Category: Places & Travel

Wild America

NewMexiKen has been reading Return to Wild America: A Yearlong Search for the Continent’s Natural Soul by Scott Weidensaul. It’s a travel narrative detailing Weidensaul’s reprise, 50 years later, of the famous trip and book by naturalists Roger Tory Peterson and James Fisher. Wild America had inspired Weidensaul as a boy. At times he inspires us now.

Visiting many of the same places as the original, Return to Wild America brings us bad news but also much that is good: species that have recovered, land that is being preserved. Faithful to Peterson, we read descriptions of, frankly, more birds than I care about, but still the book conveys the wonder of North America that makes one want to throw the sleeping bag into the car and take off for Newfoundland, or the Everglades, or Kartchner Cavern.

How many of the world’s 245 countries can you type in 10 minutes?

Jill has it down to 238. Here’s the ones she missed last time:

Abkhazia
Akrotiri and Dhekelia
Kyrgyzstan
Myanmar
Nagorno-Karabakh
Pridnestrovie
Tuvalu

Be honest, how many of those countries had you even heard of?

NewMexiKen’s original posting for the countries item.

The actual challenge. When you click the clock begins to tick. 600 seconds, 245 countries.

World’s largest

The largest passenger plane in history, an Airbus A380, was sitting at LAX when I passed through this evening. It had flown from France and arrived in L.A. Monday morning, the second to land in the U.S. (another with guest passengers came into JFK minutes before this plane had landed at LAX). If nothing else, our pilot was excited enough to mention it.

Mercy, it is humongous. It is one-third bigger than a 747. The wingspan is 87 yards across. It weighs 1.2 million pounds and will hold 555 passengers.

Semper Fi Museum Style

Jill, official oldest daughter of NewMexiKen, reports:

Museum of the Marine CorpsYesterday we went to the National Museum of the Marine Corps, which opened last November. Man, museums are so much better now than they used to be. The whole trend of presenting the experience, rather than just the facts, is done really well there. There are several “immersion experiences” — you can go into a booth and hear drill instructors screaming at you, one of the rooms about Korea is freezing and full of fake snow, while in the Vietnam section you suddenly walk onto a transport plane with the engine running underneath, and when you get off it is hot and there are explosion sounds. Marine Corps MuseumAdditionally, artifacts are no longer just lined up behind glass. Now every tank is displayed in a giant set and every gun with sandbags and foliage, etc.

There may be museum people who sniff, but I can tell you that it makes it all a lot more interesting for six- and three-year-old boys.

Marine Corps MuseumThey have the actual Iwo Jima Suribachi flag (the second one) there. But you can’t take photographs. The guy who was working there told some other folks not to do so or they’d be dealing with “one pissed off Marine.” I guess we got immersed a little bit there, too.

. . . I recommend the museum, which is free to attend, free to park, and empty of donation canisters.

Click each of Jill’s photos for a larger version.

The National Museum of the Marine Corps and Heritage Center

Send me a postcard

Shortly after noon on Wednesday, the last few feet of a steel and glass skywalk was rolled out over the southwest rim of the Grand Canyon, a 2-million-pound engineering marvel that the Hualapai Indians hope will boost tourism to their remote ancestral land and provide the impoverished tribe with a desperately needed economic boost.

With sage burning and tribal members playing gourds, spiritual leader Emmett Bender blessed the cantilevered horseshoe-shaped skywalk, which will jut out 70 feet from the canyon rim and dangle 4,000 feet above the canyon floor. He called the structure “the white man’s idea.”
. . .

Three years in the making and topping $30 million in cost, the 30,000-square-foot skywalk, which will open March 28, will allow 120 visitors at a time to walk out over the canyon rim to look at the gorge through glass walls and through a glass floor at the bottom of the canyon, nearly four-fifths of a mile below.

The Washington Post

NewMexiKen gets nervous looking over the railing from Jill’s landing into her family room.

Maybe they just hate Florida

For the first time since the Depression, more Americans ages 75 and older have been leaving the South than moving there, according to a New York Times analysis of Census Bureau data.

The reversal appears to be driven in part by older people who retired to the South in their 60s, but decided to return home to their children and grandchildren in the Northeast, Midwest and West after losing spouses or becoming less mobile.

A stream of elderly transplants leaving Florida was detected by sociologists two decades ago, including so-called half-backs, who stopped short of returning to their home states and settled elsewhere in the South. What is new is the growth in the number of people leaving the region entirely and the dimension of the migration.

The New York Times

Reading about skiing is close enough for me

Alas, NewMexiKen has never skied and I’m not likely to start now, but this article about Silverton Mountain makes me wish I did. It begins:

Chances are you’re not good enough to ski Silverton Mountain — or to ski it with grace, anyway. Don’t take this personally: This six-year-old, vertigo-inducing backcountry “ski area” in the San Juan mountains of southwest Colorado that scoffs at niceties like slope grooming (and running water, but we’ll get to that) has a way of quickly separating, with the deftness of a croupier, the rippers from the gapers, the noobs and the one-and-done’s (but we’ll get to them, too). Acre for acre, it’s the most challenging lift-skiing in North America.

Been there, done that

A meme from a year ago.

Name the locations where you spent the night last year:

Albuquerque
Tulsa, Oklahoma
Virginia near Washington, D.C.
Durango, Colorado
Vallecito, Colorado
Near Oakland, California
Archer City, Texas
Hot Springs, Arkansas
Corinth, Mississippi
Lenoir City, Tennessee
Martinsburg, West Virginia
Cloverdale, Indiana
St. Louis, Missouri
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona
Cortez, Colorado
Montrose, Colorado
Lakewood, Colorado
Denver, Colorado

Thirteen states. Other states visited, but did not stay overnight: Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Kansas, Utah; 21 in all, plus the District of Columbia.

Yucca House National Monument (Colorado)

Yucca House

Yucca House is one of the largest archeological sites in southwest Colorado, and acted as an important community center for the Ancestral Puebloan people from A.D. 1150-1300. On July 2, 1919, Henry Van Kleeck deeded 9.6 acres of land, including most of Yucca House, to the federal government. Due to its significance as an excellent example of a valley pueblo, Woodrow Wilson made Yucca House a National Monument by Presidential Proclamation on December 19, 1919.

Yucca House National Monument is one of our earliest examples of public/private stewardship of our cultural resources and will remain protected well into the future. The long-term preservation of Yucca House ensures that archeologists will be able to continue studying Ancestral Puebloan society and what caused them to migrate from this region in the late 1200s.

Yucca House National Monument

Jamestown National Historic Site (Virginia)

… was designated on this date in 1940. The site is owned and operated by the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities.

Jamestown NHS

Come, walk in the steps of Captain John Smith and Pocahontas as we explore American’s beginnings. Here is where the successful English colonization of North America began with Jamestown. Here is where the first seat of English government in America established it’s self. Here is where the first English representative government met and where the first arrival of Africans to English North American was recorded in 1619. Jamestown, the Beginning of America.

Historic Jamestowne

Richard Wetherill and Charles Mason

Wetherill Tombstone

… rode out on what is now Sun Point in search of lost cattle on this date in 1888 and first saw Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde. That afternoon, Richard found Spruce Tree House, and the next day, the two men discovered Square Tower House. Al Wetherill, Richard’s brother, saw Cliff Palace sometime the year before, but he did not enter the dwelling, so the credit for the “discovery” has been given to Richard Wetherill and Charles Mason.

In 1901, Richard Wetherill homesteaded land that included Pueblo Bonito, Pueblo Del Arroyo, and Chetro Ketl in what is now Chaco Culture National Historical Park. Wetherill remained in Chaco Canyon, homesteading and operating a trading post at Pueblo Bonito until his controversial murder in 1910. Chiishch’ilin Biy, charged with his murder, served several years in prison, but was released in 1914 due to poor health. Wetherill is buried in the small cemetery west of Pueblo Bonito.

[NewMexiKen photo, 2003]