1932)
• Stagecoach (c. 1913)

Continue reading about Administrivia - Haw Creek Outdoors Updates and Additions

I started working today on updating the RV manufacturer pages on Haw Creek Outdoors and on the first site — Airstream — noticed a very big change.

The only motorized Airstream in the 2008 lineup is the Interstate — what Airstream calls a touring coach.

There’s no SkyDeck motorhome on the site. Not only that, there’s no large motor home of any kind.

AutoWeek called the SkyDeck “a frat house on wheels.” It’s only 10 inches taller than a standard coach, but, with its roof top deck, in good weather it has essentially twice the usable”floor” space. There’s room on the top for as many as 15 people, including amenities such as wet bar, barbecue, and entertainment center.

While the SkyDeck was included in the 2007 lineup, along with a couple of other motor coaches, it looks like Airsteam has returned to what they do best, for the most part, with several models of quality trailers and the Interstate touring coach.

Continue reading about 2008 — Where’s the SkyDeck?

This blog, Haw Creek Out ‘n About, is the blog for Haw Creek Outdoors. Recently, I began the process of redoing the website.

As a result of retiring earlier this year and spending almost 3 months of 2007 traveling, camping and spending quite a bit of time outdoors, I’ve come to the conclusion that the site needs a different direction and better focus.

The first thing I’ve completed and rolled out is a redesign of the page layout. While I like it right now, I’m going to move on to other things. I’ll come back to this later to decide if this is the layout I’m going to stick with.

Most of the major content pages will stay. Other pages with little content may be deleted and some will be relocated to a different spot on the site.

Continue reading about Revising the website