Who goes to Death Valley at Christmas break? We do, and for large parts of the park, we had it to ourselves. This one's along the trail from Zabriskie Point to Golden Canyon.

My "lettering" is junk, but while sitting in a hotel waiting out a snowstorm in Joshua Tree National Park, I fooled around with enough iPad apps to create a Christmas masterpiece.

A quick jaunt out to the west desert of Utah is always the temptation when I clock out on Friday. We had reasonable weather for December, so we made a run for it.