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New section of KATY Trail open to cyclists

The county takes care of our bridge

We've had a good bit of rain recently and it's made it difficult getting back and forth across the bridge to our place. Here's a clip from this past Friday. The guy down the road has a truck so he drives when the weather is iffy.

Technically, this clip doesn't belong in the Don't Look Down series because the bridge isn't all that high. If you haven't seen Sorcerer, I highly recommend it. Directed by William Friedkin and starring Roy Scheider.

Don't Look Down: Sequence #467

Hans Van de Vorst --a photographer from the Netherlands-- took an amazing sequence of photos of a tourist at the Grand Canyon who was standing on a small rock atop a column of rocks with a camera on a tripod and taking pictures of a sunset.  According to this entry at TruthorFiction, the pix are legit:

"Nearby in the picture is the edge of a cliff from which he apparently jumped and to which he will need to once again jump when he's finished. The pictures, and the narrative with the pictures, leave the impression that the drop between the column of rocks and the cliff was 900 meters (nearly 3,000 feet) to the bottom of the canyon. 

In reality, however, there is shelf between them that is out of sight below what is seen in the picture.  If the tourist had missed the cliff, he would have dropped to that shelf. It is still a death-defying act for him, however, because the drop from the front or either side of the rock is to the bottom of the canyon and even hitting the shelf safely is a risk. Van de Vorst said that he did not intend to hide the shelf. From where he was watching the tourist the shelf was not visible and he did not know of it until a later time."

I still can't get over the idea that he makes the jump in sandals.

Let's go some place special for lunch

I'm not a fan of those "you gotta see this" email forwards. I've usually seen them 40 or 50 times and feel no need to share them with everyone in my address books (who has also seen them 40 or 50 times).

But I do feel like I have to share the images that Tom forwarded to me today. He (and I) searched the web, looking for the source of these photos so we could properly attribute or link. No luck. So I've created a little album to share them with you.

If these are your images and you want me to pull them, I'll do so immediately.

I had to post these because they are the perfect follow-up to the video of the mountain path in Spain.

PS: And here's one for some of you long-time readers. I seem to recall posting a couple of photos of some guy taking pictures from the edge of the Grand Canyon (?) and he had to jump out to some tiny little column of rock... and then back. While holding his camera and tripod. In sandals. If anyone can help me find that, it belongs with these images.

Don't look down!

Unless you can hold your breath for almost 7 minutes, I don't recommend watching this video of a walk along along a crumbling mountain path in Malaga, Spain.

My nose started bleeding about 3 minutes in. [via the always interesting J-Walk Blog]