COVID-19 Affecting Your Plans?

Kmatjhwy said:
Now often have I been down there in Zion at this springtime time of year. But Not this year! Zion can be such a madhouse in the spring when all the people on spring break descend upon Zion. But there are such lovely backcountry areas where one can disappear in Zion. Heard that even though Zion is open, much of the infrastructure like the lodge, the shuttles, the campgrounds are closed. Guess will be just staying up here in Wyoming this spring.

Yes GTNP and Yellowstone said they were closing for now. But how much do the parks half close in this early spring period between the seasons when like in Jackson it is the offseason. But how much are things closed down here in Jackson also. So maybe they will open when summer does arrive in this Wyoming country.

As for myself, not much has changed. Am still working at the local Dollar Tree Store. We are deemed an essential business so we are open for business everyday. Plus those at the top of Dollar Trees are now temporaily paying their employees several dollars more per hour because of all that is happening right now. So guess will just continue to work and self-isolate. Maybe when this is over, time to go down to Zion maybe. But maybe this year or season, time to just forget about that redrock country. And wishing it all returns to normal conditions soon.
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Good to hear from you @Kmatjhwy - I was wondering how you were doing! Stay safe and keep us up-dated.
 
Titans, Thanks! Guess as of late, just have been laying low and not doing much. Have lurked here though at times.

Now for those that wonder, as for things at the local Dollar Store where I work .... it seems the initial panic has passed. Now several weeks ago we were being swamped with people and the people were buying us out of various products. It seems now, at least for here locally, the populace are not as panicky it seems and we are being able now to raise in quantity the items we have in stock.

There was an article in the local morning's paper which stated that there were maybe 12 people in the valley affected so for what it might be worth. And several of these people were in the local hospital.

And as for here locally, there was some sun here today and the snow is melting. I personally saw my first Red Tailed Hawk and Mountain Bluebird here in the area today. So spring is slowly coming in. My hope is that when the regular summer season arrives, that all of this we have been going thru will be over or mostly over and we all can go back to enjoying the wilds again.

Wishing Everyone the Best and Stay safe and Well!
 
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Trout season is starting to ramp up here in the NE so I'm looking forward to that. Nice thing about fly fishing is that normal etiquette demands "social distancing".

There is a new infection prediction model out that many scientists think is reasonable. Naturally, it's still a model and as George Box stated "All models are wrong. Some are useful."

In any case, you can look at this state by state by drawing down at the top tab. Even that is limited as most infections are in metro areas, but interesting nonetheless.

https://covid19.healthdata.org/projections
 
In the last week in Alberta, we've seen what amounts to total shutdowns of Canada's national parks (Banff, Jasper), which has inevitably led to the same for provincial parks due to an increased number of visitors. So now- instead of people spreading out over large areas of the foothills and mountains- we are being told to recreate close to home, which doesn't make a lot of sense to me. For example- last week we did two days of xc skiing in the foothills (now off limits) where we encountered 10 people at most, scattered along trails where it was easy to distance. We also did both a dog walk and bike path ride on two afternoons starting from our door next to a large city natural area park in Calgary, encountering at least 50 people each time- because the economy has ground to a crawl here and people have much more free time- many of whom seemed to be oblivious to distancing protocols.
Edit to add: Obviously our April trip to the Utah desert is out, hopefully we can get there in October. We were also looking at a trip to the BC coast in early summer- camping and sea kayaking. No idea yet if that will go ahead.
Could be worse- we are pretty much retired, with no debt, have our health, and thus far our nest egg (had to plan ahead, being self-employed for most of my working life, so no pension other than the small Govt. one) has not been badly battered by the markets, but I do worry about our two daughter's economic future. The oldest one, with two small children and a mortgage, has just lost her high paying job in the medical diagnostics field (much of her work was considered "non-essential") and the small construction company that her husband owns/operates has had to lay off all 4 employees, as work has dried up completely. The economic fallout from covid is already huge, and is going to get worse, maybe even eclipsing the suffering brought on by the disease itself.
 
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sorry, but I got bored today after cleaning my apartment.
Here is some fun for you to chuckle about
I couldn't resist, but sometimes I need to see the fun side of the entire Covid 19 thing, including toilet paper

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Anyway, social distancing still does not exist in Southern Utah: tons of people hiking in huge groups, and they do not even keep a 6 ft. distance.
I had to pass some of these when leaving the trailhead into the backcountry and none of them pulled to the side to let me pass safely with a 6 ft. distance.
I yelled at a lot of them today to keep the fucking distance. This is just ridiculous what's going on here.

Luckily, as soon as I was in the wilderness area, there was not a single soul anymore.
 
Titans said:
Anyone who is tired of it all right now, should try a lot harder to think about loads of healthcare workers now suited up in full gear working very long hours right now to help COVID-19 patients.

Think about reaching out to families of teachers who suddenly converted everything to on-line teaching overnight. Reach out to the families working in healthcare and see what we can do to help them.

Next Tuesday we use the Jeep to help a neighbor pick up 700 lbs of food that has to go from one food bank to another, as she can't do it alone with her car. So we will use 2 cars and keep our distance.
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Shout out to my wife!
87513

Oh, and a shout out to me!

87514

I'm definitely going a little crazy stuck in the house. Spring is the time to get out again. Might not till June at this pace.
 
I thought I would provide an update for Northern Utah. I live up near the Idaho border and normally once you head west for 15 minutes you don’t see another human unless you visit Golden Spike.

We went out that way to get out of the house and there were people everywhere. They were having huge picnics, large side by side rallys, and big groups of people walking with zero physical distancing. I won’t pretend that it is bad as Zion but it is not at all what we expected. We were able to find a spot at a more remote spring and ate lunch on the tailgate before heading back.

We were almost able to keep good social distancing on the entire trip until we saw a woman on the side of a gravel road waving her arms. They had tried to take a side road and gotten stuck in the deep gravel. We were able to tow them out and we all tried to keep a moderate distance from each other. She said they had been there for over an hour and most vehicles didn’t even stop.

With everything going on there is so much anxiety and uncertainty, but for a little while it felt nice to focus on a problem that we could overcome and help some people.
 
Titans said:
A special 6-7 am hour for elderly and high risk groups has been established in our community. But it has now turned into being the most busy, most crowded time to shop now, (I heard directly from several who went a couple of times). Do you know anybody locally who could shop for you and bring it directly to your doorstep, leave it outside? A close friend, a young person looking for a job, a colleague? Having somebody shop for you might be better
swmalone said:
I thought I would provide an update for Northern Utah. I live up near the Idaho border and normally once you head west for 15 minutes you don’t see another human unless you visit Golden Spike.

We went out that way to get out of the house and there were people everywhere. They were having huge picnics, large side by side rallys, and big groups of people walking with zero physical distancing. I won’t pretend that it is bad as Zion but it is not at all what we expected. We were able to find a spot at a more remote spring and ate lunch on the tailgate before heading back.

We were almost able to keep good social distancing on the entire trip until we saw a woman on the side of a gravel road waving her arms. They had tried to take a side road and gotten stuck in the deep gravel. We were able to tow them out and we all tried to keep a moderate distance from each other. She said they had been there for over an hour and most vehicles didn’t even stop.

With everything going on there is so much anxiety and uncertainty, but for a little while it felt nice to focus on a problem that we could overcome and help some people.
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And this is why the numbers creep up.... It's nice here in island park..... Quiet.......
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Online teaching started today... can't say I like it much but the first class went pretty well. We will see how the (harder to teach) second class and its "lab" go later today.
@slc_dan your wife is a super hero! Don't let her forget that.
 
MikeM said:
I spent all weekend moving my class to online also. It was a "challenge", to say the least. LOL
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Yeah well second class was ugly but by lab time I had figured out how to use Duet Display to write on my iPad and have it show up on the recording. Chemistry doesn't work so well without writing. And somebody made $10 off of me (i.e. Duet Display).
 
I've spent the last couple weeks getting my two courses online. The first online exam is tomorrow morning, I'm expecting a shit show :)

Took the kids to a new place for a educational hike, Perryville Battlefield, they got to charge uphill to attack the artillery and decided that being a soldier in the civil war would have sucked :) I enjoyed the beautiful weather and the fact that we had ~900 acres mostly to ourselves, yay social distancing and still outside :)
 
wsp_scott said:
I've spent the last couple weeks getting my two courses online. The first online exam is tomorrow morning, I'm expecting a shit show :)

Took the kids to a new place for a educational hike, Perryville Battlefield, they got to charge uphill to attack the artillery and decided that being a soldier in the civil war would have sucked :) I enjoyed the beautiful weather and the fact that we had ~900 acres mostly to ourselves, yay social distancing and still outside :)
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That was last quarter's final exams for us. 12 hrs notice of going online. What a doozie that was.... Had to make them open resource (book, etc.) cuz kids panicked. Oh my.
 
MikeM said:
I spent all weekend moving my class to online also. It was a "challenge", to say the least. LOL
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my classes are online since last week. I usually like online courses but having my historical lab class online is a lot harder than I thought. In lab I usually can look at the specimen and turn them around as I like, now I only have a picture to look at which makes it a lot harder. I'll get through it, I can only imagine how tough this is for educators to provide material to make the lab class happen.
 
Kids are overwhelmed by it all. We even got an email from the academic dean/provost telling us they were hearing complaints about teachers snowing the kids with lots of techie stuff. I felt bad because we use an online HW site (every term not just this one) and I decided to use a quiz app for extra practice/participation. Both are actually really easy to use but given the circumstances maybe I am one of the problem teachers....
 
TN state parks being open for day use only is definitely changing my plans this week. Lots of people are actually getting out.
Clear and nice afterwards, but I bet they won't be out tomorrow(today, now), with 100% chance of rain, and temps dropping so that highs are in the 40s.
So off I go to see some of my favorite waterfalls, with no expectation of seeing another human.
Just gotta dayhike, then find somewhere close by to camp...

They're actually advertising, and encouraging people to come enjoy the parks, and there are already news stories about some of them being packed during the daytime(which is why the "bad" weather is the only reason I'm going up there).
But they have all the dispersed backcountry sites, that only backpackers use, closed "in an effort to flatten the curve of COVID-19".
Idiots.
 
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