Category: Places & Travel

Summer Solstice in the High Country

As NewMexiKen mentioned, at noon Thursday Mountain Time (the Solstice was 12:06) I was in Rocky Mountain National Park. Here are a few photos. Click each for a larger version.

Summer Snow Looking west from the Tundra Communities Trail at about 12,000 feet above sea level.
Tundra Flowers The landscape was covered in small, close-to-the-ground flowers. The blooms were about the size of a dime. It can drop below freezing at this altitude (and snow) any day of the year. The flowers have a natural antifreeze. The pika gather the flowers and the same chemical helps protect their forage from cold. Nature just never ceases to amaze.
Marker The Tundra Communities Trail is asphalt and accessible by just about any healthy person. But, not everyone can climb to the top of the rock formation at the highest point in order to get this documentary proof of being there.
Break Time The elk have a good union and get plenty of break time.

All 20 photos taken that day, unedited. Click image to move to next photo.

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How fast are you?

NewMexiKen drove from Albuquerque to Denver Wednesday, 447 miles on I-25 (almost exactly half each in New Mexico and Colorado). As I sped along reasonably close to the speed limit (though I did average 72 mph for the first six hours including one pit stop), I asked myself, how fast would I go if I wasn’t concerned about the legal ramifications of speeding? How fast would you?

{democracy:15}

Busiest airports

Interesting stuff from Ask the Pilot:

Let’s return to last week’s list of the top-10 busiest airports in the world, measured by number of takeoffs and landings: Chicago O’Hare, Atlanta, Dallas, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Houston Intercontinental, Denver, Phoenix, Philadelphia and Minneapolis-St. Paul. Notice that all 10 are in the United States. A number of e-mailers suspected the ranks were in error. Who would have thought that Philadelphia or Minneapolis would have more traffic than Tokyo, Frankfurt or London’s Heathrow? But they do. (Salt Lake City sees as many takeoffs and landings as Heathrow, transporting a third as many passengers. If you want to reduce commercial aviation’s carbon footprint, there’s a place to start.)

If you rejigger to account for total number of passengers, the top 10 is very different. Heathrow, for example, comes in at third place, with Tokyo’s Haneda, Paris’ Charles de Gaulle, Frankfurt and Amsterdam all checking in. Suddenly only five of the busiest airports are American.

This difference is a powerful illustration of how and why our air system is nearing perpetual gridlock. The problem isn’t too many people flying, but how many planes they are flying in. Our airlines sell frequency, or the illusion thereof, creating a system so immense, and so precarious, that a single thunderstorm throws the entire thing into paralysis.

Moonbows

From the Los Angeles Times, Beauty in the misty moonlight. It begins:

YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK — Aristotle took note of this celestial happening a couple of millenniums back. Ben Franklin bagged a sighting or two, as did Mark Twain. The venerable John Muir, chronicler of Sierra mountaintop and meadow, waxed enthusiastic about the nighttime phenomenon.

The hunt for the elusive “moonbow” has long been a nocturnal lure for dreamy hikers, insomniac seamen and intrepid photo buffs. But in the past, seeing one of these nighttime rainbows — caused when a full moon’s rays bounce off the mist of a departing rain cloud or raging waterfall — has been dictated mostly by chance.

No longer.

Flight attendants, doors to arrival and cross-check

From Ask the Pilot, a airflight jargon briefing. From the introduction:

The experience of air travel is unique in that people subject themselves to a long string of mostly anonymous authorities. From the moment you step through the terminal doors, you’re subject to orders — stand here, take your shoes off there, put your seat belt on, do this, put away that — and a flurry of information. Most of it comes not face-to-face, but over a microphone, delivered by employees, seen and unseen, in a vernacular that binges on jargon, acronyms and confusing euphemisms. There are people who make dozens of air journeys annually and still have only a vague understanding of many terms.

So, to help the baffled flier, what follows is Part 1 of a glossary. This week, we’ll concentrate on those expressions you hear while aloft or otherwise on board an aircraft. Next week, we’ll cover terms you encounter in the terminal and at the gate (plus any on-the-plane items that have managed to escape me). Not every word or phrase is included — some, as you’ll see, are presented tongue-in-cheek — but I’ve focused on those most easily misunderstood, or not understood at all.

Old Dominion

You think you’ll find some mountains
in western colorado
fifty weeks of snowy peaks
is where you’re gonna be
but babe the rocky mountains are gradually eroding
the hills of coors are nothing more
than blue ridge wannabes

you think that autumns in new england
are the greatest of them all
but give me sweet virginia for the fireworks of fall
the prettiest october in all the fifty states
just drive up to the skyline
park the car and wait

when you’re talking home
you mean the old dominion
just southeast of heaven to the surf and the hills
she’s the best of thirteen sisters
and thirty seven more
sweet sweet virginia always keeps an open door

Eddie from Ohio
Old Dominion

Pretty much like flying coach

MAY 2–While you’re left to fight for a blanket and shell out $5 for one of those lunch boxes, Tiger Woods is flying in slightly more comfort. As seen here, when the golf star boards a Gulfstream jet with wife Ellen Nordegren, his Evian is chilled and flight attendants are aware of his travel requirements.

The Smoking Gun has the details.

Top 25 Cities for Clean Air (and Dirty)

The top metropolitan areas for clean air.

  1. Cheyenne, Wyo.
  2. Santa Fe-Espanola, N.M.
  3. Honolulu
  4. Great Falls, Mont.
  5. Farmington, N.M.
  6. Flagstaff, Ariz.
  7. Tucson, Ariz.
  8. Anchorage, Alaska
  9. Bismarck, N.D.
  10. Albuquerque, N.M.

And dirty.

  1. Los Angeles-Long Beach-Riverside, Calif.
  2. Pittsburgh-New Castle, Pa.
  3. Bakersfield, Calif.
  4. Birmingham-Hoover-Cullman, Ala.
  5. Detroit-Warren-Flint, Mich.
  6. Cleveland-Akron-Elyria, Ohio
  7. Visalia-Porterville, Calif.
  8. Cincinnati-Middletown-Wilmington, Ohio-Ken.-Ind.
  9. Indianapolis-Anderson-Columbus, Ind.
  10. St. Louis-St. Charles-Farmington, Mo.-Ill.

Source: American Lung Association via WebMD

A hike into horror and an act of courage

Glacier National Park, Mont. — JOHAN looked up. Jenna was running toward him. She had yelled something, he wasn’t sure what. Then he saw it. The open mouth, the tongue, the teeth, the flattened ears. Jenna ran right past him, and it struck him — a flash of fur, two jumps, 400 pounds of lightning.

It was a grizzly, and it had him by his left thigh. His mind started racing — to Jenna, to the trip, to fighting, to escaping. The bear jerked him back and forth like a rag doll, but he remembered no pain, just disbelief. It bit into him again and again, its jaw like a sharp vise stopping at nothing until teeth hit bone. Then came the claws, rising like shiny knife blades, long and stark.

Los Angeles Times

Follow the link to read the rest of the first part of the story. It’s really good.

Oklahoma City Memorial

As noted earlier today, it was 12 years ago that the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was bombed, killing 168 people and injuring 500. NewMexiKen has been to the Memorial twice, most recently last June with Dad. I’ve created an album with 12 photos of this striking, yet somber place.

You may click on the image to advance to the next photo.

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Vandalism

Pasó por aqui, el adelantado Don Juan de Oñate del descubrimiento de la mar del sur a 16 de Abril de 1605.

It was on this date in 1605 that vandals first started tagging the rock face at what is now El Morro National Monument.

In English: “Passed by here, the adelantado Don Juan de Oñate from the discovery of the sea of the south the 16th of April of 1605.”

Click image for larger version. (I know, it looks like 1606, but it was 1605, before Jamestown and before the Pilgrims had even migrated to Holland on their way to Massachusetts.)

Update April 17. Better photo of inscription.

 Onate inscription

Directions

This has been floating around the internets for the past week or so, once again proving that some folks at Google have a sense of humor. Via Andrew Tobias:

1. go to google
2. click on “maps”
3. click on “get directions”
4. type “New York” in the first box and “London” in the second box
5. hit enter
6. scroll down to step #23

Deadliest aviation disaster ever

Salon’s Ask the pilot (Patrick Smith) reviews the tragedy at Tenerife. He begins his fascinating history:

March 27 marked the 30th anniversary of the most deadly aviation disaster in history.

Most people haven’t heard of Tenerife, a pan-shaped speck in the Atlantic. It’s one of the Canary Islands, a volcanic chain governed by the Spanish, clustered a few hundred miles off the coast of Morocco. The big town on Tenerife is Santa Cruz, and its airport, beneath a set of cascading hillsides, is called Los Rodeos. There, on March 27, 1977, two Boeing 747s — one belonging to KLM, the other to Pan Am — collided on a foggy runway. Five hundred and eighty-three people were killed. The KLM jet had commenced takeoff without permission, slamming broadside into the taxiing Pan Am jumbo as it swerved to avoid impact.

Another good read

NewMexiKen failed to mention a good book I read while visiting in the San Francisco area last month. It’s The Last Season by Eric Blehm.

Blehm tells the story of Randy Morgenson, a seasonal back country National Park Service ranger in California’s King’s Canyon National Park. During the summer of 1996 Morgenson went missing from his station high in the Sierra Nevada. The book tells of the search — and its eventual outcome — but also Morgenson’s life, family, devotion to the wilderness, life as a seasonal ranger and much more. Morgenson was a special, if not completely likable man. It’s an interesting story.