Category: Places & Travel

Death Valley…

was designated a national monument on this date in 1933. It became a national park in 1994.

Hottest, Driest, Lowest: Death Valley is a land of extremes. It is one of the hottest places on the surface of the Earth with summer temperatures averaging well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. It encompasses the lowest point in the Western Hemisphere at 282 feet below the level of the sea, and it is the driest place in North America with an average rainfall of only 1.96 inches a year.

This valley is also a land of subtle beauties: Morning light creeping across the eroded badlands of Zabriskie Point to strike Manly Beacon, the setting sun and lengthening shadows on the Sand Dunes at Stovepipe Wells, and the colors of myriad wildflowers on the golden hills above Harmony Borax on a warm spring day.

Death Valley is a treasure trove of scientific information about the ancient Earth and about the forces still working to shape our modern world. It is home to plants, animals, and human beings that have adapted themselves to take advantage of its rare and hard won bounty. It is a story of western expansion, wealth, greed, suffering and triumph. Death Valley is a land of extremes, and much more.

Yellowstone sleds set judges in legal duel

From the Jackson Hole News & Guide

A legal turf war is taking shape with a federal judge in Wyoming blasting his counterpart in the nation’s capital for deciding a dispute over banning snowmobiles from Yellowstone National Park.

U.S. District Judge Clarence Brimmer said he “may ignore” a ruling issued by his peer in Washington D.C. during hearings in Cheyenne. “I don’t see any reason why a judge 2,000 miles from here ought to be deciding things that affect the people of Wyoming,” Brimmer said of U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan. Associated Press reported the remarks.

But conservationists counter that the nation’s capital is both a legal and appropriate venue for a case involving the nation’s first park.

“It’s not Yellowstone Wyoming Park; it’s Yellowstone National Park,” Doug Honnold, an Earthjustice attorney representing several conservation groups, said in a telephone interview Tuesday.

Federal judge overturns ban on snowmobiling in Yellowstone

From the Billings Gazette

Severe restrictions on snowmobiling in Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks were blocked by a federal judge Tuesday, nearly two months after they were put in place.

U.S. District Judge Clarence Brimmer in Wyoming ruled that the restrictions would cause irreparable harm to companies that rely on snowmobiling in the parks due to lost business.

Brimmer issued a temporary restraining order against the restrictions and ordered the National Park Service to develop temporary rules for the rest of the 2004 season including use of cleaner, quieter snowmobiles.

It was not immediately clear what the next legal step would be, or what rules would be in effect for the 2005 season.

Where the Desert Comes Alive

The Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum

The Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum is a world-renowned zoo, natural history museum and botanical garden, all in one place! Exhibits re-create the natural landscape of the Sonoran Desert Region so realistically you find yourself eye-to-eye with mountain lions, prairie dogs, Gila monsters, and more. Within the Museum grounds, you will see more than 300 animal species and 1,200 kinds of plants. There are almost 2 miles of paths traversing 21 acres of beautiful desert.

 
 

Imperial Palace: Tokyo


The current Imperial Palace (Kokyo) is located on the former site of Edo Castle, a large park area surrounded by moats and massive stone walls in the center of Tokyo, a short walk from Tokyo station. It is the residence of Japan’s Imperial Family.

NewMexiKen photos, 1992

Bright Nights, Big Mountains

A different and amusing look at the Sundance Film Festival from Dallas writer Sarah Hepola.

What Park City has, however, is Save the Children volunteers.

‘Can I talk to you for a minute?’ asks a bright-eyed blond, smiling politely and holding a clipboard to her chest.

Dammit. They always get me.

I sign up for Save the Children. I request a child from Africa, preferably a very cute one.

‘Twenty dollars a month?’ L. says when we walk away. ‘That’s sorta steep.’

I point out that we just spent $12 on fudge….

The D.P. is nice. He comes to Sundance whenever he has a film in the festival, and he spends all day in the theatre. He saw five movies yesterday. The Woodsman, with Kyra Sedgwick and Kevin Bacon, is terrific, he says. Everyday People, about a black-friendly, Jewish-owned restaurant in Brooklyn, is really good. In fact, everything he’s seen has been worthwhile, and I feel a twinge of guilt for letting half our trip slip by without catching one single film. Long before I cared about celebrity, before I crushed on actors or read Us Weekly (helplessly, ridiculously), I just loved movies. I watched them over and over again — often in one sitting — just to have access to another life, just to see someone else’s sky for a while.

The whole essay is fun to read.

Preserving a Grand Landscape in New Mexico

The most sublime place described in this Sunday’s New York Times Travel Section is, of course, in New Mexico.

Less than four years ago, Congress paid $101 million to buy an 89,000-acre ranch in northern New Mexico of such grandeur and scientific richness it’s been called the Yellowstone of the Southwest. The nation’s backpacking cognoscenti laced up their hiking boots in anticipation. Here, finally, was the chance to tramp across a landscape so iconic of the American West that it appeared for years in Marlboro Man ads and on Stetson hatboxes.

Then the government promptly locked the gates. Managers of the newly renamed Valles Caldera National Preserve needed time to create a plan to safeguard the place from the surge of interest that was sure to come. (When a few “sneak peek” hikes were announced in September 2000, 50,000 people telephoned in one day to snare the 1,500 spots.) But the managers also needed time to digest the mandate Congress had handed them. The preserve is “an experiment in land management” that is run neither by the Forest Service nor the National Park Service but by a trust that is governed by presidential appointees. Valles Caldera is to remain a working ranch while also protecting the environment and accommodating hikers, hunters and other users. As if that wasn’t challenging enough, Congress asked the preserve to try to become financially self-sufficient by 2015, whether by charging fees for cattle grazing and recreation or perhaps even permitting some logging. It is a complex, at times contradictory charge and one that makes Valles Caldera a good symbol of the many issues the nation’s public lands grapple with today….

Some of the West’s great vistas thrust themselves on you with a beauty that is almost oppressive. Valles Caldera is not one of these places. Beyond the windshield, steamship clouds dragged their shadows across Valle Grande, a treeless, harvest-colored valley that ran to a horizon of ponderosa and green peaks. A bull elk lounged in the valley with his harem, his chandelier of a rack rising above the grama grass. This is not the awe-demanding West of Albert Bierstadt but the welcoming West of an Aaron Copland score – a big-hearted landscape, heroic, promising, completely American. Seeing it, you realize that you know Valles Caldera from billboards and ads and untold westerns. You feel at home.

As with the two articles below, those who love the west will enjoy reading the whole essay.

The Many Layers of Tucson

Travel writers love Tucson. This New York Times writer loved Loews Ventana Canyon Resort, Mi Nidito restaurant, the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, Kartchner Caverns and Kitt Peak — especially Kitt Peak.

As (very) amateur astronomy geeks, Scott and I had decided to splurge on the observatory’s advanced program. This allows visitors to stay up all night looking at sky objects with the assistance of a skilled telescope operator.

It costs $350 for one or two people, plus $55 each for a dormitory room where we would crash in the wee hours of the morning, just like the real visiting astronomers. A midnight lunch and breakfast are included. The program can accommodate just four people a night.

We dropped our bags in our spartan room, then joined the larger group with whom we would be spending the early part of the night. At a cost of just $36, the early nightly program takes advantage of the usually clear desert skies to offer an intimate glimpse of fantastically distant objects to as many as 34 visitors.

The Kitt Peak program is particularly extensive because it is one of of the few astronomical institutions financed by the National Science Foundation, and part of its mission is to engage the public in astronomy. Two of the 25 telescopes that dot the mountaintop are devoted to the public each night. The others are for working astronomers….

had seen some of the same objects through our starter telescope at home, but I was thrilled at their beauty as viewed through the high-quality equipment. The globular cluster in the Hercules constellation, 25,000 light-years away, seemed somehow mine.

After the early group departed at 9, Scott and I continued our night with the sightings of assorted stars, nebulae and galaxies. As our guide, Roy Lorenz, showed us the new sights constantly coming into view, we could practically feel the earth spinning. Since we were the only ones there that night, we benefited from the attention of another guide, Adam Bloch, as well, who helped us take two pictures of deep-sky objects with the observatory’s fancy camera.

It’s all the way up to 3° today

From the Fairbanks News-Miner

A cold air mass that settled over the Tanana Valley late last week from the Yukon Territory resulted in bitter cold temperatures throughout much of the central Interior. The temperature dropped to 40 degrees below zero on Friday and stayed there for most of the next four days, though it did climb up to 38 below on Saturday at one point.

The coldest temperature recorded in the Interior was 57 below at Dry Creek, on the Alaska Highway between Delta Junction and Tok, and sub-50 below temperatures were reported from several other Interior communities. A low of 55 below was recorded at Circle Hot Springs and Manley Hot Springs. It was 52 below in Central, Eagle, Nenana and Tok.

The lowest temperature recorded at the Fairbanks International Airport, the official recording site for the weather service, was 46 below on Sunday, but a low of 52 below was recorded in North Pole. Two Rivers reported 51 below.

Too cold

From the Anchorage Daily News

Mid-January temperatures in Bethel, ALaska, normally hover around zero, according to the National Weather Service. Last week, a chill set in that bottomed out at minus 30 Sunday morning, though winds were light all weekend.

Monday was a different story. With the temperature at 29 below, northeast winds gusted to nearly 40 mph, driving the wind chill below minus 60….

Jan. 19 is also the day Epiphany is celebrated in the Russian Orthodox Church, a holiday that celebrates the baptism of Christ. At St. Sophia church in Bethel, parishioners usually chop a hole in the Kuskokwim River ice and dip out water for the Rev. George Berezkin to bless.

Not this year. Too cold, said subdeacon Nick. In a typical year, parishioners must remove their hats during the service, he said, and the priest dips a cross into the river three times during the ceremony, then holds the dripping cross while reciting long prayers.

“Without hats and gloves, their hands would freeze right on the cross,” Nick said. He’s seen that happen, though the power of the Holy Spirit prevented the people from suffering frostbite, he said.

This year, George blessed water inside. He gave it to parishioners Monday, after getting a ride to church. His car wouldn’t start, he said.

Sonja Olofsson was ready for the restorative powers of running after waking Monday morning to frozen pipes. The taps worked all weekend but slowed down, then stopped.

A veteran of a dozen Bethel winters, Olofsson said she’s used to cold snaps. “This is about normal around here,” she said. “Unfortunately.”

White Sands…

was proclaimed a national monument by President Herbert Hoover on this date in 1933.

At the northern end of the Chihuahuan Desert lies a mountain ringed valley called the Tularosa Basin. Rising from the heart of this basin is one of the world’s great natural wonders – the glistening white sands of New Mexico.

Here, great wave-like dunes of gypsum sand have engulfed 275 square miles of desert and have created the world’s largest gypsum dune field. The brilliant white dunes are ever changing: growing, cresting, then slumping, but always advancing. Slowly but relentlessly the sand, driven by strong southwest winds, covers everything in its path.

Most stressful cities

From Reuters and AP via CNN.com

1. Tacoma
2. Miami
3. New Orleans
4. Las Vegas
5. New York
6. Portland
7. Mobile, Alabama
8. Stockton-Lodi, California
9. Detroit
10. Dallas

Move over New York, take a hike Miami, New Orleans, Las Vegas, Dallas and Detroit. You may have stress but none of you have that rare combination of suicide, unemployment, theft and gloomy weather that Tacoma, Washington, has.

The city of 195,000 just 30 miles south of Seattle was named America’s most stressful city in a survey…

Tacoma ranked at the top of 100 large metro areas surveyed by the BestPlaces ranking researcher, which also took into account other factors such as commute times, alcohol consumption and self-reported mental health.

“America leads the world in stressful living,” said Bert Sperling, who runs Portland, Oregon, based BestPlaces, “The average vacation time in Europe is five weeks a year but our attitude is almost ‘Thank God it’s Monday”‘

The city where convicted Washington, D.C. area sniper John Muhammad lived is home to large blue-collar and military populations. “On a brighter note, Tacomans can feel safe from bodily harm thanks to the low violent crime rate,” Sperling wrote in his report.

High violent crime put Miami second on the list of most stressful cities, in addition to high property crime, long commutes, high unemployment and a high divorce rate.

The third most stressful U.S. city was New Orleans, despite being known as the “Big Easy,” followed by Las Vegas, which had the highest suicide and divorce rates in the study, and New York, which boasted the longest commute times.

The sixth most stressful city was Portland, followed by Mobile, Alabama, Stockton-Lodi in California, Detroit and Dallas. Sperling, whose BestPlaces ranking is published yearly by Money magazine, said he used publicly available census, crime, weather and health data to create a “stress index” in order to rank the cities.

“One of the key factors was the unemployment rate, but we also used the suicide rate — that’s the ultimate unhappiness factor,” Sperling said.

The study also produced the least stressful cities in the United States, which all share low unemployment rates, as well as short commutes, lower divorce rates, less crime and lower suicide rates.

The multiple-city enclaves of Albany-Schenectady-Troy in New York and Harrisburg-Lebanon-Carlisle in Pennsylvania tied for the least stressful metropolitan areas.

Other metro areas with less stress included Orange County, California, Nassau-Suffolk in New York, and Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota.

Endangered places

The National Parks Conservation Association today named 10 parks particularly threatened by air pollution, development, insufficient funding and Administration policies.

Parks on this year’s list, in alphabetical order with their biggest threats, are:

  • Big Thicket National Preserve (Texas): Sale of private lands and increased efforts to drill for oil and gas could fragment and destroy wildlife habitat by promoting haphazard development along park borders; dam proposals could alter much of the preserve’s unique wildlife habitat;
  • Biscayne National Park (Florida): Important fish and coral populations are threatened by overfishing, destructive use, and pollution; sensitive coastline slated for wetlands restoration is being developed, impeding the restoration of the fresh water flows necessary to restore the estuary;
  • Everglades National Park (Florida): Failure to emphasize ecological recovery in the restoration plan guidelines, a lack of action to acquire a critical portion of wetland, and insufficient funding threaten this park;
  • Great Smoky Mountains National Park (North Carolina/Tennessee): Pollution from coal-fired power plants threatens the health of park visitors, plants, and wildlife and diminishes scenic views; administration rollbacks of clean-air protections compounds threats;
  • Joshua Tree National Park (California): Development along park borders threatens to fragment critical wildlife corridors, degrade already poor air quality, and deplete critical aquifers;
  • Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument (Arizona): Insufficient funding leaves the Park Service unable to address extensive damage to the border park’s extraordinary array of Sonoran Desert plants and wildlife;
  • Shenandoah National Park (Virginia): Pollution endangers plants, animals, and scenic vistas; non-native invasive plants and insects damage native vegetation, and insufficient funding undermines the park;
  • Underground Railroad Network to Freedom program (26 states and Washington, D.C.): Without adequate funding, the program is losing the opportunity and ability to create a comprehensive collection of sites, stories, and artifacts, depriving future generations of perhaps the best illustrations of an important aspect of American history;
  • Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve (Alaska): Irresponsible ATV use is scarring the park; a harmful administration policy could allow more than 1,700 miles of proposed roads through the park; and
  • Yellowstone National Park (Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming): Ongoing pressure to continue snowmobile use that Park Service studies have determined threatens the health and enjoyment of visitors and staff, diminishes air quality, and jeopardizes wildlife; inadequate funding for day-to-day needs cripples Park Service capabilities; and the park’s iconic bison are harassed by snowmobiles and killed by Montana officials when the animals wander off parklands in search of food.

Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument…

was designated under the Bureau of Land Management on this date in 2000.

The Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument is under joint management of the BLM and the NPS [National Park Service]. Covering 1,054,264 acres of remote and unspoiled public lands, this monument is a scientific treasure, containing many of the same values that have long been protected in the Grand Canyon National Park. Deep canyons, mountains and lonely buttes testify to the power of geological forces and provide colorful vistas. Here Paleozoic and Mesozoic sedimentary rock layers are relatively undeformed and unobscured by vegetation, offering a clear view to understanding the geologic history of the Colorado Plateau. The monument encompasses the lower portion of the Shivwits Plateau, an important watershed for the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon. Beyond the phenomenal geological resources, the monument also contains countless biological and historical values.

California Coastal National Monument…

was designated under the Bureau of Land Management on this date in 2000.

[T]he California Coastal National Monument runs the entire length of the California coast (840-miles) between Oregon and Mexico, extends 12 nautical miles from the shoreline, and encompasses thousands of BLM administered islands, rocks, exposed reefs, and pinnacles above mean high tide.

Cooperatively managed with other federal, state, local government, universities, and private interests, the primary purpose of the Monument is to protect important biological and geological values. The islands, rocks, reefs, and pinnacles provide forage and breeding grounds for significant populations of birds and sea mammals.