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I've had a cold January 2004
New Years Eve I came down with a really horrible cold. How bad was it? I lost the five pounds I put on over the holidays. That's bad. I don't really understand the biophysics of that, though. Five pounds is about 20,000 calories. Yes, there were several dinnertimes that I didn't really feel like dinner, and just had a snack instead. But I should think that could account for no more than 3,000 or 4,000 calories. Maybe the rest is a side effect of the massive Sudafed I was taking in a vain attempt to make it possible to breathe through my nose.

Weekend of the 24th was the first time I felt halfway decent, so on Monday (for some reason NRAO has suddenly decided to close for MLK day instead of Good Friday) I decided to walk the Chupadera Wilderness Trail. But I seem to have lingering effects of the cold yet. The round trip ran a couple minutes more than five hours, as opposed to four hours, twenty miutes last year. And today I took the little walk around the Socorro Box, and the walk up the slope that, by taking great care with my pace, I usually accomplish with two stop-and-puffs, took five stop-and- puffs, on two of which I actually sat down. I also felt a bit betrayed by my outside thermometer. It said 50, which I figured was right for walking in shirt sleeves. I didn't freeze, but a jacket would have been more comfortable.

Hmmm, I hate to spend a whole entry doing nothing but bitching and moaning. Let's see. Granddaughter Megan was in the high school all-state choir, and I went to Albuquerque to hear them. They were pretty good. Her father Kevin drove down from Denver for the occasion. (He mother Doree didn't make it - she had to see a man about a dog. I'm seriously considering taking Doree off my medical power of attorney - it's too easy to picture her saying "Just keep doing what you're doing; I'm off to a dog show, back in a couple of weeks." But I digress.) It's one of the interesting elements of the bargain we have made with our children - that we will support them to an advanced age while they accumulate the education necessary for survival, and one element of the payback is that they provide us with low cost entertainment. I take a great deal of pleasure listening to high school and college choruses, bands, and orchestras. Imagine having to pay professionals to do that sort of thing - the expense would be staggering. (On the other hand, the efforts in drama are much less successful. I think the reason is that they insist on performing plays in which the protagonists are adults or even elderly. That doesn't work well. The exception, of course, is the Misoula Childrens Theater, in whose very successful plays no recognizable adults appear. We had the UNM drama department do "Once Upon a Matress" for us last fall, and that also went very well; it's also composed of jejune or fabulous personae.)

After the chorus recital, the Carlsbad kids, parents, & teachers went out to lunch, and I went along. One of the teachers patted Megan on the back as she went around the table. Megan said, "Gee - are you trying to act like my mother?" "How so?" "Well, when she walks by my Dad, she's always stopping and rubbing his back, and maybe giving him a little hug." I thought gee - what a terrific thing to remember from your childhood.

Other notable event. Few weeks ago DSL became available in Socorro. I signed up for it, and, finally (delayed by aforesaid cold), this morning I got it turned on. So, finally, I'm able to ask Google about things at home, and have a reasonable chance of being able to read the answers.


The Little Angels, February, 2004
Went to see "The Little Angels". This is a dance troop of about thirty Korean girls, ages nine to fourteen. Their dances for the most part were intended to be pretty, often stately. There were a few quite athletic dances, but the emphasis was on the angelic.

I was mostly staggered by the incredible amount of work these kids must put in to attain the precision and polish they have, and to perform on a grueling tour. They were good.

I actually enjoy some dancing, though I tend to be bored to tears by classical ballet, and this was group was OK by me. I was puzzled by one of the instruments in the recorded accompaniment, which sounded like a cello trying to imitate a clarinet; I remain uncertain whether it was a string or a reed.

Perhaps their most impressive (though not the prettiest) act was one of the quite athletic ones, with six girls dancing while beating drums. The precision was remarkable, everybody on the beat, despite doing things like beating a drum over their heads while there bodies were in a backward arch, facing away from the drums. The prettiest act was probably that in which they formed flower formations with fans as the petals.

They also sang a bit, mostly in English, though one song in Korean. They were just old enough, I guess, for the oriental rl conflation to be taking root. The soloist for 'Amazing Grace' sang "I once was brined but now I sea." The chorus sang "God bless America, land that I love." The 'bless' sounded like about 50% 'bless', 50% 'bress', but there was very little r sound in 'land' or 'love'. The introductory and farewell statements were made by a very cute nine year old, speaking loudly and clearly, but probably not understanding a bit of what she said (she seemed to have little idea about where one word ended and the next began, just the string of sounds that had to be uttered.)

Considering the vast resilience of children, I guess it will do them no permanent harm to be forced to be massively cute for a couple of hours at a time.

I presume this is one of those 'goodwill ambassador" things, subsidized by the Korean Government. No other way Socorro could afford a troop this size. I'm all in favor - good entertainment, and a positive face forward for the country. The only obvious propaganda was the introduction to the sword dance, stating that this originated with the fierce warriors of a thousand years ago, but that now Koreans are a peaceful people who preserve the dance only as a show and ceremony.

But the person who gave the troop its name should be boiled in maple syrup.


Rushing the season, March, 2004
Well, a couple of 70 degree days does not make a spring, I guess. I thought it was about right for a walk in the Manzanos. The first indication that I might have been a little premature was the big snow drifts beside the road to Fourth of July Campground. The second was a snowdrift, just before the campground, and a couple of miles before the trailhead where I planned to leave the car, that the Honda declined to plow through.

So I parked the car at the snowdrift and set off on foot. I headed for the Vereda Canyon trail (as it is called on the map; the sign at the trailhead calls it the Trail Canyon Trail). This heads up to what I guess is the lowest point on the Manzano ridge. I figured if anything was walkable, this would be.

Didn't quite get to the ridge. Stopped a quarter mile or so short. I could see the saddle, and see most of the trail leading there. As well as being short, the slope wasn't really all that steep. The only problem was that it was covered with a lovely sheet of soft spring snow, roughtly mid-calf deep. I guess I just couldn't bring myself to mar such unblemished loveliness. Yeah, that's why I turned back. Yeah, that's it.

I was on this trail last June. Then it struck me as hot, dusty, and dull. Today, none of those adjectives applied.

When I got back to the car, I decided the little bare spot I parked in wasn't wide enough to turn around in. So I started backing out to a wider one. I got distracted by strategic considerations and didn't keep a close enough eye on what the back wheel was doing. When I saw it off in the snowdrift, I turned the wheel to swing the front end out to bring it back. Bad move. Thoroughly stuck. I spent half an hour trying to move enough snow to the free the car, and concluded that it was a job that couldn't be done with fingers and feet. (Next time I'm in REI I'll buy myself a small camp shovel for the trunk.) I had resigned myself to the thirty or forty minute walk to the top of a local hill so that the cell phone could get out and I could call a tow truck. At this point an enormous SUV appeared (judging by the tracks, I think this was the fourth vehicle on that road today). It was populated by Papa, Papa's teenaged sons, and the teenaged sons' teenaged friends. (It also contained a fair sized arsenal, but never mind.) Within about fifteen seconds, they had organized enough tractive power that they could have used the Honda for a hockey puck. I was quickly on my way again.


Spring is here, April, 2004
Took the dog for a walk down by the Rio Grande this evening. River was about eight inches lower than the last time we were there, a week ago. I guess the runoff is winding down already. I was struck by the difference in sound. The river just whispered by, with scarcely a ripple. A week ago it was gurgling and splashing.

Always seems the only thing I have to write about is going for walks. I suspect I get pretty boring sometimes. On the other hand, the local paper has an outdoor column that runs every week, week after week. On yet a third hand, somebody said "Pity the poor guy who is the tape editor for a TV fishing show. He has to watch all the footage that is too boring to put on the screen."

So last Saturday I did go for a walk. Up to the Water Canyon Mesa, around the Mesa Loop Trail (which has a couple of quite nice viewpoints, overlooking the Rio Grande Valley on the east and Water Canyon and North and South Baldies on the west). Came home by way of South Canyon, just for variety. Could have gone over yet one more canyon, to Six Mile Canyon, but not only was I getting tired, I concluded that if I went that way I'd not make it home in time to eat at the brew pub.

South Canyon was really nice, with a nice little stream flowing down it. I think this is the first time I've been there when it's been actually flowing, though there have often been wet spots in the bottom. Of course there are a few disadvantages too, such as the places where the trail runs right down the stream bed. I was also annoyed because, before dropping into the canyon, Doggie and I decided to have a drink; we had about 3/4 liter left of the liter I started with. She said she was really thirsty, so I let her drink first, and unfortunately I was sitting in a position that I couldn't see the level of the water in the bottle very well. She drank about a half liter, and left me with 25 centiliters. So on the walk through South Canyon, my fear of Giardia prevented me from actually drinking any of the nice little stream, and reminded me of the story of Tantalus, who was condemned to sit in the middle of a lake, but whenever he bent over to take a drink, the waters of the lake would recede away from his lips (whence 'tantalize'). The old Greeks came up with some pretty mean ideas. Add to that one: Prometheus, chained to a rock for eternity, with an eagle tearing at and eating his perpetually renewing liver; and Sisyphus, condemned to roll a boulder up a hill, which inevitably escaped him and rolled back down to the bottom.

I set out my tomatoes on April 10, because it was so warm and pleasant, and we hadn't had a freeze since the middle of March. It promptly frosted the night of April 12. The tomatoes look sort of blasted. I don't know if they will survive or not, so today as a backup I bought just a couple of new plants and put them out as well, guaranteeing that I will either have too few tomatoes or too many. They say that the frost didn't kill the apricots, at least in some places around town. So this may be one of those rare years we have apricots. Apricots have no sense at all.

Was driving home after work last Friday when I was intercepted by a bevy of teenaged girls waving signs about a fund-raiser enchilada supper in aid of a girls soccer team. I found both the view and the eats rewarding.

With a view to enlivening my dull diet, I bought a bottle of "Emeril's Sesame Orange Salad Dressing and Marinade." I think it should have been labeled "Seen on TV used by trained professionals. Do not attempt this at home." A general purpose salad dressing it isn't. On the other hand, the Hagen-Dasz Mango Sorbet is quite successful, as are the wasabi peas from the jerky store.


Touring the West, May, 2004
Quite a week and a half. This was engendered by Karen's wedding, with lots of family showing up for the occasion. Rini showed up Thursday morning, and Bill Thursday afternoon. So Thursday was spent collecting people from the airport, and, of course eating. Friday, two Clarks, four Clarkbergs and a Donovan assaulted La Luz trail. Turned back by snow near the top. Jasper, 8, did just fine, but was extremely frustrated when the cooler heads among the party wanted to turn back. Thea did very well for a four-year- old, but ended up being carried about half the way. We had planned to walk up and catch a ride down. So having to turn back meant we walked about twelve miles instead of the planned seven.

Saturday morning, the whole group devolved to the Exploratorium, which is quite new and, I think, a very good job of a science museum. I spent a good deal of time thinking about their fountain. It's pretty tricky. In its rapid turn-on/off mode, the speed of the water passing the valve seems to go from zero to maybe 6 meters per second in about 50 milliseconds, an acceleration exceeding 10 gravities. I can think of a couple of designs that might handle that, but have trouble with the other capability, in continuous flow mode, of regulating precisely the speed of the stream.

Saturday afternoon and evening were Karen's wedding and reception. The bride, I thought, was stunning. As it should be, of course. Whatever life throws at her from now on, she can at least remember, "At my wedding I was beautiful." The ceremony itself was vastly foreshortened. Personally, I'd have preferred a little time to savor things, with maybe a hymn (or anyhow something musical), and a bit of a homily. One never remembers these things (or the exact content of the vows, often labored over to get them just right), but they provide a moment to let things soak in. But it was "who gives this woman who vows yada yada to this man who vows yada yada with this ring I thee wed start the recessional."

Sunday morning I saw the Clarkbergs off on the airplane, and then Ted and I started driving north to his home in Utah. We got to the Chaco Canyon ruin complex. Well worth the few miles diversion from the highway. The current line, explained in a very nice movie at the visitor center, is that the place was a ceremonial center, rather than a farming or trading center. The midden, or trash heap, is of a size to reflect only a comparative few people living there, amidst the many hundreds of rooms in the ruins. The large buildings were built to handle the great influx at ceremonials, or maybe just to impress people, rather than to be lived in.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the ruins are the astronomical alignments. Pueblo Bonito, the large ruin, has a central wall, exactly north-south, and a back wall aligned to solsticial sunrise. But most impressive are the lunar alignments. Smaller ruins are oriented relative to Pueblo Bonito at the angle of moonrise and moonset at the saros extrema. Also, there was a nine turn spiral, upon which the solsticial sun cast a shadow edge through the center. The moon, at the solsticial full moon, would cast its shadow edge on one edge or the other of the spiral, at times nine years apart, at the extrema of the 18 year saros cycle. It would appear that these savages knew more fundamental astronomy than most modern college graduates.

Due north of Pueblo Bonito, up on the mesa above, is Pueblo Alto, marking a "road" that ran off to the north, and also directly to the south. The "roads" are much wider than needed for the traffic they bear - comparable to modern highways. The travel along them was more likely spiritual, rather than physical. In some ways the Chaco "roads" remind me of the Nazca "lines" of the Chilean Atacama.

Ted and I took the trail up to Pueblo Alto, something like a six mile round trip, with a long side loop to look at a set of steps carved in the canyon wall, to provide a convenient route for the inhabitants to get out of the canyon, otherwise quite daunting. The modern trail takes advantage of a slab broken off from the cliff, that has a quite secure, but steep, slope behind it. The trail has a couple of rather steep spots in it even after moderate rearrangement by the Park Service. About three quarters of a mile from the trail start, there is a striking overlook, looking down on Pueblo Bonito and the other Canyon ruins. This offers a wonderful overview of how the place is organized, and gives an appreciation of what the builders had in mind. Well worth the scramble up the cliff.

At Chaco, I bought a "Golden Age Passport" for $10. On this trip, I ended up exhibiting it at six Monuments/Parks, with entrance fees totaling about $75. Thank you taxpayers.

Spent the night in Farmington. Then drove on to Arches. Arches is even more fantastic than I remembered. The forces of arid erosion acting on fractured sandstone produced a landscape so improbable that no could have imagined it without having seen it. The eye, and even the foot, moves from one impossibility to another. It is a true "land removed from reality." We went on a little walk, a mile and a half each way, up to an arch called "Delicate Arch." Ted called the walk "strenuous." Yes, the slope was steep enough to qualify, but I hesitate to award that adjective to something so short. Delicate arch itself is just very nicely shaped arch, with an opening maybe 40 feet high. Its best feature is that it arises from a gently curving basin that spirals away into a steep canyon, as if the arch were swirling its skirts about it.

Then on to Ted's house in Orem. Ted's family, as so many, is very tightly scheduled - school, preschool, study groups, etc., with constant juggling of schedules so that one or two kids can be picked up on the same trip that one or two are being dropped off. All very tiring. On the Tuesday and Wednesday, I went up to SLC to visit my brother Bill while the kids were in school. He seems to be doing OK, considering that he is even less of a spring chicken than I am. (In my early experience, spring chickens were quite likely to hit the skillet pretty quickly; anticipation usually got the better of us and we started eating them when it still took two to feed the family.)

On the Wednesday I stopped by the Timpanogos Wilderness Area. Which is just a beautiful place, though not as spectacular as the National Parks. Here as elsewhere, I felt as if I were devoting a very few hours to a place that deserves days if not weeks. The Timpanogos Cave trail was marked closed (opening May 15), so I just walked around a little loop. Two hours, and not too steep, so about four miles. As I said, Timpanogos is really, quietly, beautiful, and even more so in early spring. Only slight complaint was that Mom Nature has a little trouble distinguishing between seasonal watercourses, in which a trickle of water from snow melt is most delightful, and trails, in which it isn't.

Thursday I headed south, to Bryce Canyon. The drive wasn't as long as I anticipated, so there was time to take a medium length walk. It was called Fairyland Loop, 8 miles, 3.75 hours. The literature calls it "strenuous", but they lie. Anything I average above 2 MPH can't be strenuous.

The characteristic of Bryce Canyon is the abundance of "hoodoos". These are erosion generated little stone towers, typically a few feet high, and often banded with an interesting red and white color scheme. The overall impression is that many places look like Hindu temples, covered with statues of the gods. Still, all-in-all, I like Arches better, because, although the hoodoos are baroque and fantastic, they are mostly a hundred meters or two away from the trail, whereas in Arches your very footfall seems to fall upon the fantasmagoric landscape. The Bryce trail had one nice feature, though. The overall relief of the place is quite vertical, and to maintain a reasonable semblance of levelness to the trail, they kept whirling us around turrets or into couloirs, to the extent that absent the sun, I'd have soon lost any sense of direction whatsoever.

Incidentally, Ruby's Inn, just outside the gate of the park, is a superior hostelry. Rates were reasonable, restaurant was good, 25 yard indoor pool, hot tub.

Friday, Zion. Here nature has a most peculiar preference for the vertical, and is wont to throw a thousand foot cliff in front of you when you least expect it. And here, at last, a walk that qualifies, I think, as strenuous: eight miles in five hours. It was the most strenuous of the paved (!) trails recommended for day hikes. Observation Point is the name of the place. It may be the same trail that Bill and I walked when we visited the place about half a century ago. At least it has the feel that I remember well, that we went up a ways, then got out of sight of the bottom of the canyon, and wandered about in a maze of little canyons, always ascending but unable to see either top or bottom, until suddenly we were at the level of the Canyon rim, and could see the whole Canyon spread out before us. The route may be the same, (or may not ) but the trail is very different from what I remember. The trail now (some of the paving was dated 1976) is a great broad road, easily able to accommodate a column of troops moving in either direction as required. What I remember is a footpath (well marked, though), with an occasional chain fixed in place to give you something to hang onto as you worked your way across the top of the random thousand foot cliff. And the trail designer clearly has in mind that a little scaring is in order, and he does delight in leading you across areas of great exposure, both above and below. Mostly, I shied away from looking down the cliffs. Things were so steep that in order to lean over enough to see the cliff face, one should, for safety, get down on ones knees, and mine are too old for much of that.

I sort of accidentally took another walk that day. On the shuttle bus (!) back to the parking area, the driver said something to the effect of "To put us back on schedule, this will be a nine minute stop. While you could just sit here for nine minutes, better you great sods should get off and walk up the trail, and find out what the Canyon is really about." Although I thought I had fulfilled my quota of walking for the day, I thought I'd get off and go sit on the bench under a tree for a while to mollify him. But somebody else beat me to the bench, and my darn feet, when placed upon a path and started moving up and down, tend to continue in that mode unreasonably. Riverside Walk, two miles, pretty level. Only amusing incident was at the semicircle of benches at the turn-around point. There were two or three squirrels running around looking for crumbs. I thought they were cute and offered one of them an almond. He immediately turned into squirrelzilla, leaped into my lap and started climbing up my shirt. He physically mugged me of a couple more nuts before I could get the packet stowed in my pack, which he was eyeing appraisingly, as if trying to decide if he could chew a hole in it before I got onto him. I decided it was time to depart.

Prime complaint about Zion is the people. It was verging on being intolerably crowded, and this in the first week of May when some of the trails aren't even open yet. Bryce was much better, but I suspect that it too becomes way overpopulated in the middle of the season.

On to Lake Powell. Good thing I had the Golden Age Passport, cause I sure would have been mad about being charged ten bucks to drive down a dull road through the desert beside an artificial lake. True, there was a sort of resort in the middle of this Lakeshore Drive, and I stopped there a bit. There was a desk labeled "Boat Tours." But there didn't seem to be any descriptive material about how long they were, or when they might be departing. There was a line in front of the desk, so just moseying up and asking didn't seem all that practical. I had a cup of coffee to see if the line would dissipate, and it didn't. I concluded that their lack of descriptive material meant that they had decided they didn't need me, so I decided I didn't need them either, and left.

The Glen Canyon Dam Visitor Center was outside the Lakeshore Drive/Wahweep Marina area, and was thus free. However, they had a full, airline style, security checkpoint to get in. What, I'm going to use my pocket knife to chop a hole in the dam, unleashing a devastating flood that will roar through the streets of Blythe, destroying both the McDonald's AND the Wendy's? The only hypothesis I could come up with was that the guy who thought up the $10 entry charge for Lakeshore Drive had an office somewhere in the back, quaking in fear for his life.

Next stop Meteor Crater. A private attraction, so I actually had to pay an admission. But I didn't regret that. They've done a great job on the museum. And the crater itself is just as impressive and meteor-crater looking as the last time I visited, about 40 years ago, or the first time I visited, about 50 years ago. Gene Shoemaker is credited with really nailing the meteor crater identification, but I thought they made a very good case for it at that first visit, when Gene Shoemaker was even more of a pup than I was.

Got to Petrified Forest just after they closed, and I didn't yet feel like spending the night, so that's the one National Monument/Park near the route that I didn't make it to. Spent the night in Gallup, then went on to El Malpais National Monument. Now that's a national monument with a great attitude. They basically say "Try not to get lost. Don't go caving in the lava tubes unless you have a party of three, preferably four, and have at least two, preferably three, flashlights per person. Don't go into Bat Cave, because you will bother the bats. Don't try going into the steep sinkholes near the Calderon trail unless you really, really know what you are doing. (The lady ranger allowed as how a broken leg rescue from those sinkholes was a major fracas.) I'm very glad there is still a federal reserve that doesn't feel that you must at all cost be protected from your own stupidity, whether you have any or not.

There was a short tame section of lava tube about 50 meters long, with openings at both ends, and stand-up all the way. I walked through it, and let my ancient knees convince me that clambering over jagged bits of lava is not a great recreation under current circumstances, and I was not in the least tempted to approach the twilight zone.

I took El Calderon loop trail, about three miles, to a very nice cinder cone. I also went to Ice Cave, a private, admission charging establishment, for maybe another mile. Ice Cave is a lava tube with ice in the bottom. There is also a trail up another cinder cone, which is taller, and more spectacular than El Calderon, but El Calderon is, I think, prettier, with very nice pines growing in the bottom. So maybe four miles total on the lava flows.

From El Malpais, a straight shot home, and always glad to get here. About 47 miles on foot and 2000 by car in eleven days strikes me as a great way to spend a vacation.


CSI Socorro, May, 2004
The CSI guys and their luminol would have a ball in my house right now. Yesterday morning, while unloading the dishwasher, I dropped a butcher knife on my toe. As usual with sharp knives, no pain but a lot of trouble stopping the bleeding. So there are the droplets kicked off as I assessed the situation, the big smears where I attempted to clean up after myself on the way over to the table and chair, the little smears where I tossed the saturated paper napkins, additional droplets when I backed off to see if the bleeding had stopped, then the set of bloody footprints where I headed for the bathroom to find a bandaid, blobs in front of the cabinets were I searched for the bandaids, and finally, blobs in the bedroom where I tried to dry the toe off enough to make a bandaid stick. (I've concluded it would be worth the investment, next time I'm at the store, to buy another box of bandaids, so I could have one in _both_ cabinets.)

I had been planning a long walk yesterday, and quickly shortened that concept. And when I started to put on my shoes for a medium walk, an hour and a half later, I noticed a pretty pink spot on my sock. So I cancelled that too, and spent the day in complete indolence.

(Undulant fever (or remitting fever) is an old name for brucellosis. I remember a time in my childhood when I was disinclined to do anything, and Mom said that I had indolent fever.)

But, on the plus side, it does say I still have a good blood supply to my peripherals. Venous blood, though - one of the more amusing activities of the event was watching the blood turn from dark to bright red as it soaked into the paper napkins.

Been thinking about mortality. I've been reading the TIAA-CREF literature. They say their average male retiree dies at 86. This seems to be a bit of a plus to education, or something. The number I see for the general population, starting at my age, is 82. I found a Web site that estimated individual life expectancy, on the basis of a dozen or so questions. This gives me 89, but promises 92 if I lose another 40 pounds. Phththththt. Anyway, I'm inclined to ask TIAA-CREF for an annuity with no guarantee period. A little frightening, because a fair fortune goes skittering away if I die on day two of retirement, but will break even and start to pay off after fifteen or twenty years. Of course, I'm not doing it on a calculated risk basis, but just because I truly don't give a damn about what happens after I bite the big one.


Small Town, June, 2004
You know the population density is low when you lose your cell phone thirty miles by road and four miles by trail away from home on Saturday afternoon, and get a phone call on Sunday afternoon that begins, "Hello, Barry, this is Peter. Is this your cell phone?"


Walking again, August, 2004
As so many of these entries do, this one begins with the statement, "I took the dog for a walk on Saturday." All my walking friends had been expressing surprise that I haven't yet walked trail 25 A, so we did. Trail 25 A is a new trail, finished last summer sometime, that shares the same trailhead with Trail 25. They both go up the Magdalena Ridge, and one can follow the Magdalena Ridge trail between their upper terminii. Trail 25 A is a rather unwieldy name, but I don't know a better. Trail 25 is known as the Hop Canyon Trail, so a reasonable thing might be to call Trail 25 A the New Hop Canyon Trail, and Trail 25 the Old Hop Canyon Trail. But Trail 25 has itself been relocated in recent years (it used to run partly across private land, and the landowner objected to random walkers wandering through his pastures). So some people call the Old Hop Canyon Trail the New Hop Canyon Trail. I hope I've made everything perfectly clear.

Anyway, Trail 25 A is a great trail, with really nice views of the town of Magdalena, and, in the distance, the VLA, now in its D, smallest, configuration. This view off to the northwest is really much more entertaining than the view to the south or southwest to be had from trail 25. And me without my camera. Anyway, the trail provides the most convenient access to the summit of North Baldy. So after visiting the summit, I took the connector trail over to Trail 25. At which point I ran out of steam. I mean totally ran out of energy. The two and a quarter mile connector took me two and a half hours to walk. I would normally expect to walk it in an hour and a half, or hour and three quarters (it does go down into quite a deep little saddle, and back up again), but I was totally pooped. (I did stop for a fifteen minute nap, in hopes of restoring a bit of energy, but it didn't work.) The last quarter mile in particular I felt like I was ascending on pure grit, rather than the usual feeling that I was rendering a small payment in going uphill toward enjoying the pleasures of the trail. I was so wasted that I was considering reporting the matter to my doctor, except I'm sure he would respond, "First we'll have you lose about 25 lbs, then we'll see."

I also had a little trouble with leg cramps, which I haven't had for several years, and I was hoping they had gone away altogether. They occur when I go uphill for a long way, then go downhill for quite a while, then start up again. The thighs used to take offense at that on a regular basis, and cause me to fling myself on the ground and writhe in agony for five minutes, after which I could pick myself up and go on with no further problems. It's as if my thighs were saying "OK, now that we've got your attention and registered our protest, let's get on with it."

Shortly after starting on the connector trail, I was sitting down having a drink of water, and Doggie wandered off the trail up the hillside above me. She suddenly gave a tremendous bark (she almost never barks on the trail), and ran off up the trail. And, indeed, something did need attention. Voices drifted around the next corner ahead, first a murmur that I later learned was an expression of concern about possibly being attacked by wild dogs, then the comprehensible "That looks like Barry Clark's dog." And there shortly appeared a trio of New Mexico Tech grad students, including an astronomy student who is doing a thesis at NRAO. And Doggie belied their fears of wild dogs by welcoming them shamelessly. They seemed, though, to be just a bit concerned that I was wandering about the countryside with no adult supervision. But I'm too young to need supervision.


Santa Fe Opera, August, 2004
I had never heard of "Simon Bocanegro" before, much less heard it before. I was just going on the knowledge that Verdi is pretty good. Yep, Verdi is pretty good.

Simon (or Simone) Bocanegro was the first Doge of Genoa, in the fourteenth century. According to the opera, he had personal and political problems. For most operas, the plot can be summarized in a few lines (although when you do so, it often appears transcendently silly). But not "Simon Bocanegro". It seems impossible to come up with a synopsis much shorter than the libretto. So just leave it at "he had personal and political problems." He was reviled as "the tyrant", or hailed as "the peacemaker", often by the same people. He ends up being poisoned by one of his first supporters, Paolo. (The death scene lasts half an hour, of course, but that's opera.)

Paolo, a basso of course, did a terrific job, and would have run away with the play except for the natural tendency to hiss the villain. He was a black man, which brought to mind an interview with the black man who sang Judas in the first production of "Superstar". Somebody asked him if casting a black Judas was possibly being racist. He replied something to the effect of "the heck with racism; did you hear what I get to sing?"

Earlier this season we had a lack-luster "Don Giovanni" production and now this rather terrific "Simon Bocanegro". I'm beginning to think Mozart may not really be God, or at least not the only god.

The other opera I saw this season was Bizet's "Beatrice and Benedict". Again, just chosen on what I thought I knew of the composer. It was a piece of fluff. Afterward, I got to thinking about "Carmen". If you took out the "March of the Toreadors", there wouldn't really be much there. Maybe Bizet is a one-piece composer. Someday I'll have to try his "Faust" to see.


Labor Day, 2004
Spent Labor Day weekend in the Gila Wilderness. Camped for two nights there. It's a fair drive, so didn't do much on the Saturday and Monday except drive. Four hours down, then took six hours home on Monday, because I wanted to take the Silver City to Hillsboro road, which is, I guess, the shortest route from Silver City to Socorro, but definitely not the fastest. Driving the 110 miles from Silver to T or C via Deming would have probably taken an hour less than the 78 miles via Hillsboro. But the drive was beautiful.

A fairly modest walking schedule - five miles to Hummingbird Saddle on Saturday, fourteen round trip to Mogollon Baldy on Sunday, six miles to Whitewater Baldy and Sandy Point on Monday.

Usually my trips are about mountains. This one was about trees. Actually, Mogollon Baldy is a pretty nice mountain. But the trees were something special. "Cathedral-like Forests" is a frequent cliche of the nature writer. This place actually has them. I've not been in forests like them except in Yosemite and Sequoia. It rained on me a bit on Saturday, which was amply repaid by having the forests look even more spectacular than they did on Sunday, after a day and a half of dry weather. You just can't get the feel of forests like these without being in them. Maybe if you photograph them in IMax, but even then I doubt it. With the rain, the mosses and lichens were looking good, and the fungi were out in force. There was an enormous orange mushroom about eight inches across in the middle of the camping area, and there were any number of other species along the trails, including some that seemed identical to the ones you buy in the supermarket. I was sort of wishing I knew enough about mushrooms to know if I could have bent down, picked one and eaten it. (I was getting desperate. I did not pack the right food for this trip - I had a little salami, some chocolate, and an enormous bag of trail mix. By Monday afternoon I would have killed for a good piece of bread.)

But the GPS was totally useless - not enough clearings. It kept asking me if I was inside.

Other nature notes - when I started walking on Sunday, I heard an elk bugling in the distance. When we started out on Monday morning, Doggie flushed a grouse, which proceeded to sit on a branch for about a minute, grousing at her about the indignity of being forced to fly into a tree. Doggie was also fascinated by chipmunks, which we don't have in the local Magdalenas. Every time one chittered at her, she would go inspect the tree it was in, often at considerable effort. I don't know if she thought the chipmunk was an organ of the tree, or if she thought a magic stairway might open and lead to the branch the chipmunk was on.

Being a New Mexican, I have no good wet weather gear. However, my sleeping bag came through the rain Saturday with flying colors. I managed to keep it from getting soaked, but it pretty definitely had largish wet spots on it. But wet and all, it kept me quite adequately warm.

Mogollon Baldy has large clear areas near the top, but on Whitewater Baldy I saw nothing but trees. One of the other campers told me that if you go a couple hundred yards down the far side you come to a clearing that gives the mountain its name. But in both cases, it seems to me, the "Baldy" is a mild case of male pattern baldness, not the total alopecia of North and South Baldies in the Magdalenas.

I definitely slow down at elevations above 9000 feet. The fourteen mile round trip to Mogollon Baldy, actually fairly level, took me ten hours. The people from the next campsite but one gave me a three hour lead, and did the same trip, and I was hard put to get back to camp before they did. But I talked to one of their guys who stayed home. He said they were planning to push pretty hard, and he had a little arthritis in his ankle that he didn't want to push. Darn, a perfect opportunity to complain about the arthritis in my knees, and it didn't occur to me to do so.

Sunday evening, the campers at the next campsite forgot the rule that you should keep food high off the ground to protect it from wild animals, so Doggie managed to score a summer sausage. Somehow, she didn't seem very interested in having her dog food for breakfast next morning.

I drifted through all Tuesday morning with a vague smile on my face, a tangible artifact of a three day weekend that did what a three day weekend should.


Boston & Ithaca, October, 2004
Well, I had about given up on writing a trip report on my last trip, but, as it happens I'm at the VLA site, and I need to babysit some machinery for a couple hours, and the work stuff I could work on is so disgusting that I really don't want to, so here goes.

Went to see my eastern children over Calumbus day. This is relevant because grandchild Jasper had a couple days off school. Anyway, I flew (flu?) to Boston on the Monday.

Was going to hang around the Harvard astronomers on the Tuesday, but on the way up to the astronomy place, I got distracted by the Harvard museums. The Fogg is really a major player, with lots of nice stuff. There is a Rembrant portrait of an old man (believed to be a generic old man) that is really quite nice. (A fair number of the Rembrant etchings are generic types, also. If I were to go in for Rembrant, the thing I most covet would be a print of an etching entitled "Old woman cleaning her toenails.") The place also has more Monets than you can shake a stick at. There is a van Gogh self portrait, painted on a strikingly luminous turquoise background. I may be misremembering other self-portraits; I thought he always painted himself with a touch of madness; this one seems to be just a bit unhappy, rather than mad. In one of the other museums (I forget the name), there was a special exibit of oriental bronzes, which didn't turn me on, and a 2nd century BC pot from Greece with a scene from Homer, which did. I finally got to the natural history museum shortly before closing time. Their vaunted exhibit was glass flowers (OK if you like that sort of thing), but the place I spent most of my little time there was their Hall of Minerals. A few steps beyond the Rock and Mineral Museum at New Mexico Tech. Would you believe selinite crystals five feet long, or a geode three feet across.

I arrived with a bit of a cold (whence the parenthetic remark about the air trip - I first realized I had a cold when I had to pump up my ears on the descents). So I spent the Wednesday hanging around Bill's appartment, reading and napping, which left me in good enough shape that I survived the following week.

Thursday Bill drove me over to Rini's. There we mostly just hung around. On the Saturday, we went off to a brief walk down a local creek, then to a birthday party of a friend of Jasper's, who was becoming eight. The party was supposed to be a swimming party at the local community college pool, but when people arrived, it was discovered that the pump was broken, and they wouldn't let people swim. A bit of a disappontment, but the kids managed to reorganize themselves and have fun anyway (that's a pretty good age for that). (The adults organized a kickball game in the gym, but a couple little girls organized a "We hate kickball" protest.) The kids had a lot of fun with a piece of cloth that mostly looked like a parachute.

Tuesday Rini & Larry were off to work and the kids off to school, so I mostly just hung around and read and napped again.

Wednesday I rented a car and drove it back to Boston to catch an airplane home.

While I'd been gone, Socorro had a major hail storm, worst in living memory. My skylight was broken, but otherwise I was in good shape. There are a lot of dimpled cars driving around Socorro (mine was in the parking lot at the Albuquerque airport), and the roofing companies for miles around are working seven day weeks. The fancy steel shingles I got for my house did OK, no leaks, though I worry the their attachment to the roof might be loosened by the pounding, and might lose a few in the spring winds next year. In the living room, which has no ceiling, all the accumulated sand and dust that had wedged itself between the tongue-and-groove in the roof was shaken through the cracks, coating the room. Must have been something to see (and hear). Nobody seriously injured, but there was a report of a broken finger on somebody holding his hands on top of his head for protection. Oh, and my mailbox was converted to something resembling a wadded up piece of aluminum foil.


Heating Season, October, 2004
When I got up Saturday morning, it was 63 F in the house. That's OK while bustling around, but a little chilly for sitting and reading. So I went for a walk, in the Quebradas. When I left the house, I was wearing a windbreaker and watch cap. By the time I got to the place to start walking, it was getting a bit warmer, so I stuffed the watch cap in my pocket. I was heading for la Loma de las Caņas. The Loma is a pretty long hill, perhaps as much as a mile long. So half a mile in from the road up a broad arroyo puts you at the south end of the Loma. It is quite possible to walk up the hill at this point, before the little cliffs that ring the summit start to make a nuisance of themselves. However, the slope is very steep, and, partly because of the cold I had a month ago that I'm still recovering from, I decided I wasn't up to a steep slope. So I followed the arroyo on north, around the northern nose of the hill, where there is access to the other side. On the other side, the hill is hardly troubled by cliffs at all, and one can just stroll up the slope to the top of the ridge. The stroll was sufficiently energy producing that I quickly doffed the windbreaker. But that slope puts one at the low, north, end of the hill. So I had to walk south along the ridge to the highest point, at the south end of the Loma. At this point, I decided that I still wasn't up for a steep slope, even going downhill. And there was this nice little arroyo running along the back of the Loma that seemed quite accessible. Indeed, it was a well behaved little arroyo that connected back with the main arroyo in time to run around the northern nose of the Loma. After which, I walked the length of the Loma for the fourth time, on the way back to the car.

I arrived home pretty heated up, and even slightly sunburned (hey, I thought sunburn season ended a couple weeks ago, and didn't wear a hat). The house had warmed up too. All the way to 65 F. I lit the gas fireplace. After the fashion of fireplaces, it heated the room with a pronounced gradient. By the time I decided to go out for dinner, it was about 75 over near the fireplace, but still 67 across the room. I gave up and turned the furnace on; heating season has begun.

Woke up early in the dawn this morning. Looked out the window to see what time it was. Thought I was seeing double - the morning star had whelped a pup. Turns out that Venus and Jupiter are only a degree or two apart, providing a lovely double greeting to the dawning day.


Fourth of July at Thanksgiving, November, 2004
Didn't have the traditional turkey Thursday. (Albuquerque paper said a group of the local homeless cheered when served barbecued ribs.) I had fried liverwurst on cheese bagels (note the plural) _slathered_ with mayonaise, with pecan pie for dessert. I believe that any one of those meal components would provide the recommended maximum grams of fat for one day.

After dinner, I drove up to Fourth of July Campground, to spend the night. I wanted to walk there, and it's a two hour drive, and I thought that would make too late a start to drive up this morning. Also, I wanted to see how my sleeping bag would do. It has a big 20 F on its label. They were saying high twenties for Socorro, and Fourth of July is nearly three thousand feet higher, so I was thinking low to mid teens. A good test conducted where one can readily exchange chilliness for contortion by hopping into the back seat of the car. Anyway, the bag did quite well. My only complaint with it is the arrangement at the top end. There are bits of string and tabs of material here and there that look like they should work together to make a nice hooded bag. They don't seem to. (My old down bag of forty years ago was great - as it got cold, you just pulled on one string, until eventually you had a smooth brown chrysalis, with a tiny hole near one end with your nose sticking out.) So I sleep on one hand to force its fingers to grab one of the tabs and hold it over the top of my balding head. The hand sometimes objects to this, and asks to be relieved. As I said, the bag worked just fine, including the well known phenomenon that a sleeping bag, which has been cold, hard, and uncomfortable all night, suddenly becomes warm, soft, and snuggly when it gets to be time to get up. I spent the better part of an hour telling myself "All you need to do is pull down the zipper, roll over, put on your shoes, and walk over to the car to get your sweatshirt and hat, and you'll be just as comfortable as in the sleeping bag."

In the end, I think it was warmer than 20 when I got up, though certainly well below freezing.

And after the reluctant rising, breakfast, breaking camp, and repacking my day pack, it was 7:30. I could have slept at home and gotten up at an almost reasonable hour.

But there was one reason for driving in the night before. If I had seen the road in full daylight, I might well have turned back. Pretty icy in spots.

There was a fair amount of snow round about, and I wasn't feeling very enthusiastic about hacking through it, so rather than walking down to the Trail Canyon Trail, a particular obsession of mine, I just walked up the Fourth of July Trail to the Manzanos Crest Trail. I should then have walked along it to another way down, but I had a sudden image of myself in the middle of a vast, nearly level field of knee deep snow, suddenly too pooped to walk forward breaking a trail, or back, uphill. I chickened out and turned around.

Artemis is now eleven. It was my understanding that even for the hardiest breeds she should be getting well along in doggie middle age. But, on the lower part of the trail, where there was only three or four inches of snow to deal with, she would trot way ahead of me. Every now and then, she would turn around and look back. If I was still plodding along, she would proceed on her way. But if I was stopped to puff, she would come galloping back, with her tail bouncing and her ears flopping, the picture of enthusiastic dog ready to encourage her flagging master. Later on, when we were dealing with eight or ten inches of snow, she stayed closer to hand, but still, she does well for a middle aged creature. And so ingrained is the "Dogs proper place is in the front" paradigm that I couldn't convince her that it would be a lot less work for her if she let me break trail some of the time.

With the short walk (maybe five or six miles round trip, but made more interesting by the snow), I was home by two-thirty in the afternoon.

When I was folding up my tarp, I discovered it had contained a sock, which I had missed following the Gila trip last Labor Day. I was very happy to see it. Not that socks are that valuable, but I had been feeling quite guilty that my personal effects were wandering unattended about the Gila Wilderness Area.


Donder und Blitzen, February, 2005
Was walking down the bosque road out of Escondido Lake this evening. Heard a few drops of rain on the tree leaves, and didn't think much of it, since five minutes before I'd been watching the full moon rising through a scrim of clouds. All of a sudden, the whole world vanished in a curtain of light. What hair I have left proceeded to stand on end. I started to think "There better be a very loud noise very soon, or else I'm having a stroke, which would be a Bad Thing. But my hair had not yet fully erected when arrived the CRACK of doom. I'm guessing a second and a half after the flash. Probably an intracloud discharge directly overhead. That one bang was the only one of the evening, but it took Doggie and I several minutes to get our wits together again.

After the bang, it started to rain a bit. Not a lot - my coat got wet, but not so wet as to soak through to the shirt except right at the shoulders. Trouble was, the rain was just enough to make susceptable streches of the already damp road very slick. So walking home was a bit more exiting than planned. Yes, I fell down in the mud. Not a serious fall. My reaction was not "Ouch" but "Dang, I'll have to get my coat cleaned." (I claim I won't hurt myself falling down so long as I keep in practice, which I do.)

Before I got back to the car, there was the moon again, shining through its scrim, and even Sirius blazing away in a large clear spot.

There's wet, and then there's wet.

Southern Califormia is having their wettest January-February ever, some thirty-five inches. We also are having our wettest January-February ever, three and a quarter inches. Last time it was this wet, Gen'l Sibley was worried about the damage to the adobe barracks at Ft. Craig.


Touring Arizona, March, 2005
Well, I celebrated my birthday by taking a few days off and going touristing. First, went to Petrified Forest. Took half a day, or a little more, to give it a little more attention than the other times I've been there. An interesting place, but it kept bringing up questions when there wasn't anybody around to answer them, The signage described the petrification process OK, but that's only half of what makes the place. The other half is that the sandstone erodes away, and leaves the agatized wood lying on the surface. Why aren't the sand grains fused as firmly as the wood cells? Is it something in the wood itself that makes it tough? There were a lot of logs with petrified bark, that seems to have vitrified as well as the wood, but I saw one log with a coating of cemented conglomerate in lieu of bark, as if something were leaking out of the wood and causing the surrounding conglomerate to cement.

Also, the logs are frequently broken into drums, with breaks closely perpendicular to the line of the trunk. Why? Is it just that the rock is most likely to feel strain in that direction as the supporting sandstone erodes away? Does the rock have a minimum in tensile strength in that direction because of the underlying structure of the wood? Is it breaking along a joint structure in the wood?

On one trail they had little signs, naming the plants, and telling about both food and medicinal uses by the local native Americans. I was struck by the one by the prickly pear. It said that pads were heated, split down the middle and used as poultices to, among other things, relieve the pain of haemorrhoids. I guess you just had to be careful to get the right side up.

Next up, Canyon de Chelly. I was pleased to learn that the strange looking word Chelly is some Spanish speaker's attempt to spell a Navajo word, now spelled Tse'e (with some diacritical marks I don't remember). The Europeans went a little crazy when trying to pick up the local Indian names: Navajo is a Tiwa (pueblo) word; Anasazi is the Navajo word for ancestral pueblans, etc.

Canyon de Chelly is a curious place. To the casual tourist, it is entirely oriented to the automobile. You drive out to an overlook, get out, walk fifty yards to the edge of the Canyon, say "Yep, that's steep down there, and there's an Indian ruin at the bottom," get back in your car, and drive to the next overlook.

The bottom of the Canyon is pretty flat, though not as flat as it looks in the aerial view one gets from the rim. There are people farming down there, in all the traditional Navajo ways. The road up the canyon is closed to the public, except there are guided tours, both on foot and by auto, with Navajo guides to shush you up and not annoy the local inhabitants beyond tolerance. The one exception was an open trail from the rim down to an Anasazi ruin called the White House, which is about a two and a half mile round trip. Pets were forbidden, so Doggie had to remain in the car for the hour and some that I took to walk it. The White House itself is two building complexes, one resting on the Canyon floor, the other on a ledge about 40 feet above it. I guess the high one was there for defensive purposes (though the literature says something about being a little back in an alcove keeps the summer sun off you), and the low one was for fat old men, who would not want to climb a forty foot ladder every time they wanted a drink of water, but could be considered dispensable in case of attack,

On the way back up the trail, I met a little Navajo woman, about my age I guess (I shouldn't try guessing women's ages - it's a sport I'm not good at, and is subject to major disasters), wearing the traditional skirt, and carrying a purse. I rather think she lived in the house at the bottom of the cliff, and was headed off to a shopping trip in town. When I caught her up, she had stopped to chat with a Navajo guide who was taking a group of (bilaagana) teenagers to the White House, and maybe further (they were carrying lots of water but no sleeping bags). This was maybe 500 feet below the rim. So we started up the trail together, she making a little small talk that indicated a minimal familiarity with English but a considerable familiarity with the Canyon. After a while, she started to pull ahead of me, and got fifty or sixty feet ahead before stopping to admire the scenery. Of course, I demonstrated my masculinity by walking past her, and coming out on the mesa fifty or sixty feet ahead of her.

Spent the night in Chinle, which is quite a pleasant little town, industrious and prosperous looking, except that paving the streets seems to be regarded as an unnecessary extravagance. And considering the usual rainfall, I guess it is. Drove through Tuba City on my way out of the Rez, and to my vast regret, didn't stop and ask how the heck it got its name. I was much less taken with it than with Chinle; it seemed a little, dusty, backwater, relieved only by a few public institutions like the Indian Health Services and a boarding school.

Then on to Grand Canyon. Again, very impressive overlooks, but this time with drops of 5,000 feet instead of 700 feet. But the nicest part is the colors, with sandstone in all sorts of shades of red, white and grey. And once more, signs proclaiming that doggies are not allowed below the rim, whether leashed or not. So Doggie and I had to find a trail that stayed above the rim. We walked a few miles along something called the Arizona trail, that followed the edge of the Coconino Escarpment, which was a nice view, but mostly green, instead of the nice reds and whites. The Arizona trail is one of those things that have grown up in envy of the Appalachian Trail. I could have followed it 75 miles into downtown Flagstaff, said the trail sign, where I could stop and ask directions to Tucson. New Mexico's equivalent is the Continental Divide Trail. I'm not very tempted. The continental divide is quite nice in places in Colorado and Wyoming, but trudging through the dusty pinon and cedar dwarf forest across the hills of Pie Town doesn't strike me as other than massochistic.

The lodge area of the Park seemed pretty industrialized. I didn't even stop. I seem to remember an impressive set of parking lots the last time I was there, forty years ago, but this has now passed all reasonable bounds, with parking lots A, B, C, etc, shuttle busses, one way streets and everything. If I hadn't had Doggie along, I might have presented myself to one of the dragomen, answered his questions about how much time and money I wanted to spend, and let him nudge me onto the proper conveyer belt. But I decided that this I could do without.

There was a trail I was interested in in the San Francisco Peaks, just above Flagstaff. But it seemed to be covered with snow and possibly skiers. The trailhead was somewhere in a ski resort complex. So I backed off to a considerably less ambitious walk that I stumbled across by accident. The trailhead is a few blocks from where the I40 business intersects the freeway, and goes a couple thousand feet up to a fire lookout tower and microwave dish complex overlooking the city. With my usual impeccable bad judgment, I noted that the ground was bare, the trail was wide and well groomed, and the air was warm. I set off in my usual water soluble tennis shoes. OK, I did continue to see bits of bare trail even three quarters of the way to the top, and only on the last little bit, up to Elden Tower itself, did I sink in more than ankle deep. (Other, preceding, hikers had disdained going up there and observing that a ploughed road comes up the back way, so this bit was the only place I had to really break trail.)

On the way home from Flagstaff, on impulse I stopped by El Morro Monument. This national monument has the characteristic that it doesn't really rise to being a destination in itself, and it is not near, or on the way to, anyplace you'd really like to be. It is a butte with a natural cistern at the bottom that catches much of the rainwater that falls on one end of the butte. The name comes from the fancied resemblance of the beak of the butte, near the pool, to a human face. So people have been stopping by for a drink for centuries. The cliff wall there is a beautiful, fine grained, soft, white sandstone, which virtually demands scratching your name on it. Not counting the Anasazi petroglyths, this started with Don Juan de Onate in 1605. It includes a rather bombastic note from de Vargas, the reconquistador after the Pueblo revolt, and all sorts of Spanish notables. Nothing from the Mexican era. A note from a couple of US army guys, poking around in 1849 seeing what we had picked up in the Mexican War. Finally, a graphito from a bunch of Union Pacific surveyors, who were briefly considering a more northerly route than the one finally adopted. All in all, a very interesting place, and I'm glad I took the byway.

There is some rather similar sandstone out in the Quebradas. I'm going to have to fetch a piece home and write my name on it, to find out if those guys whipped out an awl and inscribed their elegant calligraphy in five minutes, or if they spent half a day at it.

Prior to this trip, I had never spent more than $2 for a gallon of gasoline, though I paid $1.999 more than once. But this time I seemed always to run low in isolated towns with only one gas station, so that mark was handily shattered, $2.18 in Quemado, New Mexico; $2.12 in Cameron, Arizona; $2.38 in Ramah, New Mexico.

The day I got back, I pretended I was still on holiday, and went skiing at Ski Apache (without Doggie; if she hadn't been along, I'd have gone at Flagstaff Snow Bowl). I am clearly no longer up for more than half a day of skiing, so I arrived shortly after noon. The day was warm and sunny, quite delightful. I went in shirt sleeves, and even had to take off my gloves after an hour when they started getting sweaty inside. Of course, to prevent sunburn, I wore my Mickey Mouse hat. I now consider it part of my civic responsibility to make fun of the "My gear is sooooo cool" syndrome by showing up in unusual places as a fat old man in street clothes wearing a Mickey Mouse hat. (I'm not quite sure if the Navajo lady wasn't carrying that purse for the same sort of reason.)

As at Eldora, it took a while to get into skiing. First time up, I fell down getting off the chair, and fell again half way down Easy Street. Every thirty seconds I had to stop and catch my breath and rest. After a couple of hours Easy Street became too easy, and as for resting, why, since I was only just standing there, not even walking or anything. So I got on the lift to the top of the mountain, which involves the very easiest of the blue squares. I fell down getting off the chair, and fell a couple of times on the way down. One of them was not my fault - the catch on my boot popped open, and my foot was just sitting loosely within the boot - suddenly nothing worked, and I couldn't figure out why, and I fell down as the most expedient way of stopping. So the one run down the whole mountain was enough for me for the day.


Polvadera Peak, April, 2005
Walked up Polvadera Peak yesterday. It's about an eight hour walk. I got pretty hungry. I didn't take a lunch. I don't, usually, these days. I find I get more tired than hungry, and if I do take a lunch, I'm likely to eat just a handful of peanuts, and not really enjoy them, even. So about halfway back to the car, I got hungry, and started thinking that I'd go to the Chinese place, and really pig out on the Chinese food. The about the time I got to the car, I decided I was too tired for Chinese, some good old New Mexico chilles rellenos, with lots of cheese was what I needed. Then when I got home, I thought, "Do I really want to go out again?" The answer was "Nah". Dinner ended up being two cups of hot chocolate and six slices of heavily buttered toast. Hypothesis: the hierarchy of comfort food is based on age regression.

The cross-country part of the walk is pretty open, and it is very clear roughly where to go. On the way back, I was pretty tired, and the dog was going in roughly the right direction, so I ended up just following the dog. Wasn't until I started seeing my boot prints regularly that I realized she was backtracking us exactly. She even looked at me disapprovingly when I deviated and walked around a little ridge that I had found very annoying to walk over the top on the way up.

I though she was pretty tired from the walk, too. She was very subdued on the ride home. But as we were about to walk in the front door, a car pulling a noisy trailer went by, and she felt compelled to charge out to the street and give it a good barking at.

It sprinkled rain on us a bit as we neared the car. This causes the dog to take little side trips to investigate good places to hide should it thunder at us, which it only did once or twice (we were well down in the canyon, and pretty safe at the time, I thought). My own weather worries were more along the lines of a cloudburst up at the top, and being alert enough to head for the hills if the crick decided to rise, and whether even a modest flow would deliver a few tons of sand to pack around the car where it was parked in the middle of the arroyo. But all we got was just a good dampening. Apparently Albuquerque was having a rip-roaring thunderstorm replete with funnel cloud at the time. But when we got home, every dang appliance in the house wanted to know what time it was.


Sermonette, April 17, 2005
Why do we say that the year starts in January? The plants around us know it start in April. Should we move New Years Day to the spring equinox? Or just do away with it altogether. The year is a cycle, with each season having its own glories and pleasures. Why should we promote one above the other, saying it begins the year. Recognize each as its own element, each source of its own being and our pleasure in it.

Human life too is a cycle. Infancy to childhood to adolescence to adulthood to old age. Each season has its own glories and pleasures. And each person is unique, with his own glories and means of giving pleasure.

So let us rejoice in each season and each person. And we do take pleasure in each, because man was made for this earth, and for this humanity, and he sees them as good, because he was made to live with them, to treasure them. Because we live on this beautiful earth, with beautiful people, this is what it means when we say, "God is good."


Rig Grande, April , 2005
Walked through the Escondida bosque last night. For a few days a year the Rio Grande earns some respect as a river. It's not misbehaving, or anything, just moving a lot of water from A to B with considerable despatch. Elephant Butte Lake is said to be up 25 feet from its winter low. The river looked daunting enough that, had I been driving an oxcart, I would have been rather reluctant to undertake fording. If, in its wild state, the river was often like this, I can understand why a place where it could be reliably crossed might take the name "El Paso".

To judge by the remnants of mudpuddles, the bosque got a deal more rain than the sprinkle that fell on me last Saturday in Goat Canyon.


Falling down, April , 2005
I read recently that one third of people over 65 fall down at home every year. This was in aid of telling us to check our houses for tripping hazzards. Either I am an extreme outlier, or (more likely I think) the respondents to their survey lied (not counting falls that didn't result in injury).

Anyway, I've fallen three times in the last year, which I admit is fairly extreme, even for me. I sometimes go a whole year without falling down.

Last summer, while navigating the occasionally indistinct Water Canyon Mesa Loop Trail, I was so preocupied with locating the next trail marker that I wasn't watching where my feet were going, and they tried to go through a tree root.

Last fall, after the return to standard time, while walking the dog at night without a torch, I didn't see a washout in the road.

And last night, I tripped over a tomato cage, and took a header, landing on my nose on the wooden deck. I've always thought that 'Fall flat on ones face' was a modest exageration, employed for the nice alliteration. However, I've now proved it physically feasible to do so, and can display a slightly damaged nose in proof.

Anyway, in none of these cases did I receive a significant injury. I regard falling down as a consequence of maintaining a moderately active lifestyle, and do not intend to give it up.


Trail Canyon Trail, May, 2005
I walked in the Manzanos Saturday. Easy walk up to the ridge at Trail Canyon Saddle. Then I started along the ridge. The trail sign said 3 miles to the Bosque Peak trail (and trail signs don't usually lie). I was expecting a bit of a time, because the trail also goes up about 1500 feet, and because these days I really slow down going uphill above 9000 feet. Still, when, about three and a quarter hours later, I encountered a signpost with no sign, but a few fragments of sign scattered about its base, and a faint trail surface heading off to the east, I thought it reasonable to conclude that I had arrived. So I was shocked, an hour further on, to encounter an intact sign reading "Bosque Trail", and not only a trail surface, but also a cairn heading to the east. True, the sign was on a post lying on the ground, but there was no denying its authenticity. Four and a quarter hours to cover three miles - what am I coming to.

Usually in New Mexico, whenever you encounter a sign, or a signpost, whether the sign is legible or not, it is a clear indication that you need to look about and be alert, because something significant is about to happen to the trail you are on. So I have become accustomed to reading the minds of the rangers - why might he have thought it appropriate to put a sign here. But apparently not in the northern Manzanos. There were other anomalous signposts as well. A couple with missing or illegible signs, one with merely a "Trail 170", one with a "Manzanos Ridge Trail" sign, with an arrow pointing back the way I had come (though not down the trail I had arrived by).

But for all the signery, the trail was really not very well marked, and one was left to guess in a lot of places, though the trail closely follows the ridge line, so you can't go too far wrong. The trail was also rather brushy, a problem I don't remember encountering on other sections of this trail. To try walking it in short pants would be to suffer the death of a thousand cuts. (Although if you survived, rubbing a little ink on your legs might produce an interesting abstract tattoo.) I picked up a number of scratches through my pants.

As I was driving to the trailhead, the guy on the radio was saying, "Today will be a warm and sunny day through most of New Mexico." This as I was driving up the road toward Fourth of July CG with the heater on (on low, but definitely on) and the overcast hovering just above the treetops. But it did turn out to be a nice day, though cloudy much of the day. Heard a little distant thunder late in the afternoon, but no rain, nor even much of a threat.

The woods were lovely, still enjoying the winter's moisture. Wildflowers were out in force (though most of the blooms were of the miniature sort, two or three millimeters across). There were a couple of patches of snow still, off the ridge on north-facing slopes. The trail was a little soggy in spots, from the seepage from the recent melt, and the brooks were running with enthusiasm. Early in the morning (well, not very early - I slept in and didn't start walking until 8:30), perhaps because of the overcast, the woods were exceptionally quiet. If I stopped walking, the silence was complete. Not a sound of man or beast, not even a breeze to ruffle the leaves. Made me realize how rare the absence of sound is is this modern world.

I pretty much had the trail to myself. Probably because I didn't arrive at the more popular part, near Fourth of July Campground, until about 5:30, and everybody had gone home for supper. But the campground was not overpopulated either - there were just two camps in the half (or a little more) that I walked through on the way back to my car.

With this section, I've now walked the entire Manzanos Ridge Trail. from Pine Shadow Spring in the South to the Albuquerque trail in the north. Another small checkoff in the list of things I want to do that nobody else cares about.


Sermonette, May 15, 2005
There is much death an misery inflicted by those who are convinced they are doing the will of God. This is currently most true in Iraq right now, but has been a constant, in many times and places.

Does religion ask us to kill people? Christianity firmly answers no. The basic ethical tenet of Christianity is Jesus's restatement of the Law: "Love thy neighbor as thyself." But Christianity is not immune to religious killing, and I wonder why. Is killing such an innate part of human social behavior that even such a clear statement can be rationalized away and subverted. I think perhaps the ultimate in hypocracy is the medieval bishops, who, in the politics of the era, rode to war leading their troops, but who carried a mace rather than a sword because they thought it sinful that a bishop should shed Christian blood.

What of other religions? Buddhism teaches acceptance. Buddhism has its martyrs, who accepted death rather than the world they inhabited, but it is a little difficult to picture taking their neighbors with them in a suicide bombing. The pagans had gods of war, of course. But they had a curious attitude toward their gods. Their gods were curiously human, immortal to be sure, but with human failings and passions. The pagans asked the gods blessing on their wars, but did not engage in wars at the asking of the gods, though perhaps on occasion in the god's name, as representing the people, the ethos, the culture.

True, one of the main gods of Hinduism is Shiva the Destroyer. But Shiva does not destroy things because they are evil, but destroys the old to make way for the new. (I have a certain sympathy with this view, despite having become one of the old.) I am a little less sure about Kali, goddess of death and destruction, though I have seen a recent book claiming that the Thugs, the devotees of Kali sent to kill and rob, were the invention of a British police chief, who wanted to enhance his career by claiming to have wiped them out.

The central tenet of Islam is submission to the will of God. But what is the will of God? Unlike Jesus, Mohammed lived to be an old man, leader and administrator to his followers. He encountered many practical situations, and recorded what was right in the Q'ran. But all possible cases are not to be found in the Q'ran. The world is more complicated than that. So what is the will of God? The best guess is to take the word of the learned men who have studied the Q'ran all their lives. But the fatwas differ from one imam to another, and they are not guided by a central principle like "Love thy neighbor", but by a more complex analysis of the equivalent of case law found in the Q'ran. I worry about this a bit. Being a learned man myself, albeit in a far removed field, I know enough about the business to believe that one should not trust a learned man to be right about something as important as taking other people's lives.

Returning to the first thought, why do Christians continue to kill and make war, despite this being contrary to the central ethical tenet of their religion? I don't know. But perhaps I am coming into agreement with G.K. Chesterton, who wrote "The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult, and left untried."


Fifty years, May, 2005
So, I journeyed to Canyon for my high school class 50th reunion. This is the first time I've made the trip since Aunt Hattie's funeral, five or six years ago. Little has changed. The town of Yeso, which I always thought looked like not even a car had stopped at since 1950, has brightened up considerably. There are at least four inhabited houses, two of which look very nice. There was water in one of the salinas east of Willard, the first time I've ever seen that.

The reunion itself consisted of four or five events spread over three days. It was interesting. It was, of course, a collection of geezers in approximately the same state of decrepitude as I am. I'd guess I was at about the median in ease of getting out of chairs. A couple of people used canes. They were seriously overweight (but that's too small a sample to draw statistical conclusions). I noticed the beginnings of essential tremor in a couple of people, which is something I haven't been worrying about, but maybe should. Some health problems arose in conversation that were not apparent in a casual look. About one guy I heard, a couple of times, "He said he'd come, but you never can tell about him." I was picturing a madcap free spirit, until I learned that the "you never can tell" stemmed from a serious short-term memory deficiency. And when one of the organizers talked about doing a reunion again in five years, there was a cry from the back benches of "Better do it sooner than that." That struck me as far too pessimistic. Personally, I look forward to three more, at five year intervals. It takes that long to get back the money I just put into annuities, and I'm too much a tightwad to go quietly before then.

Only an eighth of the class has died, all but one men. I think that's pretty low; the formula I'm accustomed to approximating with predicted 20%. I guess we're a pretty healthy bunch, plus my formula may be a few years out of date in medical technology.

The class is still pretty well centered in the Canyon/Amarillo area. But there are outliers. The guy from Virginia showed up, who I was happy to see, because we hung around a good deal together in high school, sharing the facts that we were both scared of girls and that we were both athletically incompetent. The guy from Iowa (Mason City, no less) showed up. He's retired from being a manager of county agriculture extension agents, and has, since his retirement, been writing books about the history of agriculture in the Texas Panhandle. One of the more interesting guys to talk to, and one of the three class members who show up in the first couple of pages when you type the name into Google. The other distance contenders, a woman from Oregon and a man from Germany, didn't make it.

There were no great surprises in how people turned out. The banker, in retrospect, had a banker type personality right from junior high. The two doctors were clearly bright and studious guys. The dentist was a bit of a surprise; I would have pictured him as maybe a contractor. The women that I now find very attractive and interesting are the sort I would have been most scared of then. The very quiet, extremely nice, girls I was most attracted to in high school (neither was there for the reunion) were, I now know, the sort who drive me right up the walls. God save me from nice women.

In my mind the premier event of the reunion was that we attended the commencement ceremony for the Canyon High School Class of 2005 and they had us stand up and be recognized. I thought that was extremely nice and very generous of them to share their big day with us. Another deviation from tradition - as well as saluditorian and valedictorian they had an address by the number three class rank. Probably to maintain gender balance (number one and number two were female) but also because the guy gave the best talk of the lot. He had an interesting story to tell. His parents moved away and left him to finish his senior year on his own. An interesting and, it sounds like, effective alternative to kicking the kid out of the house when he graduates. (He didn't say if they told him where they were moving to.)

And, of course, I had to take a walk. Went to Palo Duro Canyon, of course. First time I've been in something over thirty years. After the auto accident returning from the Canyon that summer, I had some sort of visceral. distaste for taking that road again. After thirty odd years, it has finally abated. The Canyon was incredibly green and beautiful, far greener than it ever gets in Socorro, and, they say, greener than it has been in many years. It was covered with wildflowers. Especially a sort with yellow anthers in the center, an almost black outer center, and petals dark red in the center shading to yellow at the ends. Somebody said they were Indian Blankets. Maybe, but very pretty and extremely prolific in any case.

Walked to the Lighthouse, the signature formation of the park. The trail was one of those superhighway type trails, in which it looked like somebody put a blade on a Bobcat and drove cross country, doing everything short of paving. Except for the last 200 meters or so. Approaching the hill upon which the Lighthouse stands, I looked up and thought "what is that weird looking formation exposed on the side of the hill." Turns out it was stairsteps.

I guess the trail proper ended at a bench across a little gully from the Lighthouse. Considering the superhighway nature of the trail, I would have expected a sign saying "End of trail", if not "Turn back you fool." Instead, there was just the bench, and a lessor trail continued on, about as good a trail as some of the less well maintained trails in the Magdalenas, Potato Canyon, say. So I followed it, and soon found myself up on the saddle between the Lighthouse and the next formation over. And still the trail continued, growing fainter with every landmark. It was just short of imaginary when I arrived at the top of the next formation, about level with the top of the Lighthouse. Actually, about six feet short of the top. The step up to the top looked easy enough to go up, but was the sort to give me to reflect that going up is only half a round trip.

So on the way back to the car, I took another trail, called the Givins Trail (actually, the Givins et al. trail; I didn't memorize the other names). This was a much more pleasant trail, about the quality of the best trails in the Magdalenas. Superhighways get on your nerves after a while. Interesting thing about the Palo Duro is that there isn't much relief to play with. The canyon is only about 700 feet deep, and to actually get to the top, at the edge of somebody's plowed field no doubt, would be annoyingly anticlimactic. So the trail designer can run you round and round and whirl you about, but not so much up hill and down. If the trail sign says three miles, and you aren't there an hour and twenty-five minutes later, you start to worry if your watch is running fast.

I rounded a corner, and noticed, a hundred meters ahead, a family (Ma, Pa, and son) looking at something at trailside. So I had a look also when I approached that place, and sure enough, there was a large and healthy looking rattlesnake. About the time I arrived, he took it in his head to cross the trail. My mental crossing gate descended about two snakelengths in front of him, and I sat and idled until he finished his leisurely crossing, and another 15% for good measure. About a furlong on I caught the family up and made some remark about that being a rather substantial rattlesnake. They said, "Oh, have you been seeing rattlesnakes?" I said, "Only just the one, up the trail there." Blank look. "I thought that's what you stopped to look at." "No, we were just looking at wildflowers." At that point they began to recite folklore about rattlesnakes, or more accurately, folk myths. After a few seconds, I fled with my hands over my ears.

The park is much more developed, of course, than it was in my day. Half a dozen campgrounds with over a hundred spaces (and there was a note saying that all were full for memorial day), half a dozen cabins for those not up to camping, and at least three shops with snack bars, I'd guess the trails I walked would carry a dozen parties a day on an ordinary week day, and I'd have hated to have postponed the walk to the holiday weekend. Palo Duro is all very pretty, but I praise the lord for all the underutilized New Mexico trails.




Drowner, walk, grandkid, June, 2005
About ten days ago a rafter fell off and drowned in the Rio Grande, just south of Lemitar, about dusk. The next evening they still hadn't recovered the body, and I, not knowing what was up, took the dog for a walk in the Escondido bosque. There was a large random mob, it turns out of the victim's friends and relatives. Most were just wandering around aimlessly, many even out of sight of the river, though they did, very sesibly, mount a watch on the Escondido bridge, to watch the river below. I guess there were other people doing competant things, but the mob at the bridge looked pretty aimless. There were a couple of state cop cars parked there as well, and perhaps they were off searching intelligently, though the statement released by the guy in charge -- that the river was running ten or twelve miles an hour, and that the body could be south of San Antonio -- was not encouraging. The state cops gave up Saturday evening, but the more committed among the friends and relatives continued looking, and finally found the body hung up on the bank, about a mile from where he fell in.

Occupied the Saturday by going up to Water Canyon Mesa. It was hot. That was my excuse for how unconsionably slow I was walking - an hour and a half up to the Mesa. Went around the Mesa Loop, with the obligatory stops at the overlooks. West overlook doesn't have a decent chair, so I lay down in the shade to enjoy the view for a couple of minutes. Of course I fell asleep. Was only asleep for ten or fifteen minutes, but apparently in that interval my brain totally rotted away. First, when I woke up, I had no get-up-and-go at all. I would have happily laid there until the snow covered me over in October. When I did finally decide I should be up and getting on, it was not clear it was physically possible. It took many seconds of careful maneuvering to get my center of mass reliably above my feet. And once I was upright, the next five minutes might be more accurately described as controlled stumbling than as walking. But I finally got in the swing again, and brought myself back to the car, via the Deadhorse trail, just for variety.

Young Matthew Clark was in town this week, staying with the Hatches. His main pleasure was his cousin Zoë, also in town, and a year younger. They had a grand time together. Amazing how much better cousins get on than siblings do. Zoë's mother Patty is a very sensible person around kids, and it's a pleasure to watch her at work. She tries a little harder than I would to keep them from injuring themselves or each other, but I guess that's a matter of taste.

I tried to cement my reputation, in Mormon eyes, as a reprobate, by taking Matthew out for pizza in a brewery, but it was not to be - he preferred Burger King. He was pleased that the Kid's Meal included an action figure from Star Wars Episode III, though he remarked that he wasn't allowed to see it because it's PG 13, and he's PG seven and a half. (What were Burger King thinking?) Afterward, we went to one of the many picnic areas on the banks of the Rio Grande, and watched trees floating down the river. (They make considerably slower progress than the water itself; they were averaging less than 1 MPH, whereas the water was chugging by at about 3.) Best to enjoy the river while it's high. Doesn't last long.

The picnic tables on the Rio Grande are an interesting phenomenon. I seem to find more every time I head out that way. There must be twenty or thirty between downtown Socorro and Escondido. Most are concrete and look like they may be WPA vintage. I've never seen more than one table occupied on any trip out that way. I guess people don't picnic like they did in the thirties - Burger King is just too convenient.




Sermonette, June 26, 2005
It seems to me that there are two defining tenets of Christianity. The first is John 3:16 (excuse my King James): "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perhish, but have everlasting life." The second is in the synoptic gospels, for instance Matthew 22:36-39: "Master, which is the great commandment in the law? Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love they neighbor as thyself."

It has come to seem to me that these are essentially separate, and each could be the fundamental tenet of a religion of its own. The first tells you how to die, the second how to live.

As years go by, it has come to seem to me that death is less and less an important part of life. One is given ones time on earth, one enjoys it to the fullest. When the end comes, it does not matter much whether one ascends to the transcendant emperean, where the nature of being is so different from this earth that regarding it as a continuation of this life can only be a pleasant convention, or whether, with the Whiffenpoofs, "I am gone and be forgotten with the rest." Neither possibility changes the way I act now, or even the way I feel.

I can see a younger person might take a different view. Someone dying young would have the right to feel keenly the deprivation of life, the right to petition God for its extension. My viewpoint is that of an old man, who is closer to my own death, and have experienced more deaths of friends and family, than have most of those who might read this.

But for one who denies the importance of death, is it any wonder that I would just as soon forget John 3:16, and instead extoll the importance of the Great Commandments.


Water, July 2005
I always get the water wrong. A few weeks ago I visited the Manzano ridge for a 15 mile walk, carrying three liters of water, and came home with one and a half. Saturday I walked the Hop Canyon loop in the Magdalenas, maybe as much as twelve miles counting the side trip to North Baldy peak, carrying a liter and a half of water. And it wasn't enough, not nearly enough. When it's hot, the dog drinks about as much water as I do, and it was hot. 101 in Socorro. At lot cooler at the 9000 foot level, but still hot. We drank the last of the water coming off the Magdalena ridge, still four miles from the car. We were pretty darn thirsty by the time we got to the car. I popped the trunk for a leftover bottle of Dasani, 60 or 70 centiliters of stale, warm water. It was, however, quite acceptable.

But it's almost worth it, because all other fluids taste so darned good that evening - milk, Shiner Bock, mocha coffee - all purest ambrosia.

Big fire in Socorro Saturday night. M Mountain mall, across the street from Supermart burned down. (Kings furniture store was the largest business in it.) When I drove past on my way home from dinner tonight, the rubble was still smoking. And I do mean rubble. There is only one wall still standing. No speculation from the authorities about how it started.


Penticton, July 2005
Went away for a meeting at the Dominion Radio Astronomy Observatory at Penticton, BC. Penticton is a nice place, so I thought I'd hang around for a while and be a tourist. Flew in to Spokane, and rented a car for the trip across the border. Didn't quite take the usual route, for the usual reason - massive confusion. I didn't have a good map with me, and confusing Fruitland, Washington, which is near the route I wanted, with Fruitland, BC, which isn't, I wandered off to the north, instead of northwest. After a while, I bought a map, and discovered my error, and had a rather pretty drive to the west to correct it.

At the meetings, I asked one of the guys where I should go for a walk. He recommended the KVR Trail. The KVR Trail is the disused roadbed of the Kettle Valley Railroad, converted for recreational use. So I headed out of town to the north. The first segment of the KVR Trail was labeled a "Multi-use segment" (translation: road). I drove along three or four kilometers, until I couldn't take it any more - the scenery was too beautiful to drive, but the road was too road-like to walk. So I stopped at the first reasonable looking side trail, and started up it, a good decision; the trail was very beautiful. My delight was tempered only my the fear that I might actually arrive someplace. Which I did after a bit less than an hour. Specifically, I arrived at the KVR track #2. Having no map, and having no desire to return the way I came, I had no idea which way to go. After a little cogitation, I adopted a Policy: whenever I came to an intersection, I would take the fork that led most steeply uphill. Following KVR2 to the south, I quickly became bored. Trains like grades rather less than hikers do, and I seem to require a little up-and-down to keep me entertained. After a couple of kilometers along the roadbed, I reached Rock Oven Park (cut no trees). There I was happy to find a cross road leading up to the east, and promptly invoked my Policy. It served me very well for two or three hours. The scenery was magnificent, and the roads untrafficked. Most of the roads were designated "Road Deactivated", with a couple of short stretches on the next step up, "Road not regularly maintained." However, the unsustainability of my Policy was finally demonstrated when I arrived at the top of the Gorman Brothers tree farm, where there was a magnificent view, but no continuing path. So I went back down and continued along the main road to a place called Elinor Lake, where there were a couple of campers/picnickers. I asked what lay ahead, and they said maybe five kilometers to a cross road. I walked a couple of kilometers, just in case they misjudged distances, and then decided I should be getting home. (Anyway, that section of road was way too busy - I was passed by a pickup and an ATV.)

When I got back to Rock Oven Park (cut no trees) I met a couple of wilderness volunteers in an ATV, who wanted to make sure I wasn't lost. I could assure them I wasn't, but I didn't think to ask there where I would have been if I had taken the rather disused road out of Elinor Lake that I had been rather tempted by.

The overall feel of the place is like I remember Pine Lake in Colorado when I was a child. Wooded (mostly fir), very low population density, rather rustic feel, moderate amounts of water in little streams and small lakes. Delightful.

Gorman Brothers tree farm was interesting, and not really obtrusive. It was a very uniform stand of fir, all about eight feet tall. I might not have noticed it was a farm at all, had there not been a sign.

The following day I headed northwest, driving, into the Kootenay Rockies. A most spectacular place. The landscape proclaimed its glacial history. The valleys were deep U shaped gouges, with streams from above coming to their rims and descending in spectacular waterfalls. I couldn't resist having a helicopter ride up to the glaciers, on Mount Begbie. The glaciers there were nothing like the one I was used to, in the California Sierra, which formed in a large cirque, and stuck out its tongue onto the flat level of its own little valley. There the action was at the bergschrund, where the glacier is pulling away from the mountain. On Mt. Begbie, the glaciers were on the upper slopes, where they had barely noticeable bergschrunde right at the top of the mountain, but then they went down until they came to one of those U shaped canyons, where they flow over the edge. I gather that when a few feet of the tongue of the glacier breaks off, it most spectacularly falls a thousand feet to the valley floor.

I would have loved to take a walk there too, but it was raining just a little. A most annoying rain, light enough that had I been walking _to_ the car, I would have said, "Oh, well, let's get on with it." and strode off. But heavy enough that I couldn't bring myself to walk _away from_ the comfort of the car.

The Kootenay Valley is a nice place too, if, perhaps, a little touristy. I have an instinctive revulsion against motels that call themselves "Lodges" or "Resorts". One of the big things to do at a "Resort" appears to be horseback rides, reemphasizing the disconnect with what I like to do.

There was a major change in character when I crossed the border back into the US. Suddenly there were houses on the hillsides, and driveways and other dirt roads taking off from the highway.

I rather like CBC radio. If you are driving, and the radio gets too staticky, you just press the seek button, and you are deposited into the middle of a clearer version of the same program. And pretty good programs, too, about on a par with NPR, which is my refuge when driving in this country. It was rather a shock to get back to where it takes several pokes at the seek button to get anything tolerable.

When I got back to Spokane, I then flew down to Portland to see Charlotte. She has an apartment in an Over 55 development (called King City). A pretty nice place, with all the requisite stuff to amuse people who no longer have things they have to do. Charlotte's apartment is at the top of a hill, which gives it a terrific view, but she complains about having to walk uphill going home. She, like me, prefers the uphill at the beginning of the walk. She seems to be doing well, and is rather enjoying the thought that she doesn't have a house, such that if anything annoying eventuates, she can up and leave. She was grumbling about the heat, but it was only 90. She says it's only hot in Portland two weeks a year, so nobody does anything about it as they do in more sunburned lands, and with no central air, it's just as bad as Texas.

Went to dinner at Dena's. As pictured, they are busy with all the things the girls get into. Current major activity is making stuff for the FHA exhibit at the county fair. They have animals, mainly Copper, a golden lab, I think, and a cat that seems to be used to being dragged around at random by the kids. Anyway, much more people adapted than Charlotte's cat who would only enter the room I was in if she could stay close to the opposite wall, and kept a careful and suspicious eye on me the whole time.

Got back home and discovered, as usual, that after a week's absence, I was two weeks behind. One of these days I should start acting more nearly as if I were retired.


Sermonette, July 24, 2005
The proper sphere of religion is to tell you how to relate to yourself and how to relate to others. Whenever it sticks its nose too far outside these areas, it is clearly in the wrong. (I guess I admit there are a few gray areas, such as Justice, which is sometimes claimed by religion, and sometimes by law, which is more nearly a science. But that's another story for another time.) In these orbits, religion uses words like "good" and "evil", "right" and "wrong", which should not be assayed by other disciplines.

But within its sphere, one can also, with greater hesitation, comment about the properness of religion. The hesitation arises from the effrontery: I am going to use words like "right" and "wrong" from my religous viewpoint, and who am I to say that my religion is better than those I criticize.

I start with one of the clearer cases of wrong religion concerning ones relation with oneself. Jonestown, and other suicidal cults, are wrong. Teaching that death is better than life is wrong. I think I will get little argument on that one.

A somewhat less clear case is the Penitentes and related groups who inflict physical pain on themselves, short of death. I think that pain is not conducive to a right relationship with oneself, though I can see how others might believe differently.

But my concern today is with religious pronouncements on ones relations with others. A religion that teaches that it is necessary or laudatory to kill other human beings is, in my opinion, a thing of evil. Christianity, Islam, and some sects of Hinduism arose in violent times, and their teachings often reflect this. Thomas Aquinas, in particular, was a master at providing finely argued theological justifications for doing what he knew his violent patrons would be doing anyway. But can we not move beyond the violence of millenia ago. Can we not condemn as evil any religious teaching that proclaims that it is pleasing to God to martyr oneself, so long as one simultaneously kills a hundred of those designated as enemies of the faith. Can we not condemn as evil any religious teaching that says that persons not of our faith count for less in the eyes of God than we do, that they may be slaughtered in perceived revenge. Can we not condemn as evil any religous teaching that grants to the faithful the power of life and death over the infidel. To be called good, a religion should try to include all humans within its embrace, that any man is a brother because he too is a child of God.


Politics, August 8, 2005
Mr. Zawahiri's recent press release, for all its bellicose bluster, is, I think, actually a desperate attempt to avoid abject surrender. He says that tens of thousands of US troops will die in Iraq. Yes, many will die there. But tens of thousands? The toll attributable to Al Qaeda and its sympathizers has been, since the end of hostilities, about a thousand. He thinks we will believe that Al Qaeda has only been exerting a tenth of the effort it will now marshal? Give me a break. Al Qaida is virtually powerless to actually harm those that are its real enemies. Like all blowhards and bullies, it is taking out its rage on the less powerful innocents. With Mr. Zawahiri's press release, Al Qaeda makes the transition from being a leader in the Muslim world's attempt to revitalize themselves to being a group of largely irrelevant criminals.


On quite a different matter, I consult the crystal ball, and prophesy that crude oil will reach $90 per barrel before the new year. The era of cheap oil is over.


Peter Grimes, August, 2005
I cannot internalize Peter Grimes. I don't know if he's a sociopath who thinks only of himself, or is a crusty loner beset by bad luck and driven to madness by the unforgiving burghers of his village. I can make it play either way in my head. The story opens when he makes an exceptionally large catch, and decides it is too big for the local market, and heads for London. He runs into adverse winds, and is held at sea for three days, without water. His apprentice boy dies. He is held legally innocent, but the villagers are not so sure. He says fishing is impossible without help, and gets a new apprentice from the workhouse, paying a fee for the reference. (The chorus asks "Is this a Christian nation, when you can buy a child?") The villagers suspect (not without cause) that he is being cruel to the new apprentice. They storm up to Peter's hut on the cliff to investigate. Peter intends to give them the slip by taking to his boat and going fishing. But the apprentice slips and falls on the way down. When his jersey washes up on the beach, the last two people in the village who believe in him, the widowed school teacher (whom he dreams of asking to marry him, were he richer) and a respected older captain, lose faith and reject him. He takes his boat to sea, scuttles it, and, presumably, drowns.

Britten's music is interesting. Especially in the first act, the music tends to embody a cosmic quality, contrasting with the rather quotidian people and activities portrayed. I am called to remember Melvile's quote as he was writing "Mobey Dick" - "Give me to write a condor's quill, and give me Vesuvius for an ink well." Britten is investing a believable incident with the onus of representing right and wrong for all humanity.

But, as I said, I am left unsure of what lesson I have been taught. Is it of the destructive effects of small town social pressure on those who do not quite fit the mold? Or is it about a monster colliding with a small and conventional, but mostly beneficent, social order.


Walking by pinch-light, August, 2005
Walking by pinch-light is not fast. I was walking up Six Mile Canyon when, as happened last time I was up there, I lost the trail. But this time I was prepared. I had studied the map carefully, and noted that there was a trail that pretty much followed the 8300 ft. contour that would do a reasonable job of taking me where I wanted to be. So when I lost the trail, I simply headed uphill, looking for a crossing trail. About the time I passed 8400 feet, it occurred to me that maybe the trail was on that mountain over there, not on this mountain over here. So I decided to follow the 8400 foot contour over to the mountain next door. This turned out not to be easy to do.

I spent entirely too much time and energy futzing around at 8400 feet before deciding to give up and head for South Canyon, where I knew the lay of the land. As a result I was benighted on the South Canyon trail, at a point that would normally taken about an hour and a quarter to walk to the car.

More like three and a quarter by pinch-light. First off, the pinch-light on my keychain requires a good deal of pressure to turn it on. This is good at ensuring that the battery hasn't been drained by the casual pressure of the keys etc in my pocket. But it gets a little wearing when you are using the pinch-light for any length of time. By the end I was transferring the pinch-light from one hand to the other every twenty or thirty paces, and there were times when I stopped and stood in the dark just to rest my thumbs. When I got home and started to eat dinner, my hands kept cramping.

I once took a walk in the Manzanos by pinch-light that I thought went pretty well and pretty quickly. But there the path was, for the most part, a smooth, light colored roadway with dark vegetation on either side. The South Canyon trail is for the most part a light colored path lightly incised into the side of a steep light colored slope.

It would have taken even longer without Artemis. Whenever I arrived somewhere where there appeared to be two possible continuations, or zero, I would say "Doggie". She would shortly appear standing in the correct path. Dogs really do have better low-light vision than people. It's part of the price we pay for color vision, which dogs don't have. This failed only twice, when she said, "Well, I dunno, boss." Since we were returning by the same trail we left on, these could be resolved by using the cookie crumb trail feature of the GPS. One was easy, just a matter of walking ten paces back down the way I had come, and paying a little more attention at that point. The other was slightly more problematic; the GPS said the trail was fifty feet that-a-way, where that-a-way was straight down a very steep and very brushy slope.

It's all a matter of preparedness, I guess. If I'd had another liter of water and a ham sandwich, I would have holed up and waited for moonrise, or maybe even sunrise. But I don't see getting that organized. Next time I'll try to remember to take the pinch-light with the on/off switch. 
> I think he does this sort of thing on purpose, just for the story.  - rini



Interlude at WalMart, August, 2005
Checker: This item doesn't have a bar code on it.
Customer: Sorry, it was the only one on display.
Checker: What is it?
Customer: Gee, I don't know.
Me: It's a trekker pole.
Checker: Could you go back to where it was and bring the shelf label, with the bar code.
Checker (on phone): I need a price check, but I don't know what the item is.
Me: It's a trekker pole.
Checker: Huh?
Me: A trekker pole. Hikers use them.
Checker (on phone): They say it's a hiker pole. (pause, hangup) He doesn't know what it is either.
Customer: Here's the shelf tag.
Checker: That'll work.
Computer: (beep) Item not on file.
Checker: Well, we can put it in.
Computer: Price?
Checker: $9.79.
Computer: Item description?
Checker: Hicker pole.

So Labor day weekend I plan to take a hick.


Sermonette, September 18, 2005
One of the more striking images from hurricane Katrina was of a large appartment house, where one wall had crumbled away from the blast of the storm. The building itself still stood, so you could look into appartments on every floor, like a doll house, seeing peoples private spaces, their lives, displayed before you.

In a similar way, the hurricane has sliced through the strata of American society, exposing each layer to a broader view. It is not a pretty sight at the lower level. There are people for whom the thought of getting a Greyhouond Bus ticket and, just to be save, taking an excusion to higher ground was an incomprehensible extravagance. For these people, who had so little, even the little they had was destroyed. One wonders if that most precious of comodities, hope, was not destroyed as well.

Can we not take some thought for these people? Surely a society as great and wealthy as ours could afford to lift this social layer a little. But it is one of my most serious sins, and by inference the sin of most Americans, that I prefer to put these lessor mortals out of my mind, and to dwell mostly on the virtues of people like me.


Labor Day hike, 2005
Somehow, walking has become 'exercise'. Once upon a time I could walk from first light to darkness, and not feel tired; walking was not exercise. No more. I went for a walk over labor day, and I got tired. I walked in from Springtime Campground, and went on the side trip up San Mateo Peak. Proceeding on from there I was chugging up Cyclone Saddle at sunset. About the time it started to get a little dim, I totally ran out of energy. I found a place that was sort of flat, about six feet by three, threw down my ground cloth and sleeping bag, and crawled in. As I was drifting off, it occurred to me that one disadvantage of this particular bivouac spot was that if it started to rain, there wasn't much I could do about it. So promptly on cue, it started to rain. It didn't rain hard, and the night was warm, so there weren't many consequences; the most noticeable was that a wet sleeping bag with an unwashed occupant doesn't smell as good as the pristine air and old-growth forest might lead one to hope.

Next morning I got to a section of trail with a downed tree across the trail every twenty meters or so. Some were just a matter of stepping over the trunk, but a few required strenuous detours or arduous struggles to get over them. Then, too, I started to worry about water. I had a liter and a half, and knew I had to have more that night. I was heading for Blue Mountain, about two miles on, and I knew that a mile and a half beyond Blue was a usually reliable spring. But, if it weren't flowing, I'd be in real trouble if I went that way. But turning around there, from Blue to Springtime, it was an eleven mile walk. If Twenty-five Yard Spring, about which I knew nothing, wasn't flowing, I'd arrive back at Springtime after dark, exhausted and dehydrated. I was a bit concerned, because on the way in, the semi-reliable San Mateo Spring was a damp seep, and the less reliable Cowboy Spring was dry and dust filled. So, to ensure I could get out by nightfall if I didn't find water, I gave up on Blue Mountain, and turned around. Turns out that Twenty-five Yard Spring was flowing in fine fettle, and I got back to Springtime fully hydrated. But tired. Walking has become exercise. I think the only solution is to start carrying a book on long hikes, so I can rest properly.


Berkeley, September, 2005
I went on a brief jaunt to Berkeley, for the retirement party of a friend (there seems to be a lot of that going around these days). Mostly on trips these days I remember the food; and not the fancy stuff like they served at the banquet, but le cuisine de la pais. I found a very superior frozen yogurt shop, and one night I dined at a student hangout on chicken and cauliflower curry and a large nan.

I have a new idol - Charles Townes. Not beause he is a Nobel Laureate, but because he got his PhD when I was quite litterally still in diapers. But he was getting around about as well as I do (that is, just short of full mobility), and was still interested in, and aware of, all the technical and astronomical stuff being presented.


East Coast, September, 2005
I went to Charlottesville for yet another retirement party. I took a rather circuitous route, to visit friends and relatives. To Boston to see Bill & Ann's new McMansion in Boston. Intimidating. I find it bad enough to live in a big old house by myself (or, actually, in a small part of a big house). I'm not sure I could stand to live in their house. I especially considered the bathroom with marble tile a bit over the top. Bill and I went on a short walk in the park there in Winchester, no more than three miles.

Then to Ithaca, to visit Rini & Larry. Knowing how I feel about walking, Rini arranged that we should take a walk up Six Mile Creek, even if it was raining. Not raining hard, but still we were pretty wet when we got home. Thea went along, driven by alternate commands and cajoling from her mother. I was much amused, as I remember well using the same sort of tactics a few decades ago. (But she's better at it than I was.)

Then drove to Philadelphia, to visit Judy, who had just moved. Again a lot of house for one person. Master bedroom, dining room, workroom, and office downstairs, guest bedroom and nursery for the grandkids upstairs. Judy seemed in good health and spirits, and her dogs were busy learning the household rules of the new house. It is in an over 55 neighborhood, with a clubhouse with pool and all sorts of such facilities. But she still heads south to Maryland for her bridge club.

On the way down, I stopped in Scranton at the Anthracite Heritage Museum. This is a great little museum. They have lots of old machinery, not only mining machinery but also textile mill machinery. The descriptions were quite inadequate, so one had nice puzzles to solve to try to figure out how things really worked. I spent a good deal of time with the steam powered generator, because some pieces were missing from the beautiful flyball governor, and I had to reconstruct them in my mind. The electric mine locomotive seemed to have one large electric motor - I presume a DC motor, though there were no brushes on the end of the motor facing the room, and you couldn't quite see around the locomotive to see the other end of the motor. I have no idea how they controlled the speed. Electric streetcars of the same era had four motors, and speed was controlled by switching them from series to parallel, as well as a large resister box (there might have been a resistor box on the locomotive, but only the one motor - I wonder if it, in effect, only had one speed). I never figured out where the trolley was located, and having a high power naked cable in a narrow mine tunnel seems rather frightening, whether it ran along a wall, overhead, or as a third rail.

And I never did figure out how the widget that spun silk filaments into a thread worked.

They had a Jacquard loom. The interesting thing about that was that they had the support equipment for the punched card system as well. This included a steam powered card punch, so that a repetitive fabric pattern could be programmed without having to punch identical cards for each repetition, by hand.

After the symposium in Charlottesville, on Saturday morning, I had a couple of hours to kill before leaving to catch an airplane back home, so I went down to the Charlottesville central mall to have a mocha. This mall is very successful indeed, even more so than Ithaca Commons. Of course, it was a beautiful Saturday morning, so it would have been at its best, but it had outdoor vendors (junk jewelry etc. as well as the expresso vendor). There were people strolling, jogging, or walking dogs. A very successful place.


Socorro Fest, October, 2005
Last weekend was Socorro Fest, on the plaza, sort of a secular fiesta. As I've said, I remember most the food. Two years ago (I missed last year), the hit was the microbrew tent, where some little microbrewery had a wietzenbock (weitzenbock?) that I think is the best beer I've ever tasted. This year the hit was the roasted corn. Somebody brought a roaster, and was cooking it on the plaza. A tender roasting ear dipped in butter and liberally salted is just this side of heaven. By careful spacing, I managed to have three ears.

My favorite among the entertainers, even better than the belly dancers, were the Magdalena Steel Chicks, an all female group playing Caribbean type old favorites on steel drums and a steel guitar. Not an innovative breakthrough, but a very pleasant change from the usual latin accent hereabouts.


Garcia Canyon , Thanksgiving weekend, 2005
Thanksgiving day, I went to the all-you-can eat buffet at the India Palace restaurant. It was a thoroughly satisfactory experience. Friday I went for a walk in the Magdalenas, up Garcia Canyon. I've been wondering for a while how far that road went. Bill keeps saying get an Outback and drive, but there are some limitations. Yes, there were tire tracks, tread marks even, on the first bit of the road, which was in pretty good shape - that is, in a real emergency I'd have driven the Honda Civic up it, with a reasonably high expectation of getting to the real canyon mouth, and back again. There were even two different treads, though in New Mexico this does not strongly indicate that two different vehicles were involved, but maybe. Anyway, these dropped out at the mouth proper of the canyon. There were still perceptible, though indistinct, marks in the dirt that indicated that vehicles had indeed used the road, probably even this year. These lead up to what looked like a camp. There was an abandoned refrigerator there, or at least the box of a refrigerator; I didn't see the compressor. After the camp, the traffic density on the road dropped considerably, as proved by a four foot piņon growing in the middle of the road. Shortly thereafter, the road dropped into the middle of the watercourse, and was covered over with oak leaves, only intermittently visible. Finally, in one of the reappearances only one rut, not two, reappeared. I continued to chug up this trail until finally I arrived in a clearing in a thicket, with the only opening the trail I came in on. I backtracked a little way, and found a trail running up the side of the canyon. After a while, it became apparent that the customers of this trail were principly deer. Deer have rather different agendas than I do. The trail led around the particular aspersions - the thicket and the steep canyon wall - but then subdivided, fragmented, and vanished. I continued up the hill a ways, but I didn't have the grit to push through to the road that runs along the ridge, though I knew I was within a half mile of it. Bushwhacking on a steep slope is not a pleasant occupation for a fat old man. This fall has been very warm and pleasant indeed, and I wore only a windbreaker on that hike, and found it plenty warm. Sunday, things turned nasty, with freezing temperatures and a gale of wind. It was so nasty I almost took the car to church instead of walking. Sunday afternoon the Performing Arts Series had "Babes in Toyland". I'd not seen it before, and found it an interesting concept. A more or less equal mixture of melodrama, light opera, and ballet. Mainly a kids show, but good fun nevertheless. I've never particularly enjoyed ballet, and have tended to conclude that dance is only tolerable when it doesn't try to tell a story. But this was OK - the story was carried by both prose and song. There are a fair number of operas (mostly French, but "Countess Maritza" is one of the best) with ballet interludes which are quite pleasant. Monday continued blustery and cold. When I got home, it was about freezing with a 20 MPH wind blowing. I really didn't want to go for a walk. But the dog really, really did. So we went. It wasn't too bad, after I put on almost all the clothes I own. The main heat loss in the upper story was through my face, which was merely chilly. Since I didn't put on long johns, my legs sort of stung, though.