Musings

We headed toward mountains, not difficult to do. Note plenty of snow.

We crossed the Río Grande. Note plenty of water aka snow melt.

We stopped at an overlook to see the canyon of the Rito de los Frijoles, aka Bandelier National Monument,

The main community on the flats is Tyuonyi, extensively excavated between 1909 and 1912, including 242 rooms. I cringe at the thought of the data that was destroyed and discarded. These walls are reconstructions.

This is Long House, which extends along the base of this wall for quite some distance. In some places the rooms were three deep. The rows of holes were the sockets for roof beams, called visas.

If you look very closely on the slope above the model, you will see walkways, stairs, and ladders that reach the big cave, aka Alcove House, just to the right of center and far above the model’s left shoulder.

This view makes the “trail” look more vertiginous than it is. If you visit, remember that ladders are easier to go up than to descend, IMHO.

The view from Alcove House. I was so lucky to be there by myself for about five minutes.

Back on the return trail along the creek, note the good flow of water and the logjam. We counted at least five big logjams, and all new foot bridges across the creek. The rangers were too busy for me to ask when the storm was that brought down the many trees and washed them downstream.

On the way back, we stopped at the Tesuque Village Market, which is indeed a market, but also a restaurant and bakery. We indulged in their key lime pie…lovely, just the right tartness.

We returned to Santa Fé on the Old Spanish Trail, which is winding and scenic. I find these fences particularly picturesque.

Posted at 8:44 PM | 1 Comment »

Looking back at a high range in Arizona. Despite a quick flirtation with Mountain time when we creased Idaho, we’ve been waiting and waiting to escape Pacific time. All but one county in Arizona stays in PacTime, according to info on the web.

Aha! The lovely New Mexico Visitor’s Center architecture imitates a kiva or hogan, I’m guessing. Off in a room with several rows of spaced chairs, I listened to Robert Redford’s dulcet tones describing Chaco Canyon ritual architecture. I found it another reason to be happy to be in New Mexico!

A dramatic geological feature…. We also drove through quite a run of malpaís, or nasty angular broken old lava flows that would be terribly difficult to walk through. [Yes, that’s a Starbucks lid in reflection.]

Finally, we got a view of the Sandía ridge, which looms over Albuquerque. Temps in the 80s.

After a quick visit with friends we’ll see for a longer visit later in the week, we turned north, finally reaching the Santa Fé Mountains backing…drum roll: Santa Fé…our home for the next few days. Temps about 15° lower than in ABQ.

Someone’s carefully chosen special dessert. Yum.

Posted at 9:15 PM | Comments Off on Hello Mountain time

I arose not quite as early in the dawn sequence as yesterday, yet the golden-yellow tones are lovely.

Still saw a few snow-caps as we motored south, and they tapered off as we continued.

Without a doubt, the most dramatic landscape was at White River Narrows.

After long miles of a downward trending road (which lead to overall mileage of 53mpg, at a speedy pace), we ended up creasing Las Vegas. We saw no meadows.

Yeah, we made a burger stop, which happened to be in the middle of the lunch rush. Wow, what a crowd, including dozens of vehicles in the drive-through lane. They even sent a guy out to take orders from those in line.

Back out in the country, we saw several solar panel fields. This one almost looked like a lake. In contrast, in the city, we passed dozens of housing units, almost zero with solar panels. I can’t fathom the logic.

We did get several glimpses of the reservoir called Lake Mead, and the level is low low low, just as you may have read.

After crossing into Arizona, in contrast to this morning, we drove on a generally rising trajectory (mileage was a hammered 42mpg).

There was roadside rotten snow coming into Flag (much diminished from our westbound leg), but none around the hotel.

Unexpectedly, our hotel had a two-plug electrical charger. The car is now fully charged and moved away from the charger. The other space has a handicapped parking logo on it, so I can’t imagine it gets used frequently.

Posted at 9:52 PM | Comments Off on Nevada means snowfall

I snapped this during my morning walk.

And this was late afternoon.

It’s been a Seattle-y day, drippy from pre-morning through, well, into tomorrow. Thus, the Olympics are completely shrouded, and the view across Puget Sound is ghosty.

I am not Monet and the view is not of Rouen Cathedral; however, I do like the idea of pondering the same view (ish) at various times.

Posted at 8:39 PM | Comments Off on Garbage day

I touched the Pacific today, that is, if you believe Puget Sound is the Pacific.

And I learned that my favorite (well, truth: only) plant ID app did not recognize this as a star magnolia, or even as a magnolia. I think the algorithm interpreted the scale wrong (as there were no other plant parts visible), and had the flowers much smaller, and hence matched them to very different species than magnolia.

Posted at 7:15 PM | Comments Off on Matters of perspective

My finger was descending to catch this rabbit in the grass, nice profile, when s/he realized there was a big dog across the road. Ah, well, this way, you get a better view of the cottony tail.

A bit of internet investigation…and I have learned that this is Ribes sanguineum, or red-flowering currant, and native to this area, although this specimen may be a nursery cultivar.

Watching rain come across Puget Sound. It’s slow moving. I’m typing this almost an hour later, and it still has about half the sound to cross to reach us.

Posted at 8:17 PM | Comments Off on Fast, flower, slow

Rainy all day, sometimes more than at other times. And here’s just about the last snow (right of center) we saw from our various vantage points as we went down the gorge to the Rose City.

All this rain means…tada! Waterfalls. This is Horsetail Falls.

And this is the better known Multnomah Falls. There are pedestrians on the old road bridge…and no longer any cars.

From the natural history display: an osprey. (Photo especially for those who’re tired of landscapes.)

Portland is a city of treasured neon, or at least I have the sense there’s plenty of neon here, and some of seems to be historic…or perhaps just retro.

This is not our hotel, and if we didn’t have a reservation, I still don’t think we would have been tempted. See note above. Just to be clear, we have two, count ’em, two color TVs in our room (it’s like a studio apartment, BTW).

Powell’s City of Books: of course we visited. And we traveled via street cars (trams), on complementary tix from our hotel. The Rose City is so green and hip.

I have never before seen this abbreviation, and I’d rather it disappeared. Only two-thirds of the shelves had it; the rest had the full spelling: archaeology. Much classier. And, besides, there was room for the other letters…so, why? Why?

Posted at 9:53 PM | Comments Off on Rainy day adventures

We were high enough and north enough getting up in Winnemucca that we had heavy frost on the vehicle. Fortunately, the sun fast-melted it.

Out of town northbound the road was dry (and it was all day—yay!), although we could see relatively fresh snow above, and sometimes melt-rotted snow nearer the road.

Whoops! What’s this? A hand-made sign: 5mph. Ah, and cattle. I’m calling it transhumance. I think the shepherd was trying to get the cattle to cross the road.

I think the humans were off to the right trying to relocate the herd to a pasture across the road. It didn’t help that the gates were not totally opposite, so they had “sweetened the pot” by putting little piles of alfalfa along the desired route. I think it probably worked well after we were gone.

Driver Spouse eased along and finally parted the herd. Most of them moved back to the right. I stared them down. Oooooh.

Miles later, the which peak is it game began. We knew the order: the Three Sisters, Mt Hood, then across the Columbia, Mt Adams, and somewhere between Mt St Helens. We weren’t sure we could see that, however.

Note the sign…chain removal area. Yeah, we had to carry chains or have what I think are studded tires in order to pass through some stretches of road today. No one was out there checking, but we didn’t know if they would be, so this morning before we left Winnemucca we became the proud owners of a set of tire chains. They’re expensive! We’re very much hoping we can take them back to a different store, unopened, and get a refund. Fingers crossed.

The kindly (?!) DOT had anticipated the which-peak problem, and installed labeled arrows. Of this pair, Hood is left and Adams is right. You can see a slice of Adams and nothing of Hood at this time/angle.

We continued north and had to loop several hairpin turns down to cross the Deschutes. The Deschutes is a lovely river, and the town of Maupin seems busy, with an active railway and even a grain elevator.

As with the previous photo, note how green the slopes are, now that we’ve descended oh so far.

Crappy moving photo, but, look, there’s the Columbia!

Ah, yes, a darned big river…Lewis and Clark and their fellow travelers passed by here.

And the meta-message of the moment is: we made it north to the Columbia before the storm hit. There will be snow on higher elevations on roads to the coast south of us, not just in California, but also in Oregon. The snow has already started, but many elevations are getting “just” rain. By the time we head to the coast in two days, we should be just fine. Yay. We could have been hosed getting to the coast, but our friends we’re going to see on the coast warned us in time, and we made a bee-line north from Pahrump, staying far enough east of the mountains that we could sneak through. Rain is coming tonight, as well as frozen stuff some places that we came through. That’s why I noted above: we had all dry roads today.

Posted at 11:11 PM | Comments Off on Transition up down and north

We’re overly weather-aware these days. Another one of those river storm systems is threatening northern Cali, which is where we have been heading toward. Rrrr. So, we’re sensitive to storm-like deposits and have been checking out the snow at higher elevations.

And noting our own altitude.

And seeing that high winds have derailed semis.

Although, we also notice that the arid landscape is greening. The magic of spring….

This is the view passengers in low-slung vehicles now have of Hoover Dam. Note that these barriers are higher than the ones in GooStreetView.

Passing west of Vegas, we spotted more snow-capped peaks, and green in the vegetation.

Another stupendous sunset, so very wide and dominant.

Posted at 11:59 PM | Comments Off on Altitudinal notes

Apologies for the delayed post; I was wiped last night…. Our route yesterday was consistently west from Hot Springs toward Lawton/Fort Sill. We traveled on Interstate, US highways, State higways, and even county roads. There was only one short gravel stretch, with signs saying watch for flooded road; we were lucky as the ditch water was about five feet below the road surface. This is the land of flash flooding.

However, we did avoid the cops in Mena!

This part of the world has many lakes that are reservoirs. For this one, I’m guessing they left the trees telling folks it’d make great fish habitat. Some kind of habitat, anyway.

Disrespect for signs.

We stopped briefly in this small community, so I could stretch my legs. The houses on either side of this street had the barking-est dogs; however, it took almost five minutes for someone to come out and ask what I was doing. This was the view out of the hamlet; I decided not to walk closer to this agricultural implement.

We diverged a bit north to visit the quirky community of Medicine Park. The quirky here is a busy resort/ex-hippy-style place, I assume for a change of pace for those who get off-base from Fort Sill, or away from the fields. We got terrific burgers (this is beef country, after all), and spotted this decoration in a planter.

We crossed the river on this fine bridge leaving Medicine Park. It predates hippy-style.

PDQ we entered wild lands, and saw…tadah! A real wild thing. Two actually, lone males several miles apart. We’re still looking for antelope.

The open plains offer a whole different sunset experience. This dramatic graduation lasted for perhaps an hour. Such a contrast to my experience of the sky in the eastern woodlands.

Posted at 10:22 PM | 1 Comment »