That's the sampler; if you care, you should really look at the larger size. Unfortunately, Flickr won't let me post the original in all its 4900x1400 pixel glory.
Below is the canyon through which the Colorado runs. We can trace its course for miles, and at points catch glimpses of the river. From the northwest comes the Green in a narrow winding gorge. From the northeast comes the Grand, through a canyon that seems bottomless from where we stand. Away to the west are lines of cliffs and ledges of rock – not such ledges as the reader may have seen where the quarryman splits his blocks, but ledges from which the gods might quarry mountains that, rolled out on the plain below, would stand a lofty range; and not such cliffs as the reader may have seen where the swallow builds its nest, but cliffs where the soaring eagle is lost to view ere he reaches the summit. Between us and the distant cliffs are the strangely carved and pinnacled rocks of Toom'pin wunear' Tuweap' [Land of Standing Rocks]. On the summit of the opposite wall of the canyon are rock forms that we do not understand. Away to the east a group of eruptive mountains are seen – the Sierra La Sal, which we first saw two days ago through the canyon of the Grand. Their slopes are covered with pines, and deep gulches are flanked with great crags, and snow fields are seen near their summits. So the mountains are in uniform, – green, gray, and silver. Wherever we look there is but a wilderness of rocks, – deep gorges where the rivers are lost below cliffs and towers and pinnacles, and ten thousand strangely carved forms in every direction, and beyond them mountains blending with the clouds.
This is our only halfway-decent picture of Mesa Arch, and it's not even the whole arch.
Right in the center of the image is the oddly-shaped and hard to see Washerwoman Arch. (Try looking at the larger image.)
The arch is cut out of a fin of rock that is splitting away from the cliff, so there's quite a drop-off just beyond the rock in the foreground.
(In contrast to the Black Box, something really bad could happen to you here, but you'd probably be found within a few hours.)
I think Powell's description of "solemn depths" (see previous) is appropriate; the place is solemn. Nature at Bryce felt sort of light-hearted, non-threatening and fantastic; at Canyonlands, nature is somber, immense, overwhelming, and likely to crush you to dust without even noticing.
Powell's account of their difficult voyage casts our pathetic mewlings after espresso in a very poor light. Here is Powell, attempting to take an elevation reading near the confluence:
"At last we determine to attempt a passage by a crevice, and select one which we think is wide enough to admit of the passage of our bodies and yet narrow enough to climb out by pressing our hands and feet against the walls. So we climb as men would out of a well. Bradley climbs first; I hand him the barometer, then climb over his head and he hands me the barometer. So we pass each other alternately until we emerge from the fissure, out on the summit of the rock."Note that Powell is doing this with only one arm; he lost his right arm during the Civil War.
This is the view from Island in the Sky towards the Colorado River. The rock that forms the prominent white rim is, of course, the White Rim sandstone. It serves as a cap to protect the softer Organ Rock shale beneath, creating the pinnacles of Monument Basin.
These pictures don't look particularly hot, but it was in the mid-90's at the time.
"We continue our journey. In many places the walls, which rise from the water's edge, are overhanging on either side. The stream is still quiet, and we glide along through a strange, weird, grand region. The landscape everywhere, away from the river, is of rock – cliffs of rock, tables of rock, plateaus of rock, terraces of rock, crags of rock – ten thousand strangely carved forms; rocks everywhere, and no vegetation, no soil, no sand. In long, gentle curves the river winds about these rocks."
– John Wesley Powell
"When thinking of these rocks one must not conceive of piles of boulders or heaps of fragments, but of a whole land of naked rock, with giant forms carved on it; cathedral-shaped buttes, towering hundreds or thousands of feet, cliffs that cannot be scaled, and canyon walls that shrink the river into insignificance, with vast, hollow domes and tall pinnacles and shafts set on the verge overhead; and all highly colored – buff, gray, red, brown, and chocolate – never lichened, never moss-covered, but bare, and often polished."
– John Wesley Powell
Side trip #2: Southeastern Utah
in which we visit 2 more national parks, and one state park.We drove down towards Moab, with the weather again looking dubious, as you'll see in the images. We never got rained on, but there were lots of little showers here and there around the horizon. August is monsoon time, when the relatively moist air masses push up from the Gulf of California across Arizona and into Utah (though frankly compared to the real thing, the southwest's 'monsoon' hardly seems worth the name). We decided again to try the Park - overnight stay - Park routine, with Canyonlands first, then Arches on the second day.
Adjacent to Canyonlands is Dead Horse Point State Park. The point is a small peninsula of high tableland jutting out over the canyon of the Colorado River, connected to the rest of the high tableland by only about a 50-foot wide neck of land. The dropoffs are sheer and long on all sides. (Very nice satellite image from Google Maps here.) The name commemorates an extreme bit of animal abuse during the period of early pioneer settlement, when some settlers apparently corralled a group of horses out on the point, culled out the horses they wanted, and left the remainder to die of thirst. (Or so the material at the park said. Apparently the story is somewhat fuzzy.)
The view is spectacular, and was the site of my second attempt to take a panoramic set of images with the camera. I think I've figured out the basic idea of the photo merging software, though the results aren't as good as I'd hoped – it's sort of an impressionistic fantasia, with buttes dissolving into thin air – but it does get the feel of the place across pretty well. (At this scale, the image isn't very impressive. I'd really encourage checking out the larger version.)
The Colorado River flows in from the left, swings around the gooseneck, and heads off towards the distance in the left-center of the image, where it meets up with the Green River at the head of Cataract Canyon. The rise from the river to where we're standing is just about 2000 feet. The high plateau on the right is Island in the Sky, part of Canyonlands and where we're headed next.
I was heretofore unfamiliar with Beth; Ilyka I've been reading for a while, and though I'm sure we seriously disagree about feminism, contempt for jackassery and women who love too much knows no party lines. (Also, she cracks me the hell up.) They happen to be discussing a blogger I don't read, but they're cheesed for the same reasons that I have, over the years, dropped more than a few bloggers off the bookmarks - I can't take seriously grown men who talk like retarded adolescents about women. (I'll cut actual adolescents or emotionally retarded but still quite young adults some slack if they've got otherwise interesting content. Boys can be boys. Men should not be boys.) You'll have to follow the links to get the gist; too much to summarize.
Not that the efforts of our two bloggers will likely effect transformation from baboon to man, but, as both suggest, it's good to draw the line - in the same way that you often can't really reason with teenagers, but you can draw lines. In fact I think the teenager analogy works well here, as illustrated by a recent conversation with my daughter. She was asking us the reasons for the common adult irritation with the behavior and attitudes of teenagers - "why do older people tend to find teenagers so annoying and exasperating?" We could, of course, only give her the true but non-explanatory explanation, that it was just one of those things that had to be experienced to be appreciated - only when she was herself an adult in the company of teenagers, would she understand why some teenagers can be so annoying.
So, as with teenagers, I generally don't think it's possible to explain to an asshole** why he's an asshole. Like the teenager who has not developed an adult perspective, the asshole has no experience of the non-asshole perspective. And like the stereotypical teenager, explication will not avail, because the asshole is convinced that he already knows the reasons for any objection to his behavior - there's something wrong with his parents, who mysteriously lack the ability to understand the obvious, raw realities of human existence, which the universe has vouchsafed to the precociously wise teenager: (My parents/You people) are just putting me down for what I really am, man...(My parents/You people) are just repressed prudes who don't know anything about (sex/men)...(My parents/You people) are such a bunch of hypocrites who just can't handle the truth, man. Well, (Mom and Dad/touchy dykey female bloggers), unlike you, I have to be honest, and I'm just too real, man, to be tied down by your (standards of common courtesy and simple human respect/lying bourgeois so-called "manners"). (Unlike the teenager, though, who in the fullness of time matures into an adult and marvels at the forebearance of his parents in not throttling him, there is no inevitable transition into the state of non-assholery. I suspect the window for what one of my brothers-in-law refers to as "anti-asshole training, the first duty of a parent" is quite narrow, and occurs early in development.. Still, there can be the epiphanic moment for the asshole; I've seen it happen.)
Just a few comments on the general issue, beyond the specific example discussed in the linked posts: I'm indifferent to a bit of laddishness here, a little T&A there, on a general interest site. (And I would surely have no objection to a "no girlz allowed" sort of site, where guys could just hang loose and act like baboons in peace and comfort. Wouldn't be offended, because I wouldn't go near the place.) I'm also not talking about those blogs that, though ostensibly covering topics in which I have an interest, immediately if implicitly announce themselves as intimate little cabals of heroic wankery for whom, to paraphrase an Eve Tushnet riff, women exist, but they're not real. To them I say, wank away, my little chickadees, I will graciously absent myself from venues where my readership or commentary is neither required nor desired. But I do make the (possibly incorrect?) assumption that most blogs assume a coed audience, even if female readers are likely to be a minority. But over time I've dropped blogs off the bookmarks because that bit of laddishness expanded into the off-putting and at times to the downright offensive. Naturally I react to to these things in the same way male bloggers would react to an excess of estrogens in concert with dim-bulb chickitude in a blog - I'm outta there. So as far as say, high traffic political or science blogs go, where one reasonably expects "mixed company" standards to prevail regardless of a numerical predominance of male readers - well, if they had any interest in my patronage, they would bloody well stand up when I click into their site, limit the discussions of the hotness of this or that woman to a civilized, non-pimply-faced level, and for god's sake have the manners to shove the porn-skank material under the sofa cushion. It would be the gentlemanly thing to do. But hey, free country, they don't have to have any interest in my readership, and I can just move along. Which I do. But, ya know, theoretically speaking.
*Oh, I may join in the travelogue myself - y'all know all about and have probably been to Yosemite and Yellowstone (not that we don't have lots of pics we're going to show you), but you really need to be told all about fascinating, moving Little Bighorn Battlefield and the mystic wonder that is Badlands NP. And btw, the current (received but as yet unread) issue of National Geographic is serendiptously all about national parks (American and worldwide). If you've been to Yosemite, the title of the cover story - "What We Must Save" - will resonate.
**Apologies for the somewhat coarse language. I know we usually try to avoid it on this site, as we're such incredibly classy people, but sometimes the technical term for a phenomenon is imperative for clarity.
P.S. Having supped of the ham of truth, D. is jumping around like a monkey behind my chair demanding I append one last cool pic on the road to Canyonlands. Ladies and gents, Dead Horse Point! (Next, onwards to Canyonlands!)
The thing on the right is Mexican Mountain, an isolated remnant around which the San Rafael River makes a 180° loop. The Black Box is on the other side of the tree (or, rather, shrub) line. The mountain is made up of the same sandstones that form the walls of The Wedge.
This is the view looking almost straight west from the Black Box. The prominent peak on the left is Window Blind Peak, "one of the world’s tallest free-standing monoliths", whatever that means. (It's certainly a useful landmark.) It stands about 1800 feet above the flats.
This picture merely serves to demonstrate that I haven't figured out how to splice images together successfully yet, otherwise I could have presented a super-duper panorama shot. The road is the road back to Buckhorn Wash.
By the time these pictures were taken, it was early afternoon, very hot, and we'd run through most of our bottled water. We figured it was time to head back towards civilization, with just one more stop on the way...
Shortly after Buckhorn Wash joins up with the San Rafael River, the canyon empties into a broad, scrub-covered flat. Geologically, the flat region is the top of the Kaibab limestone, a relatively hard rock layer that has resisted erosion, while the younger sandstones above it have been completely washed or blown away. Though it's relatively flat, the land continues to rise towards the southeast, forcing the river to cut a second canyon into the dolomitic limestone.
The open flat was the most deserted place we went on the entire trip. We drove there about mid-day, with temperatures somewhere in the mid-90's. After bouncing down a dirt track for 15 miles or so, we came to a stop in the middle of what appeared to be an open valley, rimmed by cliffs to the north, east, and west. The day was cloudless, windless, and apart from whatever noise our little party made, soundless. Up at the wedge, we had run into two other people; in Buckhorn Wash, a rather inquisitive sheriff stopped to chat; but out here there was no one, and based on the lack of tracks there hadn't been anyone for at least a week. Definitely the sort of place something bad could happen to you and nobody would notice for a long time.
After a strictly utilitarian lunch, we hiked southeast through the rocks and scrub, and came to the edge of the Black Box. The Black Box is the slot canyon that the San Rafael has cut through the dolomite into the Coconino sandstone beneath – the oldest rock exposed in the Swell. The rock here is so hard that, aside from the cutting action of the river itself, it has been only slightly eroded, and so the canyon is basically only as wide as the river is.
This was the only place we went on the whole trip where I thought, whoa, that's scary. It's a long way down, and it's straight down. Because there's no clear cliff edge, it's tempting (especially for adolescents) to get just a little closer... a little more...
It's a frustrating thing to try to get a picture of, because it is very hard to give a sense of scale. (Yes, I know, putting actual people into the pictures might help, but we're vampires and don't show up in photos.) I don't know the canyon width, but our empirical testing showed that a 13-year old boy could easily throw a golfball-sized rock well onto the other side of the canyon.
Further tests (conducted after waiting to see if anyone was floating down the river) were conducted to determine depth;
[rock tossed over side]
one second...
two...
three...
four...
five...
BOOM!
The echo was startlingly loud. Let's see: distance = 9.8 * time2 / 2... about 122 meters, or about 400 feet down. (That more or less agrees with the topo map, which gives depths of about 400 to 600 feet for this part of the canyon.)
To give you some idea of scale, those green shrubby things on the far side of the canyon are junipers, about 15 feet tall.
Shortly downstream from here, the rock drops down to near river level and the canyon opens up. The river makes a hairpin turn and re-enters the hard limestone, creating a second slot canyon, the Lower Black Box. A spot on the Lower Black Box is known as Swazy's Leap, after an early settler who allegedly bet a herd of sheep that he could jump the canyon on his horse. (He could.)
(An uncropped version of this photo here.)
Buckhorn Wash is probably best known for its rock art. Along with other sites, the wash contains a large, smooth sandstone wall that has been decorated with pictographs and a few petroglyphs. (The fence helps give a sense of scale.)
The BLM has put a lot of work into sprucing up the site, and has provided informational plaques that give a lot of historical information; however, I didn't bother to write it down, so I had to reassemble the history by trolling the back alleys of the internet.
Most of the pictographs are in what is known as Barrier Canyon style. They are thought to have been created about 2000 years ago, by an Archaic culture that was supplanted by the Fremont culture (and which was, in turn, supplanted by the ancestors of the modern Ute and Paiute Indians).
We first saw this panel in the early 1990's. At the time, the images had been heavily defaced, mainly with recent graffiti from travellers. In the mid-90's, extensive restoration work was done on the panel. The result is very impressive – if you didn't know what it was like before, you'd have no clue that the restoration had taken place (pre-restoration photos here).
One bit of vandalism that was not undone; many of the figures have divots gashed into their 'chests'. This was apparently done during the Fremont era.
I think the petroglyphs are considered to be Fremont-age. They are on the same wall as the pictographs, but off to the right, on their own.
I started describing our little tour two weeks ago, and so far I've gotten about 4 days in... at this rate, it will take much of the remainder of the year to slog through it, so I guess I'd better get cracking.
M. and I are both more interested in geology than the average bear, so travelling through a place like Utah, where geology is everywhere on display and in your face, was quite a treat. In addition, we had two local honest-to-God geologists acting as our tour guides, so we were able to wander much further off the beaten track than we would have dared otherwise, while at the same time not falling off any cliffs or into any slot canyons.
So, about the San Rafael Swell. It covers a big chunk of east-central Utah, northwest of Canyonlands Nat'l Park and northeast of Capitol Reef Nat'l Park. It's crossed by only one paved road (I-70), and is completely uninhabited (it's the ovallish region, trending northeast to southwest, in the center of this satellite image).
It's a very cool place geologically. The layers of rock that form the Swell have been bulging upwards for millions of years, while simultaneously erosion (mostly stream erosion) has been cutting downwards; the uppermost layers of rock are completely gone from the center of the Swell, and the San Rafael River and its (usually dry) tributary streams have cut deep canyons through the remaining rock layers.
Travelling on a network of dirt roads, we first drove up to the edge of a feature called "The Wedge", part of the northwestern rim of the canyon of the San Rafael River. The canyon is about 1100 feet deep at this point.
Below is the same canyon, looking downstream. This area is occasionally referred to as the "Little Grand Canyon". This sort of thing would be a state park, at least, anywhere else, but here, so far, it's just BLM land. Studies are underway to determine if the area ought to be made a National Monument. Apparently, the local feeling on this is mixed; a National Monument would bring in more tourist money to the area, but at the cost of the current, basically unhindered, access to all the land in the Swell. (When Pres. Clinton created the vast Grand Staircase - Escalante National Monument, he engendered lots of bad feeling in the locals, not least because he didn't bother coming to Utah to sign the public proclamation creating the Monument – he did it in Arizona.) It's also been proposed to make parts of the area into a national Wilderness Area; this has very little support in the region, as it would effectively cut off local access to the land, while only attracting a handful of backpackers. Like they spend any money.
I know it looks like the camera's tilted in these images, but really, it's the rocks; at this edge of the Swell, the rock layers are all inclined upwards towards the southeast.
Next: Buckhorn Wash, really. No kidding this time.
You must understand that M. and I like our coffee muy fuerte. Even when we lived in the northwest, that mecca of caffeine, what we made and drank for ourselves was noticably powerful stuff. Now, what we make at home for ourselves is probably twice as strong as what we can get at most places around our little town. As a result, we usually end up drinking coffee before we go out to breakfast, because for us local restaurant coffee might as well be hot water with brown crayon shavings added. Ah, the joy on those rare occasions when we find someplace that serves strong, tasty coffee!
Alas, the American open road is not, generally, a place where slap-you-upside-the-head strong coffee can be found. The beverage fashions of the coasts take years to diffuse inward to the vast, lo-caff interior. The "coffee" to be found in most roadside stopping points for weary travellers is a pale thing, easily mistaken for tea, tasting like water, and packing no wallop at all. And to make matters worse, much of the early part of our grand tour took place within the bounds of rural Utah, possibly the most un-caffeinated place in the lower 48. Getting any coffee, let alone decent coffee, could be a challenge. (Side note: a friend of ours happened to be stuck on campus at a conference at Brigham Young University for a period of several days, and they became so desperate for some kind of caffeine that they ended up swallowing Excedrin tablets as a replacement for coffee.)
What we would be in for became clear early on in the trip. We brought no coffee-making materials with us (part of our strict Anti-Bear Tempting Policy) and were thus dependant on what we could find locally. We steadily fell victim to caffeine withdrawal symptoms, such that by the time we left Bryce, I was wondering if I could stay awake enough for the rest of the day's drive. (The Bryce Canyon Lodge, despite its other fine qualities, makes weak coffee.) In desperation, we stopped at Ruby's Inn, a local landmark where we found huge crowds of French tourists doing touristy things. I thought, with all these Europeans around, there's got to be some espresso somewhere, and it turned out I was right. We got a table in the crowded dining room, M. and A. ordered lunch, and I ordered an Americano, stat. I greedily slurped it down and summoned the waiter again. "Another, please". I slurped that one down, too, ignoring the waiter's bemused face.
I think our caffeine dependencies waned over the course of the trip, such that by the latter stages we could get by on the brown water placed in front of us – at least I never had it so bad as that one morning. But now that we're back home and brewing our own, we've got that java monkey firmly replaced on our backs.
Hmmm. Haven't thrown in a trip photo yet... here's a preview of our next stop, Buckhorn Wash:
"Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."This drew the usual condemnations from the usual suspects:
Muslim Brotherhood head Mohammed Mahdi Akef said the Pope's words "do not express correct understanding of Islam and are merely wrong and distorted beliefs being repeated in the West".Sorry for the misunderstanding, M. Akef! I guess it really would have rubbed salt in the wounds if the Pope had mentioned how Manuel's successor but one was killed and his kingdom destroyed by invading Muslims, then....
Full text of speech (fairly interesting comments on the nature and interplay of faith and reason) here.
Haha. Thought we'd be leaving Bryce by now? Not so fast, bucko. There are still a few more things to see.
One thing that we didn't really appreciate at the time was that these were the furthest-distant horizons we would see on the whole of the trip. Bryce is at fairly high altitude – about 7500 to 9000 feet – and is on the southeasternmost corner of the Paunsaugunt Plateau, at the top of a vast series of cliffs and plateaus known as the Grand Staircase. Looking to the southeast, the land drops away layer by layer, and on a good day you can see as far as the Kaibab Plateau, on the north rim of the Grand Canyon, about 70 miles away. In the image below, the Pink Cliffs are in the foreground, and the Gray Cliffs in the middle distance; the White Cliffs, Vermillion Cliffs, and Chocolate Cliffs are too far to be seen, and I don't think the air is clear enough to see the Kaibab.
Turning northeast, from Bryce you can see the Aquarius Plateau, the highest of all the many plateaus that merge together to make up the Colorado Plateau. A lot of it is over 11,000 feet in elevation. In fact, Wikipedia currently claims that the Aquarius is the highest plateau in North America, but I'm not sure how much credence I feel like giving that at the moment.
During the night, M. and I were awakened by the gentle but persistent tap-tap-tapping of rain drizzling down upon our tent. It didn't rain hard, but it didn't really stop raining, either, putting big holes in my plans to get beautiful sunrise images. We tried to wait out the rain with a nice breakfast at the lodge, but no luck. Finally, we decided we weren't going to just give up, so we drove down to Yovimpa point – the highest, southernmost point in the park – and hiked out to the edge of the plateau.
A short trail winds around neat the cliff edge, passing some bristlecone pines. We didn't get any pictures, because the rain was coming down pretty persistently by then. Even in southern Utah, being rained on at 9000 feet is a cold experience.
Looking off towards Zion, it was pretty clear the weather was no better down there (the top of Zion Canyon is on the left horizon of this image).
So we thought about how crowded Zion probably was, and how long it would take us to drive there, and the rain, and decided to cross it off the itinerary. I regretted it, because I'd been there before, decades ago, and I know how spectacular it is, and I wanted the offspring to experience it – but wet and shivering – no, I didn't pack a raincoat – she was rapidly reaching the limits of her enthusiasm for the great outdoors, and Zion would probably be lost on her now anyways.
So, in a fog of caffeine deprivation, we headed north, and back down to the desert.
Next: we're goin' to the Swell.
Here are some more images from Bryce. I'll 'fess up right now and admit that these images are not just as the camera created them; each has gone through some degree or other of size reduction, cropping, color normalization, and color saturation enhancement. Each of these, except for cropping, I end up agonizing over for a minute or two. I'd prefer to keep the images at full size, except I'm a cheap s.o.b. and won't pay Flickr for enhanced uploading rates, so I have to reduce the image sizes enough to squeeze them through my 20MB/month pipe. (In some cases, though, the images sometimes look better at less than full size; the full image allows you to see that the camera's optics aren't really all that great.)
Another problem with the raw images is that they often seem washed out. This was always my complaint with Kodak film, back in the cave-dwelling, film-using stone age; the resulting image was always a pale, blue-tinted echo of what I remembered the scene to be like. I just put up with it for many years, until I discovered Fuji film, which produced color-saturated, vivid (perhaps too vivid) images. I remember showing a cousin some Fuji prints from photos I'd taken at Maroon Bells; she said, dubiously, "Is that really what it looks like?" and I, assuming for one brief moment the mantle of Pompous Artsy-Fartsy Guy, told her, "That's what it feels like". And I still think that's true; Fuji may have over-saturated, but less than Kodak film under-saturated; and the Fuji image better delivers a sense of what being there feels like.
Only recently, I discovered that the color saturating effects of Fuji film were so characteristic of it that the process of enhancing image color was dubbed "fujifying".
In attempting to combat the washed-out look of many of the images, I try to keep within certain bounds. I'm using a hoary old image processing tool called ImageMagick to tweak the images, and only permit myself to use two of its features, color normalization and color saturation adjustment (explained here; also note reference to "fujifying"). Normalization is a qualitative thing – the image is normalized or it is not, there are no degrees or levels of it. It seems akin to correcting the exposure on a printed image, and the improvement it can bring to an image can be remarkable.
Fujifying – tweaking the color saturation level – is, in contrast, a slippery slope. I've forced myself to always use the same minimal degree (10%) of enhancement, subtle enough that the change is only apparent when compared with the original, and justified by the slightly washed-out appearance of the daylight images.
However, increasing the saturation just looks ... so .... good. The blues and oranges become so intense, the image becomes almost three-dimensional, as though the vista was really right there, accessible through the monitor screen. You just want to push it – just a little more... but by then your image bears only a faint acquaintance with reality.
Drive, drive, drive. We enter Utah and are buffeted by a howling duststorm. We reach our destination, and rest up in preparation for:
Side trip #1: Southwestern Utah
The Plan: drive up into the southwestern plateaus, see Bryce, spend the night somewhere, see Zion, return. The first part of the plan works pretty well. We drive south, down route 89 through beautiful high green valleys like islands, bounded to the east, south, and west by harsh desert. We drive into Bryce, and the thought comes to us; we're equipped for camping, why not just spend the night here? So we pay our ten dollars, break out the tent and sleeping bags, and set up camp. The severity of our camping ordeal is eased considerably by the existence of the Bryce Canyon Lodge, which has a good, reasonably-priced dining room within easy walking distance.
As our waitress served our herbed rainbow trout, I noticed that her nametag said "SLOVAKIA" below her name. The company that runs the lodge apparently hires lots of foreign students during the summer months; in fact, I think most of the waitstaff were non-U.S. college students.
We watched the full moon rise over the canyon, but couldn't get a decent picture. Later, we tried to drive out to an open area to look at the stars, but the full moon's light pretty much killed that plan off. (This would become a recurring theme.)
As we drove, the Front Range peaks gradually separated themselves from the gloom, and we could pick them out one after another – Longs, Meeker, Evans, Grays, Torreys, Pikes Peak, Arapaho, Audubon. The western horizon evolved into the familiar backdrop we hadn't seen for eleven years, except for brief glimpses through airplane windows. Heading northwest towards Boulder, we note the changes to the landscape – far more houses, more stores, more malls, more hotels. Then, the final rise over the hill, and – The View appears; Boulder, carefully nestled in its wreath of parkland and greenbelt, foothills just behind, the Flatirons shooting up out of the plains. (Sorry, too busy driving, didn't take pictures.)
Boulder is more crowded, more built up, lots of construction going on. The trees along the Pearl Street Mall are eleven years bigger. Most of the familiar landmarks are still there, but some aren't... like the place we got up at 5:00 to eat breakfast at. No more Pour La France, apparently. Plan B: Rocky Mountain Joe's, further down the Pearl Street Mall... uh, no, it's not there anymore either. And it looks like there aren't currently a whole lot of breakfast-oriented places to eat along the mall, so we end up munching pastries in the cafe of the Boulder Bookstore. (A Pretty Good Bookstore, btw. Not Powells or the Tattered Cover, but generally good coverage on most subject areas. Points deducted for excess New-agey hoo-hah.)
As M. and I munch, we compare notes on the changed city. Relative to graduate student days, the town seems richer. There are lots of new, expensive-looking apartments and condos, lots of investment banking services, lots of shops selling absurdly expensive posh clothing. If possible, even more shops selling Tibetan and Nepalese trinkets than before. The same New-agey hoo-hah, but more of it. Boulder – this end of it, anyway – feels just a little bit like Aspen, a hyperrich boutique mountain town. It doesn't seem like the sort of place we would have lived for as long as we did.
A quick drive up to the Chautauqua dining hall, a last look at the Flatirons, and then down route 93 past Rocky Flats to Coors-swilling Golden; a sharp right onto route 6 and we enter the mountains, climbing up the canyon of Clear Creek towards Idaho Springs and the Interstate. Catching the winding-mountain-road bug, we exit I-70 so that we can drive over Loveland Pass. We paused at the summit and remembered Hey! We brought a camera! and took a picture looking back:
On the other hand, I'm enough of a touchy-feey sociology-lover to believe that a good chunk of the utility the rich derive from their conspicuous consumption is transferred to them from the poor: the happiness America's working poor and middle class derive from the compensation distribution--given their compensation, the compensation of the rich, and the lifestyles of the rich and famous--seems to me to be certainly less than that of their counterparts back in 1973."...utility ... the rich derive from conspicuous consumption..."? "...transferred from them to the poor"? "happiness... derive[s] from the compensation distribution"?? For the life o' me, I can't figure this paragraph out. Jane Galt had a go at it, but I'm not sure she made the issue any clearer, though quite a bit more vivid, with images of vitriol attacks on Cindy Crawford (must be that journalist training!).
J. Galt (I think) argues the paragraph is M. DeLong's way of arguing that the rich gain positive value by rubbing the proles' noses in their obscene wealth. I'm not really seeing that in the original piece – to me it just looks like a standard must-tax-rich-more argument. Creepily, some of Galt's house gadflies agree with the idea that the rich love grinding the poors' collective face in the dirt, and must be punished on that account!
UPDATE: Jane Galt demonstrates again why it's generally not worth it for me to open my gob on most subjects: if I just wait a little while, someone out there says what I would say, only better.
Wait, Galt's readership is obviously gotten at my expense – people reading her words are not, simultaneously, reading mine – this readership inequality fills me with burning envy, and no doubt, fills Galt with smug spitefulness. I'll bet she spends hours poring over her hit counters, cackling to herself, "Ha! There's another hit those pathetic losers won't get!" A program must be instituted to force people to read Progressive Reactionaries! Blog equality for all!
The Interstate planners didn't help, either, routing I-80 along the dullest part of a dull region. There are some mildly interesting areas of Nebraska, like the Sand Hills, but you can only see a tiny corner of them from the highway; for the most part it was cornfields, cottonwoods, repeat. And $3.16 / gallon gasoline. (All praise to the intrepid expedition vehicle, a 1998 Saturn SL, that averaged about 38 mpg during the trip.)
I tried to pump a little historical significance into this section by remarking to the daughter that her great-great-great-grandmother had followed this approximate route in a covered wagon in 1863, fleeing the near-anarchy of Civil War-era western Missouri for the Oregon Territory.
Getting towards the western end of Nebraska, the terrain becomes increasingly barren, until by the time we got into Colorado it was mostly sagebrush and bunchgrass. We strained our eyes westward, looking for some evidence of the mountains we knew were there. For six years the outline of the Front Range peaks had meant "home" to us; it was like anticipating old friends. But we had driven in and out of rain most of the day, and the broken cloud layer over us coalesced into uniform gray to the west. When we stopped for the day, it was still plains all around.
Dear Sir/Madam,
How are you doing. I would be very interested in offering you a part-time paying job in which you could earn alot.My names are (name redacted) and I am 58 years of age. I just resigned my job as a research scientist for ARINI(Agricultural Research Institute of Northern Ireland (odd, why do you have a Hong Kong domain for your mailing address?) and I now work as a freelance consultant for the instistute which gives me very much time to do my own work which is basically being a freelance researcher who could be employed by research institutes to do research projects anywhere in the world.Presently, I have just been granted a funding to head a research projectin the tropical regions of Asia regarding rare and vulnerable plant species and this would be commencing very soon. This research program will be funded and sponsored by some of my Australian counterparts and Associates. But the only set back is that my Australian counterparts want to make payments for the research in form of bank transfer only to any of the Australian banks. Getting an accountant in Australian or opening an account would have been my best choice but I have a deadline to meet and taking any of those choices would cost me time and a whole lot of other requirements which I am not ready to deal with. This is where I need to employ your assistance and service.WHAT I NEED YOU FOR? At this point, I will be glad if you could work with me as my representative in Australia. You will be working as my payment assistant incharge of collecting the payments from my Associates. Since they will be making the payment in bank transfers made payable only to you in Australia, you will be collecting this payments and cashing them on my behalf. On agreement to been my representative, you will receive a commission of 10% of whatever amount of payment you receive from my associates.HOW MUCH WILL YOU EARN? 10% from each transaction! For instance: On receiving 6000 Dollars on my behalf, you will cash the payment and keep 10% to yourself before remitting the balance! At the beginning your commission will equal 10%,though later it will increase up to 12%! For the research, I am expecting about the sum of $95,000 in total from the clients(though the money willbe sent in installmentally due to the progress of my research). You could make over $9,500 for the little time we will be working together.
Listen, Dr. (name redacted), I've got friends – good, powerful friends – in places like Nigeria who are gonna pay me millions, you hear me, millions, and I'm supposed to be your little minion for chump change? Not bloody likely.
"They snatch living animals, living insects, out of mid-air, they grasp them with these spiny front legs that amount to claws of death and, while the insect is still squirming, the praying mantis eat that prey alive"
– Daniel Lewis, ISU Entomologist
Emphasis added. Actually, maybe we can really help Dr. Lewis sex that quote up a bit:
They snatch living animals! Living insects, out of mid-air!! They grasp them with these spiny front legs that amount to claws of death – and, while the insect is still squirming, the praying mantis EAT THAT PREY ALIVE!!!Much better. Oh, and they eat birds too. And they're coming this way!
