Heres a quick run down of our trip down the Erie Canal on bicycles:
 It took us 5 days to pedal 402 miles.  95% of the trip was done on really relaxing towpath or paved trails away from the road.  This meant quiet, mellow pedaling for days on end.  Peaceful.
And for any aspiring Buddhists out there; bike touring is way more living in the present than your lame meditation…

Heres a video that was shot, edited, and uploaded entirely from a telephone while still pedaling:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zUY3yJVnvY

And here are some photos which were also shot, and edited on a telephone:

http://www.scottgablephotography.com/eriecanal/

We managed to pick the worst weekend of the summer for a trip up to Algonquin Provincial Park http://www.algonquinpark.on.ca/ 
60 degree highs and downpouring rain did not stop us from getting out of our tents and enjoying the day.

Oh wait.  Yes it did…

Special Thanks to Santa Claus and dream capsules…

Heres a few more from “The Garden Spot of New York”.

Trolled around Eden, NY on my motorcycle for a few hours tonight, and came up with this.

Heres Peter Cook, historian extraordinaire, and master roofer atop Gothics mountain in the Adirondaks.

Updates!

I have finally convinced my internet doppleganger to relinquish scottgable.com to the true Scott Gable!  Actually, he was the bigger man and sent me an email saying it was available. 
Get it?  Bigger man…

So, I have been getting together all my new material in hopes of launching a brand new website by the end of July. 

In the meantime; Horses!

West texas.  One of the last places in the United States to truly feel alone. 

This 8 inch thick concrete door leads into ‘the vault’.  A cancer treatment room with a large high energy particle accelerator that uses x-rays to treat patients.  
Kinda scary.

Not a flamingo. 
This was taken at a manmade rookery in High Island TX; which is a weird name for a town that was definitely not an island.
Also weird was the amount of japanese men with incredible camera rigs pointed at these birds.  Weird set ups with 2 bodies and 2 lenses attached to the same beefy tripod, and the guys with fingers on both shutter buttons just firing away. 
What are they building in there… 

An average roughneck in west texas makes $30-$40/hour.  This is the least skilled, entry level position on a rig.  Most people start off as a roughneck, and move up to tool pusher, or drill operator pretty quickly.  
After talking to a few investors and finishing companies around west texas, it appears there is a definite roughneck labor shortage.  
So if you  can pass a drug test, and want to work on a loud, dangerous, hot oil rig, come on down to west texas…

Back to the sulphur stink of west texas. 
The type of oil being pumped up here has a high sulfur content, and is called sour crude.  All the impurities and sulfur make sour crude more difficult (and more expensive) to refine.  Most of the gasoline that you put in your car comes from sweet crude oil, but recently a new process has come online to refine sour crude into gasoline. 
And now you know…

Some more from Big Bend. 

Spent a few relaxing days in Big Bend National Park.  Huge, beautiful, and hot.  110f  along the Rio Grande.
Heres a shot taken early in the morning of the Chisos mountains. 
More to come of Big Bend, but Im exhausted right now and scared of the criminal in the motel room next to me.  His plan to escape his bail bondsman sounds pretty tight to me(through very thin Motel 6 walls).  I wish him all the best…

Dust and the remains of a snow storm at sundown in northern AZ. 

Dusk on the Navajo reservation. 

More cliff dwelling madness…

Thanks to the tip from Deano, I made it to Bandelier National Monument today(after getting blissfully lost in a high desert snow storm).  The cliff dwellers here are the same as in Canyon De Shelley, but the naming  conventions is where it gets interesting…

At Canyon De Shelley, the cliff dwellers are called Anasazi.  Canyon De Shelley is right in the middle of a huge Navajo reservation.  Stick with me here.
At Bandelier, the same peoples are called Ancient Puebloans.  Why?  Because Anasazi means ‘ancient enemies’ in Navajo.  So the modern Puebloans that still live near Bandelier (and who claim lineage from the cliff dwellers)  arent too hip to the term ‘Anasazi’.

Whatever they want to be called, they had some cool homes.  In a kidinatreehouse kind of way.  Here’s Bandelier:

The Anasazi occupied large sections of the southwest from 100 BC to just about 300 years ago.  They started off in the valleys and canyon floors, like normal people.  But then they probably pissed off some bad asses and conversations like this happened:

“Lets build some new houses.”
“OK.  Maybe we should make them really strong.”
“Nope.  Lets build them into the sides of steep, 400 ft cliffs.”

I dumped my point n shoot into my laptop tonight and decided to share a few of these… snapshots.  To be fair, there are a few shots that arent exclusively me.  Sarahs in front of the alamo and my bikes in there perched on top of a snowy porcupine rim.

From left to right:
Canyon De Chelly(said Shay) – Chinle NM
Porcupine Rim Trail – Moab UT
Porcupine Rim Trail – Moab UT
Bar M Trail – Moab UT
UFO Museum – Roswell NM
Alamo – San Antonio TX
Carlsbad Caverns – Carlsbad NM
White Sands Monument – Alamogorda NM

More Permian Basin geology.  The weird formations inside the caves are reefs that were covered with halite and gypsum from all the sea water evaporating 250 million years ago.  Sulfuric acid and uplifting are what carved out the caves out and brought them near the surface.
These caves are massive.  Miles and miles long, with some rooms soaring hundreds of feet high.  Not expecting to be all that impressed when I walked in, I walked out overwhelmed. 

Its all about the light. 

These 2 shots were taken at Monahans Sand Dunes Park.  These dunes and the even larger dune field at White Sands in new mexico are part of an ancient sea bed that used to cover west texas and eastern new mexico.  This sea bed, now called the permian basin, is responsible for all the oil(and dune fields) in this area. 
Oil did not come from dinosaurs.  It also did not come from land based animals or plants.  Oil is a product of ancient reefs in ancient seas.  These reefs, which were not coral based,  got compacted under several hundred million years worth of sediments and subductions, and then.. OIL!
And sand dunes.

In the extreme upper portion of west texas is a town called Grandfalls.  Its a quasi ghost town.  Population less than a hundred.  But it used to be big enough to support this skating rink.  Boom town, bust town…

While I was inside the rink, the wind was blowing like stink outside, and making a ton of noise.  I was using a tripod and completely focused on what i was doing.  I just tuned out all the crazy noises. 

But I caught some movement out of the corner of my eye and looked up.  On top of the slanting ductwork was a fox.  Staring at me.  From about 9 ft away.  I froze and we just sat there for almost a minute, eyes locked, in this busted out old roller rink in the middle of a dead town in texas.  Then he or she had enough, and shot down the ductwork and jumped out through a hole in the wall. 

No shots of the fox.  It would have ruined the moment.  But heres the roller rink where it all went down.

I met these guys on a farm road yesterday.  They were hauling west texas sour crude from the well site to the storage tanks. 

Another day on the rig…
The mud covering this hand is from tripping pipe.  When they bring the 60 ft sections of pipe out of the ground, theres pressure that shoots this mud everywhere.  These guys get covered in this stuff, it dries, and then they get covered again.

Wow.  I spent 12 hours out at the rig today, and shot 16 GB of photos.  And while Im tired, I cant bitch, after what I saw today.  Roughnecks work hard.  For a very long time.  Without stopping. 
Heres a cool shot of a roughneck running drill mud.

I spent the day hitting the bricks around Midland, trying to get access to well sites and rigs.  This was much harder than anticipated.  Persistence and unorthodox thinking (ADD) finally paid off, and Im good to go on Oryan Rig #15 tomorrow.  This should be interesting…

Wandering in and out of these drilling companies offices today, I got to rub elbows with the roughnecks trying to score jobs in the fields.  A different crowd.  A very different crowd.

And heres a photo of a completely unrelated, busted up International truck that was modified to haul cable for an old oil rig.

These 2 were taken at the Petroleum Museum in Midland Texas(birthplace of George W Bush).  This is a huge multi-million dollar museum that was completely empty for almost two hours today.  See if you can find ol’ dubya’s face in the ‘founders room’.  Midland is a strange town…

See all those little bumps on the drill bit?  Those are diamonds.  Industrial diamonds.  This particular bit is rated down to 15,000 ft.

“Wanna know why they call me Chicken Jimmy?  Cuz my prices are cheap cheap cheap”.