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Hi Bill - Thanks for your kind words. I would have answered sooner but yesterday I got back from a couple of weeks in Alaska to face several hundred emails. I lived in Colorado for a little over 40 years. Most of that time at 8300 feet, west of Boulder, off Sugarloaf Road.

Regarding the Yellowstone post, lots of posts talked about the wonderful tourist things you can do in the park. So, I wanted to suggest some of the spenders that aren’t on everyone’s bucket list. The original poster is from the East and will be here for only a short time. Unless he specializes in wild animal shots his time here could be better spent than waiting days or hours for a perfectly lighted animal shot. In Yellowstone, where the animals are somewhat domesticated by the millions of tourists who see them every year, it is not difficult to get many shots of buffalo, bears, elk… But, you can easily do that at a zoo. What is really unusual for an easterner is places like Chief Joseph pass, Bear Tooth Pass, the world class thermal features, and the vast empty plains butting against the Rockies.

Anyway, that’s what I was trying to say,

Best of luck – Dan

P.S. Speaking of Backpacker magazine, I worked for Holubar Mountaineering for several wonderful years.

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I purchased a Vaio Z canvas, https://www.amazon.com/VAIO-Canvas-12-3-Laptop-Windows/dp/B015QDEXVW/ref=sr_1_3?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1470487409&sr=1-3&keywords=vaio+z+canvas about 6 months ago and it is one of the fastest computers I have ever used and it's designed for the artist/photographer specifically. I have the 512 GB model but carry a 2TB WD hard drive with me for backup and ultimately push everything up to other backups at home and in the cloud. I never keep much on the laptop unless I'm working on the photo. Great computer to do PP on with the pen. Like working on a Wacom Cintiq.

I doubt you would save much money by dropping the internal drive. Disk drives are getting so cheap these days - I just got a WD 4TB My Passport drive for $150 a week ago at Target (USB 3). Put my older 1 TB drive (USB 2) in the drawer for this new larger drive but I have a NAS 3 TB drive and a 2 TB USB 3 drive I still use for backup of all photos.

Also wireless is a bit slower than USB 3 but then "look MA - no wires" might be worth clearing the clutter. I like the USB drive for quicker searching but the wireless does the job too (just slower).

And a 1 TB drive is not large anymore with all the bigger camera resolutions (the reason I went with 4 TB this time).