In is down, down is front

Move over, Seattle

2009-06-26T21:34:00.004-04:00

This has been one of the wettest Junes in New York City history. It rained twenty out of the first twenty-five days of the month. All those crazy storm clouds do make for some spectacular, otherwordly sunsets. If someone was out and about with an SLR this evening, he could give the Flickr Hivemind a run for its money.

BBG

2009-01-19T17:46:00.005-05:00

It finally warmed up enough for a bit of snow in Brooklyn. (The thermometer on the local grocery store registered -14 degrees Celsius this past week. Brr!) While screaming hordes of sledding children comandeered the Long Meadow at Prospect Park, I went for a much quieter walk in the Botanic Garden next door.Japanese Garden, Brooklyn Botanic GardenCherry Esplanade, Brooklyn Botanic Garden

The Village Petstore and Charcoal Grill

2008-11-15T21:26:00.003-05:00

I'm so glad I got to see this before it closed. (Thanks, Linda!) Banksy, the ubiquitous London street artist, tried his hand at animatronic irony. As he puts it, "New Yorkers don't care about art. They care about pets." The Independent has a better explanation. The Wooster Collective, an excellent blog devoted to street art, described it in October:

While New Yorkers have been consumed by the stock market meltdown, a tiny little pet store quietly opened four days ago at 89 7th Avenue between West 4th and Bleeker Street in the West Village of New York City.

There are no puppies or kittens in the windows here.

Instead, a live leopard lounges on a tree in the window.

Or is it?

In other windows, things get a bit more bizarre.

McDonald's Chicken McNuggets sip barbecue sauce. A rabbit puts on her makeup. A CCTV camera nurtures its young.

Italia

2008-10-17T18:21:00.014-04:00

I took my mother on a tour of Italy for her birthday. We saw so much of the countryside, I think I need a vacation from the vacation. :)An amazing view of the Alps on the plane ride over.The Sistine Chapel isn't the only beautifully painted part of the Vatican.Michelangelo's "Pieta" in St. Peter's Basilica was amazing. The guy was only 24 when he carved it. My photo-montage of the Colosseum. Impressive structure, no?Roman gladiators wandering the grounds.The Trevi Fountain in Rome (as seen in Roman Holiday and Three Coins in the Fountain), largest free standing fountain in Rome.The Isle of Capri, playground for the rich and famous (and home to fashion mavens and movie stars) sure was swanky. Lovely weather though, and perfectly blue water.Pompeii was probably my all time favorite part of the trip. Romans were unbelievably technologically advanced - running water, pedestrian crosswalks, fast food stalls, paved roads, spas, public toilets, sporting arenas... not a far cry from modern life. These were once gladiator barracks.Italians are very serious about their gelato. I tried some rosemary and raspberry gelato in San Gimignano at Pluripremiata Gelataria and it was superb. This year's Italian gelato champion, in fact.

Crash Bang

2008-09-28T09:52:00.002-04:00

At 5:20am I was woken by a huge crash followed by what sounded like a garbage can being knocked over. The noise had actually penetrated my closed window and the air conditioner, so it must have been loud enough to wake up the entire block. When I stuck my head out of the window I realized it had been.

The neighbors up and down the street were wandering out of their apartments in bathrobes and basketball shorts, sneakers untied, some sort of attempt at hair management. It looked like our little anthill had been disturbed, all the people milling around and more exiting their apartments to view the carnage, as seen from my third story vantage.

Directly in front of my building someone had run into a parked SUV so hard the back tire jumped the curb. The force was strong enough to pop the back hatch and the belongings of the poor owner had poured out onto the wet sidewalk. Swirls of the neighbors' conversations came from below

- He was drivin' the wrong way down the street.
- Must've swerved or something.
- Which one your car? This one here?

Someone called the police. The owner, some white kid with long I'm-in-a-heavy-metal-band hair, spent some time picking his stuff off the street. Either he had just moved in or was travelling from somewhere else because leaving that much visible stuff in your car is asking for a break-in. A firetruck arrived.

Say what you will about my neighborhood with its construction cranes and corner liquor stores, abandoned brownstones next to ones renovated for someones real estate portfolio. The people on the block who have been here the longest were the first on the scene. It will be a shame when the gentrification of our street is complete and the little community that watched it go from ghetto to fabulous can no longer afford it. What will happen to the black man with the pocked face, who bought a car and drove from Brooklyn to California back in the 70s? Or the one with the pageboy cap who shuffles religiously up and down the street on his daily constitutionals? Or the one with the dreads who wakes up at 4:30am every day and rides his Honda CBR to Queens for work, hair flying? What about the crack house at the end of the block? (Well, I guess that can go.)

Anyway, that was my morning. It's nice to see a neighborhood acting like a neighborhood - nosy, pushy, helpful, worried, being all of these adjectives as a group, held together only by an address.

9/11

2008-09-11T21:03:00.000-04:00

Blah blah... Freedom Tower... blah blah... Daniel Liebeskind... blah blah... iconic importance... I know that there is a prime chunk of unused real estate in the clogged downtown of Manhattan. Nonetheless I find the memorial of light more symbolic and beautiful than any useful building. Photo by kingfal

Hanna

2008-09-06T17:09:00.001-04:00

Tropical Storm Hanna is dumping all over NYC. What a mess.

Giant's Causeway

2008-08-08T10:22:00.019-04:00

August 8 - Bus tour of the Antrim Coast - Carrickfergus, Carrick-a-Rede, Bushmills, Giant's Causeway

As the day dawned gray and cloudy, Cheryl and I packed up our backpacks, put them in luggage storage, ate a massively filling egg and cheese on soda bread with a sad cup of instant coffee, and boarded a bus for a tour of the Antrim Coast. If we had an extra month I would spend it here. The north coast is ridiculously beautiful and varied, full of glacial valleys and waterfalls, seaside cliffs and ancient ruins.

We first stopped at Carrickfergus Castle just outside Belfast. When John de Courcy and the Anglo-Normans conquered Ulster in the twelfth century, the castle became an important military stronghold. Life-sized plastic figures depict medieval life and provide many opportunities for surreptitious molestation.From there the bus hurtled along the small coastal road toward Carrick-a-Rede. We rode through green fields dotted with sheep, clunky medieval bridges spanning rivers and canals, more castles, and a lough (lake) raised to the highest level our tour guide had ever seen due to the persistent rain. I managed to suffer my first bout of motion sickness exacerbated by the bus’ high center of gravity and the narrow twisty road. Luckily, we arrived at the Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge before things got out of hand and a beautiful day of blue skies and shining sun greeted us for the first time since our arrival.

The rope bridge is included in the tour as a bit of tourist excitement. A sturdy pine and rope bridge hangs thirty meters over open sea, connecting the mainland to a small island once used for salmon fishing. Apparently the original bridge was much more thrilling to walk over as the North Antrim website explains:

Spanning a chasm some eighty feet deep is the famous Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge, its construction once consisted of a single rope hand rail and widely spaced slats which the fishermen would traverse across with salmon caught off the island. The single handrail was subsequently replaced by a two hand railed bridge, the current, caged bridge was installed by the National Trust during Easter of 2000 as a further safety measure. Although no-one has ever been injured falling off the old bridge, there have been many instances of visitors being unable to face the return walk back across the bridge, resulting in them being taken off the island by boat. A collection of old photographs in Sheep Island View Hostel show a local man doing various stunts on the bridge which include riding a bicycle across it and performing handstands on a chair in the middle. Primarily a 'seasonal' working bridge for the fishermen, since the demise of salmon fishing along the coast, the bridge is nowadays more widely used by passing visitor's and marketed as a tourist attraction.

The National Trust now runs a tight ship. There are separate queues for entrance, crossing, and return crossing, controlled by young people in polo shirts with radios. The sea was splendid though and the air filled with wheeling gulls.From Carrick-a-Rede we stopped by Bushmill’s Distillery, a maker of Irish whiskey. Cheryl’s guidebook recommends the tour, as Bushmill’s is still a working plant while Jameson’s in Dublin is not. During the week visitors see men doing whatever it is they do to barley and yeast in complicated vats. You may even meet Colum, Bushmill’s Master Distiller. We settled for breathing in the sour yeasty air and watching folks sample the goods.

Finally we arrived around lunchtime at the Giant’s Causeway. As Wikipedia says, there are two conflicting reports of the geological formation:

During the Paleogene period, Antrim was subject to intense volcanic activity, when highly fluid molten basalt intruded through chalk beds to form an extensive lava plateau. As the lava cooled rapidly, contraction occurred. While contraction in the vertical direction reduced the flow thickness (without fracturing), horizontal contraction could only be accommodated by cracking throughout the flow. The extensive fracture network produced the distinctive columns seen today. The basalts were originally part of a great volcanic plateau called the Thulean Plateau which formed during the Paleogene period.

The basalt column nonsense is all well and good, but doesn’t explain how the site got its name, leading to an alternative theory of creation:

Legend has it that the Irish giant Fionn mac Cumhaill (Finn McCool) built the causeway to walk to Scotland to fight his Scottish counterpart Benandonner. One version of the legend tells that Fionn fell asleep before he got to Scotland. When he did not arrive, the much larger Benandonner crossed the bridge looking for him. To protect Fionn, his wife Oonagh laid a blanket over him so he could pretend that he was actually their baby son. When Benandonner saw the size of the 'infant', he assumed the alleged father, Fionn, must be gigantic indeed. Therefore, Benandonner fled home in terror, ripping up the Causeway in case he was followed by Fionn. The "causeway" legend corresponds with geological history in as much as there are similar basalt formations (a part of the same ancient lava flow) at the site of Fingal's Cave on the isle of Staffa in Scotland.

Whatever the cause of the Causeway, the place is a photographer’s dream. Basalt columns exist all over the world, and their unique structure boggles the mind everywhere.All in all, a wonderful day and especially lucky with the weather. My favorite part was meeting a group of nuns who had obviously bypassed a fence that said "Do Not Enter" to climb up to the pipe organ structure off the upper cliff path. Robed in red habits with sneakers, they took pictures by the basalt columns while pretending to fall off the rocks, miming "Save me, Gabriel!" Hysterical.

Kilmainham Gaol

2008-08-07T20:27:00.001-04:00

August 7 - Caught an afternoon bus to Belfast.

Our bus to Belfast didn't leave until the afternoon so we went on a particularly interesting tour of the Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin. The associated museum was also quite thorough, covering aspects of daily prison life as well as the political history of the prison's most famous inmates, the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising who were held and executed there. The place was a bit depressing, particularly when they led us out to the work yard where prisoners broke rocks for hard labor. Two crosses in the yard marked the spots where the nationalist men were shot by a firing squad. Definitely a worthwhile hour and a half.Before we went to the bus station we picked up some fresh apples from the Moore Street Market where we also found some complicatedly dyed flowers. I still haven't figured out how they get them to look like that. Some poor person has to sit there with a needle and inject each petal individually?From there we took a rather long bus trip up to Belfast through yet more rain. We got our first glimpses of the Irish countryside, replete with content looking sheep lounging on damp grass and hundreds of miles of rock walls.

The Belfast International Youth Hostel felt a bit sterile - it looked like a college dormitory including acoutrements like a pool table and library. We did get our own room though, and just around the corner was Benedict's, a beautiful bar/restaurant that did a brilliant early bird special. From 5-7PM dinner costs as much as the time your ordered. Starving after our ride, we ate at 5:45 and paid less than £6 for a salmon dinner.

Howth

2008-08-06T11:38:00.002-04:00

August 6 - Day trip to Howth, on the peninsula north of Dublin. We woke to constant drizzle and, after failing to get a Wicklow tour that would take us from Dublin down to Glendalough and back, decided instead to go to Howth, a little fishing village only twenty minutes away by train. I, in my infinite wisdom, was convinced that the DART (Dublin Area Rapid Transit) rail and the Irish national rail couldn't possibly leave from the same station, and we spent a soggy half hour wandering around in a large circle trying to find an invisible second train station.

By the time we got to Howth, the rain had tapered off. We found some real coffee at a very cute cafe above a gourmet grocery store. The Irish seem quite fond of the instant stuff, which tastes vaguely like dishwater and has about as much caffeine as chamomile tea. Lunch was grilled bread with goat cheese, roasted peppers, and a variety of side salads.The walk along the Howth peninsula is supposed to be gorgeous, but the weather kept switching schizophrenically from black clouds to blue sky and getting caught in a rainstorm didn't seem particularly appealing. We went to the old Martello tower (old British defense against Napoleon, as well as marauding pirates) that now houses Ye Olde Hurdy Gurdy Musuem of Vintage Radio. From the hill we could see the rock walls of Howth Abbey and its associated graveyard, so we headed over for a look.After our fill of dead people we walked down to the harbor to ogle the boats and check out the lighthouse. A small island, Ireland's Eye, sits less than a mile away from Howth and has a Martello tower of its own. Shockingly, the weather began to clear up at this point and we had a brief spate of sunshine before heading back to pub crawl our way through Dublin. This is the River Liffey at night (back in Dublin), looking toward the Ha'penny Bridge.

Dublin

2008-08-05T11:05:00.003-04:00

Our flight arrived early in the morning on August 5th and, after a rough night where Aer Lingus left the fluorescent lights on the entire six hours, we fortified ourselves with scrambled egg and toast and hit the streets of Dublin. This is a detail from the monument to Daniel O'Connell on O'Connell Street, not far from our hostel. Please notice the rain on her arm. Constant precipitation seems to be a theme in Ireland.Across the River Liffey is something called the Royal Liver Assurance. Given how much the Irish drink, I found this sign apropos. We wandered our way over to Trinity College, keeper of the Book of Kells. This is the campanile.
And some other random building (possibly in the corridor by the Samuel Beckett Centre).Carroll's is a gift shop chain that sells some of the most obnoxiously Irish souvenirs I have ever seen in my life. They have several locations throughout the city if you need to get a plush green hat or forty-seven leprechauns of varying size. We accidentally found St. Patrick's Cathedral while trying to get to Dublin Castle. Their lovely gardens had marigolds and a small memorial to Samuel Beckett. Fiona Shaw's "Happy Days" had also been playing at the Abbey Theater. Stupid dead Beckett, following me around with his inscrutable existential drama. We finally found Dublin Castle (phew!) across the street from a fantastic little pastry shop, the Queen of Tarts. Our extremely well appointed tour guide (who had some great peep-toe saddle shoe pumps, not at all appropriate for walking around a castle all day) showed us some of the formal chambers and explained that the original castle was burned nearly to the ground in the 1600s. Crown jewels were also stolen from the castle in 1907 and are still at large. £1000 reward for the finder, in case you see it on Ebay.We finished off the night with our first pints of Guinness and fish and chips at Brazenhead Irish Pub, purportedly the oldest pub in Ireland. If you ever find yourself at the Globetrotter's Hostel by Busaras in Dublin, try to book yourself in Room 420 (and no, it's not what you're thinking). It's a six-bed female dorm that is actually part of the Townhouse Hotel next door. Although finding the room involves climbing through a little-used part of the building, the place is a lovely little garret apartment with a kitchenette, TV, couch, and closet. And nary a bunk bed in sight. And the Irish breakfast in the morning is a definite plus.

For Fun

2008-07-22T12:20:00.005-04:00

Full disclosure - I haven't filled out a survey since first year in college. This is for Jen (and for fun):

Four jobs I've had:

1. Radiological Procedure Scheduler
2. Assistant Set Designer
3. Ballet Teacher
4. Electrician

Four movies I've watched more than once:

1. The Fifth Element

2. Finding Nemo

3. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

4. South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut

Four places I've lived:

1. Orange County, CA

2. Los Angeles, CA

3. Telluride, CO

4. New York, NY

Four places I've been:

1. Budapest, Hungary

2. Berlin, Germany

3. Cuzco, Peru

4. Leiden, Holland

Four TV shows I watch:

1. The Colbert Report

2. Dexter

3. 30 Rock

4. Extras

Four people who email me regularly:

1. Cheryl

2. Damon

3. Linda

4. JKLD looking for more electricians

Four of my favorite foods:

1. Bacon, egg, and cheese sandwiches

2. Truffled potatoes from Lil Pig Market

3. Tom kha gai and curry puffs

4. Guacamole from La Taqueria

Four places I would like to visit:

1. Angkor Wat, Cambodia

2. Wherever they film Ninja Warrior, Japan

3. Mt. Roraimi, Venezuela

4. Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia (Salar '09! Who's in?)

Four things I'm looking forward to in the coming year:

1. Visiting Paul and Jenny in England

2. Pina Bausch coming back to BAM

3. My trip to Italy

4. The next Pub Night NY

People I've tagged (to do this too):
1. Sam
2. Josh

Upper Calf Creek Falls

2008-07-04T10:51:00.001-04:00

A turnoff from the Hogback on Hwy 12 brings you to the trailhead for Upper Calf Creek Falls. There's a lovely Lower Calf Creek Falls as well, but the campsite this summer was crawling with people and we wanted something a little less crowded. While not quite as spectacular, Upper Calf Creek was a fun way to cool off. The trail leads to the falls themselves, which at 90 feet is nothing to sneeze at. Above the falls are smaller cliffs, more suitable to jumping into the freezing water below.No 4th of July fireworks due to the wildfires, but I barely noticed.

Burr Trail

2008-07-02T10:36:00.001-04:00

We found this rabbit on a hike down Deer Creek. Supposedly if you follow the creek toward the Escalante River far enough, there are Indian petroglyphs in the cliffs by the water.

A giant tree of unknown species (a botanist I am not) loomed over the campsite across the way and its fallen branches provided our evening entertainment. We met a college kid named Sam from Northern California who, on his three week solo camping adventure, was starting to go a little lonely and crazy. He was the only other person in our campground for days, so he would come over with his ax and chop firewood and we would all sit around the fire until the stars came out. One afternoon we caught a brilliant sunset whose colors culminated behind the tree.Deer Creek is located off the Burr Trail, a partially paved fifty mile adventure that leads from Boulder, UT through the Waterpocket Fold of Capitol Reef and on to the Bullfrog Marina at Lake Powell. Tim and I took the motorcycles through their paces, including some extremely demanding switchbacks. We met some guys from Illinois on BMW 1200 GS's. One of them accidentally tipped his bike over and, though it didn't get far with all the luggage to hold it up, it was unbelievably heavy to pick up. The graded dirt part of the trail just seemed to go on and on, so we rode until it started to cloud over and came home under gray skies.

Boulder, UT

2008-06-30T10:10:00.000-04:00

From Capitol Reef, we went to Grand Staircase - Escalante National Monument, which is basically preserved wilderness under the protection of the Bureau of Land Management. Highway 12 cuts through the cliffs and plateaus between Boulder and Escalante, UT. A brief section called The Hogback switchbacks over a ridge with sheer drop-offs on either side. It was unbelievably beautiful and exhilarating. Who needs Six Flags? When we first passed through Boulder we ran into a variety of temporary signs with cryptic labels like Incident Command Post, Incident Site 2mi, and Incident Communication Center. It took us a minute to discount an alien landing and connect the signs to the fire department putting out some regional wildfires. We found a campsite at Deer Creek and spent a lot of our time at the Mesa Grill in Boulder, Utah, and even more at the coffee shop across the parking lot. Boulder is also home to the Anasazi State Park Museum, a largely unexcavated Anasazi village with pithousesand a six room, life-sized replica of a pueblo, complete with firepit. The cottonwoods were blooming at the time and it felt like we were wandering around the village in the snow. There is an amazing fine dining restaurant called the Hell's Backbone Grill in Boulder, which uses local organic vegetables and meat along with some indigenous ingredients. The food was fantastic and it was our waiter that evening who kindly gave us her campsite at Deer Creek the next day while she packed up to go back to Idaho. Good food, good coffee, good scenery and kind people. If it weren't for the hypocritical eco-Nazis spoiling the hippie vibe, I could definitely like this place.

Capitol Reef National Park

2008-06-29T11:38:00.000-04:00

After a week in Moab, we got back on the motorcycles and headed out to Capitol Reef National Park. The park protects the Waterpocket Fold, a 75 mile wrinkle in the surface of the earth. We did a couple of hikes, including one to the Hickman Bridge. We also discovered some ammonite fossils in the hike through the narrow canyon at Grand Wash. An unfortunate threating patch of clouds made us high-tail it out of there. Slot canyon + rain = flash flood. While I do want to witness a flash flood firsthand, I'd prefer to be on top of the canyon as opposed to in it. A lovely hike up the Fremont River Trail leads to a great overview of the river and surrounding park. Capitol Reef is also home to an adorable population of marmots. Unlike normal marmots, these live at a lower elevation and a non-alpine ecosystem, making their presence in the park a mystery. A park ranger theorized that someone brought them from a mountain range nearby (La Sal or Henry) as a food source or as pets.

San Rafael Swell

2008-06-27T11:24:00.000-04:00

An old river guide, who had lived in the area for ages, suggested some places to camp. As I recall, this was what he told us as we drove past the San Rafael Swell on the way back to Moab: "See that grove of cottonwoods down there? That oasis? You can reach that from the cattle road and set up camp there. Then, if you just hike back toward the notch three or four miles, you see that notch? In that notch in the rocks, there's a bunch of swimming holes. The water gets nice and warm, sitting in the sun all day." We looked out the window, frantically taking mental notes.

A few days later, we took the dirt road with the cattle guard out to a wash encrusted with some kind of white mineral. Sure enough, there was a little oasis of greenery in the middle of the yellow shrubbery that dominates the landscape. After setting up the tent and packing as much water as we could hold, we headed out for the Swell. The San Rafael Swell is an upthrust of rock 75 miles long, created 60 million years ago. The years of subsequent erosion have created a whole mess of canyons and potholes and washes that would take ages to explore. Despite the baking heat, we picked the closest notch in the rocks and headed for it. And what would you know? We found the swimming holes! We were probably two weeks too late to go swimming because even the larger pools were infested with mosquito larvae. But we found some strange looking creatures populating one of the smaller pools. They looked like tiny horseshoe crabs, with a swimming tail instead of a spike. Same carapace though, with eyes on the top of their heads. Very strange. We also found a bighorn sheep skull, almost picked clean and bleached white.

Indian Ruins

2008-06-24T11:00:00.001-04:00

Jim and Leigh run a shuttle service in town and Tim and I helped them run some trucks down to Lake Powell. On our first trip out, we stopped by a viewpoint that had a bunch of welded steel tubes that looked like T's with signs underneath. When you looked through the tube, voila! Gopher Rock!One my favorite parts about Utah is how unadulterated history remains. National parks are wonderful, and I fully support them, but you feel like a pioneer when you find an ancient pictograph that isn't being pointed out or protected. A million people drive by the rock wall where either A Boy And His Dog or A Princess And Her Goat (depending on who you ask) is painted without ever knowing of its existence. It's somewhere between Hanksville and Lake Powell on the right side of the road.After a quick drive through Natural Bridges National Monument, they remembered an unmarked ruin off to the side of the highway. So we parked the car in the middle of nowhere, got out, and started wandering around. And sure enough, there was an Indian ruin by a wash, under a cliff! The walls were crumbling, but people who had been by the site before cached some pottery and rope and thousand year old corn cobs.

Canyonlands National Park

2008-06-23T10:41:00.001-04:00

Canyonlands National Park is amazing. It actually looks out over the same canyons as Dead Horse Point. In fact, you can see Dead Horse from Island in the Sky, the only paved section of Canyonlands. (And the Island in the Sky road is great for a motorcycle - lots of twisties, hardly any cars.) It reminded me of the Grand Canyon with a 270 degree view. And nothing quite puts you in touch with your humanity like sitting on the edge of a cliff, knowing that a huge drop is mere feet away.We then attempted to take the Schafer Trail down into the canyon. My bike hit a patch of deep sand and down I went, taking off part of my brake lever in the process. So we scrapped the Schafer Trail idea for this trip. I don't know if I could have made it down all those switchbacks anyway. They're pretty steep. (Ha ha - now I have to do it next time, or I'm going to be a wuss for life.) And this is Monument Basin, as seen from the Grand Viewpoint. The National Park Service actually has some really nice interactive panoramas that capture the impressive splendor better than one measly photo.

Potash

2008-06-22T23:14:00.000-04:00

After Dead Horse, we headed over to Potash, which isn't actually a town but a place where they mine... potash. Of course. The road to Potash follows the Colorado River and passes through a section of sheer rock cliffs, nicknamed Wall Street. Indian petroglyphs survived on the red rock of the cliffs for hundreds of years, only to be scratched over by stupid kids who think "Morrison High 2006" is an important cultural statement. A lone pronghorn antelope barely stands a chance competing against all those adolescent couples who have long since broken up, school slogans and curse words.Past the potash plant, about a mile and half into the 4WD dirt road, a fossilized coral bed is a playground of ancient sea creatures turned to stone. We found fossilized shells, coral, agatized clam tubes, and tail sections from crinoids embedded en masse in sandstone. A scientist working for the US Geological Survey told us our fossils from Potash are over 300 million years old.
That evening, Jim and Leigh took us out for a barbecue at Ken's Lake. The weather was perfect, the mosquitoes actually left us alone (sort of), and the food tasted great after all that riding around.

Dead Horse Point State Park

2008-06-22T21:05:00.002-04:00

Dead Horse Point State Park derives its friendly name from an old cowboy legend. From Utah.com:

Before the turn of the century, mustang herds ran wild on the mesas near Dead Horse Point. The unique promontory provided a natural corral into which the horses were driven by cowboys. The only escape was through a narrow, 30-yard neck of land controlled by fencing. Mustangs were then roped and broken, with the better ones being kept for personal use or sold to eastern markets. Unwanted culls of "broomtails" were left behind to find their way off the Point.

According to one legend, a band of broomtails was left corralled on the Point. The gate was supposedly left open so the horses could return to the open range. For some unknown reason, the mustangs remained on the Point. There they died of thirst within sight of the Colorado River, 2,000 feet below.

Bummer!

These are potash evaporation ponds. I had originally thought they were tailings from uranium mines, leftover from the rush for nuclear material from the 1950s. Utah was full of military mystery. Unmarked flatbeds carrying uncovered tanks occasionally rolled down the highway. A missile testing ground used to fire rockets to White Sands, New Mexico. One misfired and landed in the nearby town of Green River where it now pokes phallically at the sky in the middle of town.

The impressively large Gemini Bridges. (Yes, there is a second one, just not in this picture.) You can barely see Tim trying to give me a heart attack by crawling toward the edge.

Castle Valley

2008-06-21T19:50:00.001-04:00

Highway 128, Castle Valley, UT

La Sal Mountain Loop Road (looking into Castle Valley), UT

Free-range cattle, La Sal Mountains, UT

La Sal Panorama, UT (looking west)

Ashcroft Ghost Town

2008-06-19T11:56:00.003-04:00

Loads of old mining towns dot the Colorado mountains, miniature paeans to human greed and ecological destruction done in charming clapboard and shingle. Ashcroft went bust around the turn of the century after the silver veins in the mine gave out. The Aspen Historical Society took the place under its wing in the 1970s and it is still open as a nice little reconstruction today.
The mountain pass eventually ends up in Crested Butte, but even in June there was too much snow to make the crossing.

Somewhere in Iowa

2008-06-16T11:42:00.000-04:00

... is The World's Largest Truckstop! Boasting a store the size of Costco brimming with chrome and mud flaps and those seven pitch air horns that play La Cucaracha, this roadside stop has its own website and is home to a Trucker's Jamboree. And all I wanted was a place to spend the night. Preferably with bunnies.

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

2008-06-15T11:53:00.000-04:00

Tim and I are summering in Utah. With motorcycles. Six thousand miles. One hundred and five degree heat. Death just may ensue.