Our first stop traveling south from Idaho’s Harriman SP in mid-September was Northern Utah.  We volunteered for several weeks at Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge in Brigham City.  This large refuge, a key part of the Great Salt Lake ecosystem, consists of nearly 80,000 acres of marsh, open water and uplands providing habitat for about 200 species of birds along the Pacific flyway.  Joe spent some of his time out on the refuge assisting law enforcement, and I spent most of my time in the fabulous Visitor Education Center and Avocet Bookstore.  This fairly new facility is one of the nicest we’ve seen in our travels.  It is aesthetically beautiful and houses state-of-the-art facilities including a teaching lab and classrooms, interactive exhibit hall, theater, auditorium, bookstore, and much more.  Kinda looks like an airline terminal…incredible!  Once again, the staff was wonderful and we met a lot of great people.  And if I’ve failed to mention this, one of the many nice things about volunteering is that they really appreciate you….and they show it.  They’re very generous with their thanks and verbalize it often, unlike a lot of the private parks.  They gave us an unexpected send off with lunch and a “thank you” cake, which we greatly appreciate.  You’ll see our smiling faces (in a photo taken by Joe Moran) in the “Northern Utah” photo album.  During our stay here, we took only one trip up to Logan and hiked to the wind cave, and I didn’t do any photographing around the refuge, so it’s a small album.  I have a couple of images of the lovely Mormon Temples, but someday I’ll have to dedicate an entire album to these beautiful churches.  One note of photo credit; I took only one photo of the refuge from our RV site at the bunkhouse, so the 2 shots of the visitor center--exterior and interior—were obtained from the web.
As long as we’re talking about Utah, I’ll post some images of Zion National Park and southern UT, a trip we took back in January of 2011.  At the time, we buzzed in and out of the park quickly and I held the photos hoping for another Zion trip for some more interesting images.  But, since we don’t know when we’ll go back, I’ll share these photos in the “Zion 2011” album and hope for some better shots another time.  See ya back here next time!