I’ve been traveling again, and I apologize for not being as active as I would like to be. I went up to South Dakota for a family reunion. It’s been four years since my last visit, so I had some catching up to do with a lot of people.
The church above was built on land donated by my great great grandfather way back when in 1889. It was a church for Danish immigrants who settled in southeast South Dakota. The second Sunday in August is the Reunion Sunday service where the little church is packed with family. Afterwards there is a picnic in town. This has been going on for decades. It is always nice to see people.
We got to missing our little bunnies and wondered where they were so I put the trailcam on their favorite yarrow patch and one showed up the other day.
We are worried about our puppy Kodi getting them but so far he just half heartedly chases them.
Every once in a while he goes on the hunt for them and gets one to run but like I said his heart is not in it. WHICH IS FINE BY ME!!
I captured myself cutting the grass the other day. I am about the only person on the street that still mows their own yard.
And here is Lizzie. She never goes out in the back yard but she likes to check out the action through the window when she is not napping. She naps a lot.
So continuing from last week, after I rode in the 4th of July Parade in Round Valley, Arizona I needed to head back home right afterward. A friend suggested a different route than what the apple maps app suggested. He said turn off at Quemado, New Mexico, head north to Interstate 40. There are some cliffs you will run into that I think you might like.
So I drove to Quemado and hung a left just past this beautiful little church and headed north.
And drove miles of road looking like this. Beautiful and desolate but no cliffs to be seen. After a long while I came to El Malpais National Monument and area of beautiful lava flows including lava tubes and other interesting things. No photos of any of that though. I was looking for cliffs. Pretty soon I came to an area where the lava flows came up against cliffs. And my friend was right, the cliffs took my breath away.
Truly spectacular with great skies that day.
Great views everywhere I looked.
And the La Ventana Arch just off the roadway. Aptly named as La Ventana means the window in English.
This shot is from the trail that gets you pretty close to the arch.
Lots of cactus in the area. This might be a cholla cactus.
I loved the blooms on the cactus.
So I loved the arch and the El Malpais. I was kind of mad at myself as well because I lived for years in Albuquerque, just 100 or so miles away and had no clue about the cliffs, the arch, the Malpais or any of that. Of course, that was back in the day when I was young and dumb, (I am now old and dumb.)
What a beautiful place this is. I intend to come back when I have more time.
Sorry, not sorry, I am still documenting my recent trip to Arizona for my 50th high school reunion in Eagar/Springerville, AZ. Our family left the area in 1971 when dad got transferred to Albuquerque. I hadn’t been back since so I was really curious. (The two towns butt up against each other so I am just going to call the area Round Valley since that is what the locals tend to call it).
John Wayne had a ranch, the 26 Bar Ranch, in Round Valley up until he passed away in 1979. It went through some changes and is now owned by the Hopi Tribe. He’d show up every now and then and the town had John Wayne days for him with a parade and all that. He was a very nice guy, very approachable, especially with kids. I never talked to him but I stood right next a time or two. The towns are still very proud of him.
The 26 Bar Herefords painted rocks are still there but they used to be a lot more prominent than they are now.
Round Valley is football crazy. They are used to winning and by big margins. The whole town would shut down on game days to either cheer them on at home or caravan to wherever they were playing. Years ago they passed a bond issue and they got the football team a domed stadium. As far as I can tell it is still the only high school football field with a dome in the US. I had never seen it before and I hauled my drone all the way to Arizona just to take a few photos of it. it seats about 5000 or so. They play other sports in it and it has been used as a shelter for some of the big forest fires they have had in the area including the gigantic Wallow Fire in 2011 that burned 538,000 acres in Arizona and New Mexico.
Looking off toward the mountains is Flattop Mountain. I had plans of maybe hiking it but reading up on it, it is a nine mile trek with no cover. Nope, not for me.
Instead I headed downtown to the XA Bar. When I was a kid it was the XA Buffet and featured nightly entertainment by the Arizona Yodeler. He wasn’t around.
And it is still a bar. I felt like I was going somewhere forbidden. Bars outside the bible belt in the US are pretty much heavy drinking places. You go in, saddle up and drink her down. I never thought of drinking of being particularly sinful until I moved to Texas after college. I mean you are an adult are expected to control yourself.
So I had a couple of beers and a steak. I enjoyed it thoroughly. There was an enthusiastic crowd in there enjoying themselves as well.
The next day I drove up to the old saw mill and it was gone!! Southwest Forest Industries had a huge sawmill up there and it was the economic driver of the town. The market changed and the sawmill shut down. It was pretty much dismantled for scrap and off it went.
Just a huge empty tract of land and one remaining building left. All shut down. Two huge coal fired power plants started up and provided jobs for lots of people. That is how the town was able to afford the dome. Now the power plants are in danger of being shut down. It will cause some pain but the people there are resilient.
So now back to the reunion. The school was a kind of small and so here was the class.
You can examine the photos and names all you want and you won’t find me because I didn’t graduate there. Remember, I left in 1971. I had stayed in contact with them over the years and they invited me to join them in celebrating the 50 years. So I went and I had a great time! I felt kind of like an interloper but they made me feel welcome.
They had a dinner program the night before the parade and I got to meet people I hadn’t seen in decades. It took a little while at first because I didn’t recognize anybody. After a while it got easier. I was amazed at all my former classmates. Most of them had done quite well with families and careers. A few had challenges but they didn’t seem defeated by the experiences. And several had passed away including one classmate who ended up in Tulsa. She is buried just a few miles from where I live.
Part of the celebration was we got to ride on a float in the 4th of July parade. That’s a sign of being really old I think.
(Photo lifted from a classmates facebook page.)
So there I am sitting on a hay bale in the parade, representing the class of 1973. It was a huge parade, it went on for a long time and we rode for miles.
Also in the parade was this thing. A privately owned armored car. I am not sure what the deal was.
So we sat on the hay bales and waved flags and tossed candy to the kids. And to show their appreciation they threw water balloons at us.
It was a blast. So we finished the parade, and said our goodbyes and off I went back to Oklahoma! And guess what, I got my Albuquerque High School 50 year reunion coming up in a few weeks. Don’t be jealous, riding in a parade is not on the agenda.
I went on a bike ride earlier this week along the RiverParks Trails here in Tulsa and took along my superzoom camera. I captured this flock of great blue herons egrets fishing along a channel in the Arkansas River.
I always like catching birds in flight.
Another mixed flock of birds fishing in a different spot.
This heron was all by himself.
Upriver were some geese.
A couple of egrets checking out the action.
Another shot of an egret with a heron.
And a butterfly flitting around our backyard.
Lizzy the cat checking on the cicada action on the back porch. She likes to watch them. Our pom Kodi likes to eat them. Yuck!!
Hoof prints found during a hike on Turkey Mountain. They have asked for people not to ride horseback on the new trails but some people insist on doing their own thing.
Earlier this month, during my sojourn to Eagar, Arizona for a high school reunion, one of the things I really wanted to see was the Very Large Array, a radio telescope the feds built on the Plains of San Agustin. A huge, very flat, very dry, former lake bed in a remote part of New Mexico. My family left the area in 1971 and the facility started being built in 1973 and was operational a few years later.
I had read and seen photos of the giant antennas at the site. There are twenty eight of them and they are ninety feet tall. When I dropped out of the mountains to the plains where the VLA is located, the plains are so vast that the antennas looked like small mushrooms popping up on a large football field. But when you get close, the antennas are indeed gigantic.
There are twenty eight of these antennas spread out on three rails going out from a hub. The rails are in a Y configuration and and are about ten miles in length give or take. This allows the towers to be wide apart to focus in on details. You see the tires are all wired together with fiberoptics and are connected to a supercomputer. So it simulates up to a 22 mile wide telescope. I am not sure that I understand it all but fortunately they have a comprehensive web site with all sorts of videos, photos, and other things to help you make sense of it.
They have a very good, self guided, walking tour. They ask that you register in advance. It only costs a few dollars per person.
This is big science but it is retro big science. They first started making images there in 1980. They have upgraded the software, wiring, and computational capabilities so they keep the site current.
The VLA is in this remote site because of the flat terrain, high altitude, and low humidity. The mountains that ring the plains help keep out radio waves. Warning though, the site has not very good cell phone coverage and the facility has no street address so they suggest you download the map on google maps or may never get there. They actually don’t like cell phones and ask that you turn yours completely off when visiting. They said the cell phones can kind of fog the images. In fact everything you have that is wireless including blue tooth just turn off.
This is the admin building where the technical stuff and people are. They let you walk on the balcony but you cannot go inside.
This is the barn where they do maintenance and upgrades on the antennas.
This is the transporter that picks up and moves the antennas. They change their configuration of the towers every several months.
Check this link for a video narrated by Jodie Foster explaining the VLA. She does a lot better job than I can. She made a movie, Contact, that had her at the VLA communicating with aliens.
Son and I went to see Oppenheimer last night at a movie theater. It is three hours ong and the time went by fast. The movie is about J. Robert Oppenheimer, a theoretical physicist who was over the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico where the atomic bomb was developed. The movie is not just about the bomb but concerns what happened afterwar World War II was over and the country was trying to decide where to go next. Whether to build more bombs and whether to proceed with the hydrogen bomb and whether to share the secrets of the bomb with Russia.
Oppenheimer had his opinions and they were not popular with the powers that be at the time and so they maneuvered to strip him of his security clearand and this his credibility. They did so in a nasty underhanded manner. But hey I am not going to give it away except to say this is a great movie. See if if you like great movies, and doubly so if you like history, and further if you love science as I do.
Many of the great people of science had a role in the making of the bomb and many of them are portrayed in the movie. Such as Albert Einstein, Edward Teller, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Richard Feynman, Earnest Lawrence, Hans Bethe, Kurt Godel, Enrico Fermi, and more. I had always known that Oppenheimer got screwed but I didn’t know the story until now. Of course its a movie so I have to do a little reading to double check the my understanding of the events.
I give the movie, five stars out of five. Keep the kids at home. Take them to go see Barbie instead. That’s the next movie I want to go see. I might even buy a pink shirt. Does that make me woke? Second thought, I’m told the movie is a little dark for little kids so you are on your own.
Check the Oppenheimer movie web site. Lots of good stuff there. My mother played a small role in the project. She was a secretary briefly at the Hanford Site in Washington state. I think she specialized in partying. She used to talk about slipping out of the dorms at night, squeezing through a gap in the security fence and catching a ride to town and then coming back very late. Fun times!
