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Best of the Blog: 2012’s Top 10

by Brian on December 26, 2012 in Travel

A thermal pool at Yellowstone National Park

With 2012 coming to a close it’s once again time for the annual retrospective. This year, instead of us selecting our favorites, we trolled through our blog statistics to try to discern which of our posts were most widely read and shared. What we came up with is a kind of “Reader’s Choice” roundup.

The results are a somewhat eclectic mix of travel stories, how-to pieces and general musings. If there is a message to us in this it is that we should keep writing a variety of articles, throwing stuff against the wall because we never know what’s going to stick.

But that’s a topic for another day. Today we’re all about revealing the first five posts of 2012’s Top 10:

Utah in the Rearview Mirror

by Brian on December 21, 2012 in Travel, United States, Utah

Utah may be only the 13th largest U.S. state by area, but within its borders we found diversity enough for an entire continent. Now that we’re leaving this remarkable place, we thought it fitting to spend a moment reflecting on what we saw here.

Where Man’s Best Friend Finds a Friend of His Own

by Brian on December 17, 2012 in Travel, United States, Utah

3,700,000

That’s approximately the number of animals euthanized in the United States each year.

They come to that end because of broken homes and busted dreams; because too few animals are spayed or neutered and because too many are deliberately bred; because their owners are completely out of options or simply out of patience.

It’s a shockingly high number. More than 10,000 every single day. For the most part those killings are conducted by shelters trying to free up room for the steady stream of new animals that come through their doors. The old, the sick and the unwanted are euthanized to give those animals more likely to be adopted a space and a shot. But the volume of new arrivals is so large that a typical shelter puts down 60% of the animals it receives.

If killing six in ten animals seems like a strange form of rescue to you, you’re not alone. Best Friends Animal Society in Kanab, Utah, thinks so too.

Photo of the Day: Coral Pink Sand Dunes

by Brian on December 12, 2012 in Photo of the Day, Travel, United States, Utah

Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park, Utah, Landscape, Desert

Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park, Kanab, Utah

Is This the Best National Park in the U.S.

by Brian on December 7, 2012 in Travel

Bryce Canyon National Park, Landscape, Hoodoos, Sunrise

Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah

There’s a certain “love the one you’re with” aspect to judging things. Whether books, or movies, or music, or – in this case – national parks, we often give preference to our most recent experience. Still bathed in the glow of something amazing it is difficult to rank older experiences objectively. Was that incredible place we just left really that much better than the incredible place we visited earlier in the year? We can’t sample them back to back in a blind taste test. Which is probably why our annual “Best Of” travel articles are always so hard to put together. It’s also why this particular post is expressed in the form of a question.