This post has a little bit of everything: sunshine in the foreground, ominous clouds over Joshua Tree, and even a faint rainbow that I didn’t notice until I looked at this pic!
I was certain that the fix I pushed out midweek yesterday to my servers was safe. But I was wrong. Not to worry, I made everything right in a couple of hours with another update.
I can never remember how to spell consensus… my brain is convinced that there is a second c in there somewhere.
I am afraid that my recent knee / MCL injury is giving me too much insight into what its like to get older. Hopefully the MRI on thursday will be good news and I’ll be back on the pickle ball courts and riding my bike sooner rather than later!
I have enjoyed my first few days trying to use micro.blog regularly. It feels good to be out of the echo chamber that is twitter.
I used to be exempt from this kind of injury and silliness but darn, my first day back at pickleball and I have to ice my knee. I can think of a lot better uses for those ice cubes!
Today’s Microblogvember word admiration made me stop and recall some of the people I admire and those who have influenced the arc of my life. Here is an archived post about Three influential teachers that shaped who I am today.
For today’s Microblogvember challenge I will engage in a little shameless self promotion. Runestone Academy has high quality interactive textbooks for Math and CS, all of have an open source license, either CC or GNUFDL. – Democratizing textbooks for the 21st century.
I’m very happy to announce that Runestone and PreTeXt have received an NSF grant for “sustainable open source ecosystems!” Read more about it on Runestone News
I must say that I cut quite a dashing figure at last night’s black light party!
I think I’m off to a good start for microblogvember.
Westward Ho!
Instead of camping our way to California this Fall we decided to make it a four day drive. We stayed in, gasp, hotels! This is really our first driving trip where we have used hotels since the pandemic. The verdict? Its nice to pull your accommodations with you!
Our first night was a very nice lodge in Spearfish Canyon South Dakota. Although the lodge was nice it was kind of a bummer because we had a nice hike planned, but I had injured my foot just a couple of days before we took off and I couldn’t walk more than a few yards without a lot of pain.
We did see some pretty cool sheep on the hillside!
We left at O-dark-thirty on day two of our adventure and had the pleasure of scraping ice off our windshield for the first time in a very long time! Today’s drive would take us across Wyoming to a lodge just outside of Dutch John Utah. The area is better known as Flaming Gorge. It was very pretty but our lodge was quite remote and felt even more so because we were clearly in the after season. Only one restaurant in the area was open.
Even thought it was isolated, we had a very pretty view out the picture window of our cabin. Here is a nice Sunset shot!
And to follow up, here is a sunrise photo from the same spot.
A long drive down I 15 brought us to Cedar City Utah for our third night. We headed up to Brian Head, a ski area and did a short little hike. My foot was feeling better by this time, but we still didn’t want to do too much. I love this shot of the show against the beautiful red rock! Our hotel was a Baymont tonight, and I’m not sure why, but the hotel had a some special “mini-rooms” even the door was about 3/4 of a normal width. This was our room for the night. The saving grace for the hotel was that it was near a brewery and a really excellent pizza place! I had a chicken pizza with white sauce and pistachios! Truly amazing.
Our last day was the final push to Indio. But we made a quick stop at Kolob Canyon to take a short hike. Maybe some of the most spectacular views yet.
This was a great way to do the trip out this year. We averaged about 6-7 hours of driving a day with time at the end of each day for a short hike or some site seeing.
Superior Fall Colors
Timing the fall colors is a tough game to play. It’s hard to predict when they will peak because there are so many factors at play. Jane did all of the research and tried to make a reservation for next week, but could not find a good campsite. So we reserved for this whole week thinking we would use part of our reservation. Then I found out I had other commitments at the end of the week so we had to push our time further forward.
The results speak for themselves.
We arrived on a very gloomy and rainy Sunday afternoon. But discovered our campsite was just 100 hundred yards or less from the shore.
Bean and Bear
The next day was cool and clear so we did the 7.5 mile bean and bear hike near silver bay. The colors we almost there but not quite. Still it was a very beautiful hike, although Jane lost her Yellowstone hat from the vantage point where we took this photo.
Oberg
A shorter hike on another clear day, but further north near Lutson had amazingly vibrant fall colors.
Temperance River
On our final morning we took the short hike to the Temperance River gorge. It had a beautiful waterfall, and we enjoyed watching an Arctic Loon try to fight its way upstream.
Fall Walks on Bone Lake
After a couple of years of taking long camping trips during the month of October it has been wonderful to be at the cabin for the “Fall colors” this year. These pics just highlight the everyday beauty of the area during October.
Its a bit cold to bike (40 degrees) but it is a nice temperature to walk. Here are a few photos that Jane and I have taken in the last two days on our walks around the cabin. Enjoy!
Devils Tower
The road home runs through Devils Tower National Monument. A monument who got its name from a misunderstanding between the Native Americans name “Bear Lodge” and the white people.
Nothing about this tower says evil/devil. But apparently after the army slaughtered all of the bison the area was a stinking pile of carcasses and the army colonel described it as Devil’s Tower. There is a movement to change it back, predictably opposed by Wyoming members of congress. You can read more about it on the park service website
As is our usual practice we spent the last night on the road at a KOA so we could have a nice easy way to clean out our tanks for the long trip home. This KOA shows a movie every night — Close Encounters of the Third Kind. You may remember that this monument featured in that movie.
This is a popular spot for climbers. Except for the month of June when it is not open for climbing out of respect to the Here are some climbers coming back down.
The title picture for this post was taken at 6 AM as we pulled out of the park to being our 13 hour journey back to Wisconsin. This was a fantastic trip, made even better by our traveling companions. Where will we be five years from now? Who knows, but it will be an adventure.
Yellowstone Scenery
Although there was a huge flood in Yellowstone just over a month ago there was very little of the park that was closed to visitors. We took full advantage of that and saw everything that the park had to offer. When most people think of Yellowstone, they probably think of Old Faithful, but there is so much more to the park than that. We did a few longer hikes, and a lot of short hikes. We saw beautiful rivers and waterfalls and canyons. Even the meadows along the river were amazingly beautiful. I am very grateful to the Hayden expedition, congress, and to President Grant for making Yellowstone the first national park in the world.
The grand canyon of Yellowstone was really grand, and maybe my favorite of the trip. There are two huge waterfalls, upper and lower. Here is a view of the lower falls — which are 308 feet tall! For comparison Niagara is 167 feet but Iguazu falls are 360. I looked it up so you get to read it!
We started out our visit to the grand canyon of Yellowstone at artist point, supposedly named for some paintings made by the artist Thomas Moran who was part of the Hayden expedition. Moran painted the falls to present to congress because after discovering Yellowstone they knew that it needed to be preserved and wanted to persuade congress to preserve this place for future generations.
But this is a mistake, he actually made the paintings from the north rim. Nevertheless its a great view point and you could definitely be inspired to paint there.
From the north side of the canyon You can take a 3/4 mile hike down to the brink of the upper falls. Its a 600 foot elevation change but you get to stand and look right over the falls.
Sometimes you can happen upon something really nice just by taking a short little offshoot of the main road. These are wonderful stops without the crowds that you see at some of the main attractions.
This has been a wonderful trip. Tomorrow we leave Yellowstone and begin the two day trek back home. We will make a stop at Devils Tower tomorrow night, and then have a marathon day back to the cabin in Wisconsin on Friday.
Mud Pots, Hot Springs and Geysers
Educational Post Alert (EPA)! Did you know there are four kinds of geothermal features in Yellowstone? And that Yellowstone has more than half of the worlds geysers ? Thats geysers not geezers , although there are a lot of geezers here, I’m pretty sure its not more than half of the worlds population.
The first couple of days in the park we visited a lot of thermal features I’m going to take them by feature rather than going in order. We will go from most boring to least boring. As a bonus for sticking with us you will get to see wildlife photos.
Let’s begin with Fumaroles. You might think these sound like some nice Italian pastry stuffed with sweet cream filling, but you would be wrong. Fumaroles are gas vents. And when I say gas I mean sulfur gas. You can encounter these things all over the park and you usually see them and hear them before you actually get to them.
Next on the list are the mud pots. Mud pots are boiling pools of, well, mud. In the springtime when there is more runoff and rain they tend to be kind of thin, but by late summer and early fall they are very thick and muddy. These are also quite odiferous, but kind of fun to watch them bubble away and spew mud into the air.
Third are the thermal pools. These can be quite beautiful actually. They look like they would be wonderful to sit in like a hot tub. But they are actually way too hot for that and their PH is quite acidic. They also contain lots of interesting kinds of bacteria that only grow at higher temperatures. In fact the colors in these pools are from mats of bacteria that thrive at different temperature levels. Not only are they pretty, but they are scientifically useful in that they help make DNA replication much faster!
This pool deserves some special mention. It is right in Lake Yellowstone. It gives anglers the option to catch their fish and cook it without even taking it off the hook. It is called the fishing cone.
Finally, the most famous and dramatic of all of the features are the Geysers. Geysers are especially fun when they erupt. Old faithful, here at Yellowstone erupts every 35 minutes to 2 hours. We enjoyed seeing old faithful twice, once from a viewpoint up on the hill quite a ways away, and the other time right up close. We also witnessed several other smaller eruptions and different geysers around the park.
OK, you made it this far, here are some animals. By far the animal we have seen the most is the Bison. We have seen them in the field, near the road, on the road, rolling in the dirt, everywhere. We did not pet them. We also saw this nice herd of Elk in the distance. But no bears. We did get to observe some black wolves, but trust me they are so far in the distance that they don’t really make for sharable photos. We also saw a coyote out on the road in the middle of the day, which is quite unusual.
