Thursday, January 31, 2008

Monte Carlo Catches Fire

What a weekend! We had one objective when we made the trip down to Las Vegas on the last weekend of January, and that was to follow Miss Utah Jill Stevens as she competed in the Miss America pageant. But, as any journalist will tell you, it doesn't always work out that way. The morning of Friday, Jan. 25 we were on our way to Planet Hollywood to meet up with Jill and her family....that was before we saw black smoke coming from the Vegas strip. It turns out the Monte Carlo hotel and casino was engulfed in flames, so I parked my car in the median of the strip and grabbed my camera. Here's what I came back with:

Monte Carlo employees walking away from the casino:



Smoke rising from the casino:



Monte Carlo guests watch from the strip:



A crowd gathers on the strip to watch the fire:


A few of these photos were picked up by USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and other major newspapers. Right place, right time I guess....

Monday, January 21, 2008

Snow Biking and Tubing

I love working on stories for our Outdoors section, it gives me a chance to get a great hike in or try out an not-so-ordinary sport. The winter months make things more interesting, some of the stories we tackled last winter included skiing, snowmobiling, snow shoeing, and hiking Alta near Salt Lake City. In an attempt to mix it up this winter, we started off with two interesting snow sports available in our area (Brian Head Resort), snow biking and tubing. So we grabbed our bikes and hit the pavement, er....slopes!

Here's our outdoors reporter Ryan Dionne taking on a diamond run:



Dionne grabbing some air:



Dionne carving across a run:



Time to put the bikes away and grab a tube, here's the starting gate:



Tubers hang on as they cruise down the course:



Here's a snowboarder getting ready to head down the mountain, I really liked the light and color in this shot:

Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Happy New Year!

A new year, a new start....and new kids!

The first of the year brings the first baby of the year story for most papers. So welcome in Cedar City's first baby of 2008, Koy Joshua Wasden: