Rider on the Pony Express Trail: Volume 2, 2017, Sacramento, California to 2024

Rider on the Pony Express Trail: Volume 2, 2017, Sacramento, California to Salt Lake City, UtahAfter surviving great losses this is how one woman found her way to live a passionate life with her camera and Rider on the Pony Express Trail. It started out as a simple question: "How many stations are still standing today along the famous Central Overland Pony Express Trail?" It turned into a quest that closely resembles a treasure hunt, time and time again! As a Western Lifestyle photographer, Carla was excited to try to find the answers to that question and record what she found in photographs of the famous trail. This behind-the-scenes Journal is a record of her journey as she worked on that project. She found much more to see and experience while hunting for those treasures than she had ever imagined: - In California: historical towns, boarding houses, a reassembled Wells Fargo building, and the beautiful Sierra mountains with their rivers and tall pines. - In Nevada: historical mining towns, forgotten cemeteries, Native American petroglyphs, miles of two-track roads leading to rock ruins, historic forts left to decay in the desert, a castle, and a ride on a steam engine train. - In Utah: log cabins, a rock fort, beautiful marshes, a dog cemetery, simple dugouts and monuments on sidewalks in the middle of a big city. During the authors travels to and fro, again and again, between Sacramento, California, and Salt Lake City, Utah, she collected so much information and so many photographs that she had to pause to assemble it all...with hopes to later continue following the rest of the trail to St. Joseph, Missouri. Hop in and ride shotgun in spirit with Carla and her canine companion, Rider, as they share their day to day RV adventures, trials and triumphs, the people they meet on the trail, the view of the roads leading to their destinations and, of course, photos of those American treasures, the Pony Express Stations!

Carla, born a Texan, transplanted to California, continues to love the Western way of life, no matter where she hangs her hat. Her grandfather sparked her love for ranching and riding horseback early on. She owned her first pony before the age of five, and soon after, fell in love with Roy Rogers, Dale Evans and Gabby Hayes on the silver screen.¿¿Over the years, her college education has confirmed her love for learning; horsemanship, colt training, animal science, civil engineering, architecture and photography.¿¿She has worked as an engineering tech, taught horsemanship, and has had opportunities to ride in many places. Her love for the Western way of life is preserved in her photography and writings about cowboys, cowgirls, cow-dogs, cow-horses, the beautiful countryside and historic locations of the American West. Visit days she keeps these passions alive traveling with her canine companion, Rider (an exuberantly happy, ball-retrieving, Australian Cattle Dog), in a Chevrolet pickup towing a 5th wheel trailer. For extended stays, they reside in places near her family in Northern California and Western Nevada.