Winter travel in Utah is amazing adventure. There is nothing like desert scenery with patches of white snow around you and on distant mountain tops and the solitude off-season provides for is a strong part of the experience: you have one of the world’s most beautiful playgrounds all for yourself.
As our short road trip comes to an end, I thought it would be worthwhile to provide several tips for Utah winter travel:
1. You must be lucky with the weather. Try praying, making good deeds prior to your departure, throwing dice or just relying on your luck: traveling in Utah is an outdoors adventure, and there is practically nothing to do if the gods of good weather are against you.
2. Everywhere but in the ski resorts, it’s off season. That means that you don’t need to book hotels in advance and you can negotiate rates on the spot. $80 a night will get you sleeping very comfortably in nice inns and motels along the way (this is as upscale as it gets in some of the small towns).
3. Off season also means that most tourism-related businesses are closed. Expect only very few restaurants open in the towns along the way, and make sure you go dining early – some places close as early as 7pm.
4. Unless it snowed heavily in the days prior to your trip, you’ll do well with a 2WD car in most places you want to visit.
5. As usual, we used the Lonely Planet South USA guide book, and were pleased with the breadth of information provided and the suggested activities.
6. It’s COLD! Bring warm clothes: on a typical day out we had a fleece, wind coat, gloves, scarf and a wool hat. We often had skiing underpants and undershirt on as extra measures of keeping ourselves warm.
7. Hiking. Most trails in the national parks are easily accessible and in very good shape. Although hiking boots look cool and will keep you warm, you will do well with sneakers on almost any trail you decide to do.
8. The best part of traveling in Utah in the winter is that you are ALONE. You practically have the huge national parks all for yourself, and the sense of grandeur and solitude does not get ruined by thousands of tourists. It makes you feel a bit less of a tourist yourself.
9. Another huge advantage is that… it’s cold 
It’s always better to layer up than finding yourself hiking in 40 degrees celsius (104 Fahrenheit) in the Utah desert. Plus, the snowy mountain peaks add such an amazing backdrop to the vistas that when you are driving you feel like in real-world Outrun (the 80s video game).
Recommended Itinerary for a 7-10 days trip:
1. Moab. It’s a great base for exploring Arches and Canyonlands National Parks, which are absolutely amazing. Plan on spending a full day in each of the parks. End your Canyonlands day at Dead Horse Point, but don’t try the Thelma and louise maneuver.
There are plenty of other places to see around Moab so you can easily spend an extra day or two in the area. If you are fit and a savvy mountain bike (or motorbike) rider – you will never forget the crazy Slick Rock trail. It has more than 100,000 visitors a year, but guess what, it’s winter and you’ll be there all alone!
View from Angel's Landing, Zion National Park
Angel's Landing, Zion National Park
Angel's Landing Ridge, Zion National Park
Bryce Canyon
Route 12 - Boulder Mountain Pass
Arches National Park
Arches National Park
Delicate Arch, Arches National Park
Zion National Park
Bryce Canyon
Bryce Canyon
Bryce Canyon
Bryce Canyon
Bryce Canyon
Bryce Canyon
Bryce Canyon
Route 12
Zion National Park
Angel's Landing, Zion National Park
In the past couple of days, a free-calls iPhone app called viber is being praised around the interwebs (Techcrunch coverage here). It’s basically a Skype-like application, yet no skype ID is needed – it connects to your iPhone’s address book, and automatically finds your friends who are connected to the service. In this process (which is required by the application to operate), your whole address book is being sent to Viber’s servers and kept there (From their privacy statement: “A copy of your address book will be stored on our servers and will be used to…”). They now know practically every detail of your phone book. Even more, their privacy agreement states that they collect and log all your phone calls, and may share your personal data with 3rd parties they “trust”.
So, you would say, isn’t that a reasonable price to pay for free phone calls?
Well, not if you dig a bit deeper. Viber was founded by the same guys who started early peer-to-peer file sharing app iMesh (just like Skype, who was founded by the same guys that wrote p2p app Kazaa). Now, iMesh, besides offering users an easy way to share music and videos, was trying hard to make money as a company. And how do companies of spooky nature make money? You guessed right – by bundling the application with a bunch of spyware apps whose removal would usually require a good anti-spyware app.
Viber was founded by Israelis (although no data on the founders or management team can be found on Viber’s website, a pretty strange phenomena in the startup world). Most Israeli startups are incorporated either in Delaware (which is the state of choice for incorporating most US startups as well due to convenient corporate laws) or in Israel. Viber, for some odd reason, was incorporated in Cyprus, a location favored by offshore gambling operations.
So, will you give away all your contact lists and call logs to guys who made money from spyware distribution? Hell you shouldn’t. I’d rather pay a bit more in monthly phone bills, or just continue using Skype (which although created by hackers, has proven to play fair over the years, to the extent they were eventually acquired by a legit company, eBay).
Update: The WSJ just published an interesting article about how your mobile apps are spying on you. Worth a read.
Update: Over the past couple of months, Talmon Marco, Viber’s CEO, did a great job of responding to the concerns I mentioned above and to questions that were posted by users in the comments section of this blog post. Viber changed its privacy policy and did further steps to increase users confidence in their product. I find this behavior by Talmon to be noteworthy and genuine, and I wish Viber success with their product. In terms of their access to your personal data, it is not different than a wealth of other mobile applications (such as WhatsApp) that can access it. Unfortunately, we are entering yet another new era in which, in order to play the social mobile game, we cannot treat our phone’s contact list as private information. I’ll write a blog post about it in the near future.
Google just launched Hotpot, a recommendation engine for places. It’s interface is neat, and adding your own reviews is an easy and a fun process. As expected from Google, navigating via search is very easy and efficient, a much smoother experience than Yelp‘s one. However, Yelp does a better job thus far in surfacing the top-ranked places.
Google managed to pre-populate their places database with lots of review data scraped and aggregated from 3rd party sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor (who is still looking at TripAdvisor as a trustworthy source of information? It’s such a crappy website) . While initially that may lead to traffic to these websites, in the long term it undermines their business model as clearly Google wants to own the review data themselves. This trend can be seen already in Google Maps local searches, and Google has of course the unfair advantage of being the search engine and the content provider. As such, it has to be careful not to go too far with that practice, as antitrust issues will start looming over their head (Google is already taking steps to make sure there is quiet on the antitrust front; it’s lobbying budget was up 11 percent to $1.2M in Q3 2010 – dining and wining in Washington DC got more expensive since the recession, or maybe its the soaring seafood prices since the BP oil spill).
Anyhow, it’s an interesting Google product that will get much better as they ‘clean’ their data over time. The only thing missing BIG TIME is the ability to see which places my friends have rated. And no, adding friend from my Gmail contact list is not the right way to do so. My social graph is owned by that college kid from the Hollywood movie The Social Network. No, not Justin Timberlake, they other guy, the one who wasn’t smoking the bong. With so many Googlers working in Facebook, you would think they’ll find a way to bridge the social graph issues in less childish ways.
Google Hotpot
Assorted movie recommendations from the last couple of weeks:
Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Andersen, 2009). An original cartoon with great pace and good sense of humor by the director of the excellent “The Royal Tenenbaums“.
Fantastic Mr. Fox
Ponyo on the Cliff of the Sea (Hayao Miyazaki, 2008). Another great fable from the creator of Spirited Away and How’s Moving Castle.
Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea - Movie Poster
Tetro by one of cinema’s all-times masters Francis Ford Coppola (2009) is a solid movie, which falls far behind Coppola’s best works, yet is a worthwhile watch. Good actors, great cinematography and a descent story (did I already mention that I am in love with actress Maribel Verdú ever since Y tu mamá también?)
Apple, November 2010:
Microsoft, November 2010:
12 years ago (thanks archive.org)
Microsoft, December 1998:
Not much has changed…
Which reminds me of a video I posted here a long time ago:
Hmmm…
