As we entered the park this morning, Paula asked the ranger where the best place would be to see bighorn sheep. “I don’t know,” the ranger replied, “I’ve never seen any myself.” We headed drove off up to Keys View, which overlooks the San Andreas Fault. A couple just leaving told us they had seen four bighorn sheep cross the trail to the viewpoint and head down the hill. They were well down the slope by the time we got…
Neither Paula nor I are desert people, but here we are in a godforsaken desert interrupted by yucca plants with delusions of grandeur. Joshua Tree National Park is packed. The roads, trails, and parking lots are close to Yosemite-busy. Many of the visitors seem to be European, perhaps looking for a foretaste of what global warming will do to Southern Europe. Anyhow, here are my attempts to find a few shards of beauty in a desolate and unsympathetic landscape. Can…
Funny stuff, felt. You might think of it as a material for costuming, hats, or artwork, but it played a fundamental role in the most advanced transportation of both the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries. Long time readers of this blog (both of you) may remember when we crossed the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct, perhaps the greatest engineering achievement of the canal age. It is a mighty iron trough held up on stone piers. The sections of cast iron were bolted together…
Last night we spent with our old friends Barry and Sue. They are planning to downsize from their eleven thousand square foot home in the hills north of Los Angeles now that they no longer have most of their extended family there. If you are in the market for a new home, here’s the website, and here’s the view from the guest suite that they put us up in. Compared with home prices in San Francisco it’s a steal. Sue…
Heading south today we stopped at two of the original Spanish missions, Mission Nuestra Señora de la Soledad, and Mission San Antonio de Padua. Let’s get the historical background out of the way. Depending on your viewpoint the missionaries were either devout men who were willing to travel to the far side of the world leaving all the comforts of civilization behind in order to spread their faith, or racist imperialist conquerors who enslaved and imprisoned the Native Americans, and…
There’s no question that we saw condors today, flying overhead, past us, and below us. This is our friend, number six. They really are a limited edition bird, with only four or five hundred alive, but that is up from twenty seven in 1987, when all the remaining birds were captured to set up a captive breeding program. The day dawned sunny and cold. We saw the first cows at 9:36am, along with a coyote, and were on the trailhead…
We packed up the car and headed south on 280. First cows of the day were at 10:56am. There’s a herd that grazes near the Stanford linear accelerator. Q: What do you get if you put a cow in a linear accelerator? A: Moo-ons I know the jokes are bad, but now that Ken Dodd is dead someone has to pick up the SLAC. First stop was Pinnacles National Park, formerly known as Pinnacles National Monument, and before that as…
Mesa Verde was the first national park to be designated for the human constructions that it contains rather than the natural features. The part contains the remains number of buildings from the Puebloan people, stone age farmers who lived here from about 550 CE to 1300 CE. Around 1190 CE they stopped building on the top of the mesa and started building under overhanging cliff faces. Nobody is quite sure why they did this. Possibly they ran out of land…
Today we visited the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde, so I’m going to talk about zombies in Yorkshire. We were sitting in the lobby of the Far View Lodge in Mesa Verde National Park, and Paula wanted to show some of the other visitors a picture of our narrowboat, Wharram Percy. I did a quick Google of “narrowboat wharram percy” and the second result that turned up was Well, I’m happy to say that when I checked the article it…
Breckenridge is a ski resort trying to monetize summer as well, so the mountainsides that are defaced by ski runs are also full of well maintained trails used by hikers and mountain bikers. Pat tells us that the town as a five million dollar budget just for trail maintenance. The mountains above town are imaginatively named Peak 1, Peak 2, Peak 3, Peak 4, Peak 5, Peak 6, Peak 7, Peak 8, Peak 9, and Peak 10. I think they’re…