Most of what I know about Lewis & Clark beyond what I learned in HS comes from “Undaunted Courage,” a great book by Stephen Ambrose. It is a book I recommend. But the cover of my book has an error. It shows Lewis & Clark dressed in buckskins. It fit my frontier image garnered from watching Walt Disney’s “Davey Crockett,” hardly a work of strict historical scholarship.
I learned today that Lewis & Clark tended to wear their dressy uniforms. This should really not be much of surprise. Consider how well dressed officers were in civil war armies.
We went to visit the Lewis & Clark museum in Sioux City, Iowa. There is not much there, but it is nicely done and worth the visit if you are passing through.
The Lewis & Clark expedition was instrumental to the expansion of our country. It was an expedition of exploration and science that captured the imaginations of Americans of the time and every generation since, even if most of us do not know the details. My pictures are from the museum and the grounds. They had a robot Thomas Jefferson, not exactly “West World” but lifelike.
We finished up in Sioux Fall, SD after a day of driving across Iowa. It is so different from Virginia. Lots fewer trees and lots more row crops. And the soil is black or brown, not red as in Virginia.
Ash trees are still alive in Sioux Falls. It is nice to see them. I know that it is possible to defend trees against emerald ash borers, but it costs a lot. I am hoping that native birds or bugs learn to relish the EAB and keep their numbers down. It is heartbreaking to contemplate having no more ash.
My first pictures are from Granite City Brewery. It was a very pleasant place. Last picture is the Lego version of Lewis & Clark. Beth Harvey Barch might want to share this will Lee, as I think he likes things like this.
We had supper today at Swig & Swine, very good pulled pork and beer. I had a Kentucky Bourbon Barrel Pale Ale. It had a unique taste. I would not want to drink it all the time, but it was good to have this one.
My other pictures are from Magnolia Plantation. Spring is coming.
Audubon Swamp
Visited Audubon Swamp near Charleston. It was full of birds and people taking pictures and watching those birds. It is a beautiful place in general. We saw snowy egrets, great blue herons and something called a snake bird, among others.
The snake bird got its name because it swims just under the water and its long neck looks to observers like a fast moving snake.
There were also lots of turtles and a few alligators. I used to be afraid of alligators and I still would be if I was in the water, but they just don’t do very much most of the time.They are not much fun to watch. Most of the time, you cannot see but a few parts of the animals. They look like logs. I suppose they could be dangerous if you just stepped on one and I would not be eager to camp on the ground where they might come ashore.
I always assumed that we would sometime move to Arizona. Chrissy’s sisters live there and it seems like a good place to retire.
But in the last few years I have become very much more attached to Virginia. It is where my forests are and it is where I have developed a network of people interested in forestry and improving the environment.
I am not saying that I could not leave Virginia, but it has become MY place more than I ever thought possible. This is not something I expected.
So looking for a retirement home, We are more interested in the Old Dominion. But it is expensive to live in Northern Virginia. Real estate taxes are high and property values are too.
Our friend and neighbor Steve Barch suggested that we might like the Fan District in Richmond, so we are down here to look around. Richmond also is one of the top brewery cities in the world. This means something.
We came down today and will look around tomorrow. There is no urgency in the decision, but good to think about it in advance.
Chrissy & I went to the Champion Brewery. We had a flight of beers. CJ kept the little one, but I got a regular sized St. Vitus Dance. It was really good.
We had supper at the Third Street Diner. Penultimate picture is Grace Street in Richmond and last is my usual Love’s photo.
We finished our tree farm national leadership council and will be home soon. Chrissy and I did a last lunch and beer in Albuquerque. Wonderful weather. We had some drinks at La Hacienda in old down and visited the Natural History Museum.
BTW – the beer I am drinking is not really Bud Light. Who would drink that? The beer is Santa Fe IPA, a local brew.
New Mexico has a unique and diverse environment. It is rich in natural communities and geology. A docent at the museum told us that New Mexico is still a volcanic zone, although they don’t expect eruptions anytime soon. The geology is conductive to finding fossils. This is the kind of place Alex Matel would have loved. I thought of him as I posed next to the dinosaur.
“Breaking Bad,” one of CJ’s favorite TV shows, was set around Albuquerque. They take advantage of that moment of fame, as you can see in the second last picture. Last is about the largest mass extinction. All life on earth was nearly extinguished.
Santa Fe is quiet and quirky. Chrissy and I had lunch at Los Potrillos, a nice Mexican restaurant. The food was very good and the people very nice. The beer in the picture is Modelo Especial. It is not bad beer, but not great.
Chrissy got some locally made jewelry. It is okay to buy jewelry if it has if there is a back story. The guy in the picture, Calvin Lavato, was really nice. He made the jewelry himself; he lives in the area and he is a veteran of the USMC. And it was not very expensive anyway.
The last two pictures are from Museum Hill. Unfortunately, the museums were not open on Monday. The middle picture was a statue along the street in Santa Fe.
Today’s entry in the beer tour. Chrissy and I went to Four Peaks Brewery in Phoenix. I got my picture. Chrissy looks better, so I put hers first.
Enjoying beer garden experiences, especially outdoor ones, is one of the important aspects of my gentleman of leisure profession. Tough job, but it need to be done – often.
In keeping with my beer tour activities, we stopped off at Thunder Canyon Brewery in Tucson. They have an IPA called “Sky Island”. It tasted good, but the taste came second to the name in my book. Anyway, the photos below are self explanatory, except maybe the last one. That is a left over picture from the Ramsey Canyon/Sky Island post of a couple days ago. Ramsey Canyon had people living there permanently and seasonally escaping the hot desert. This shack is typical of them and seems familiar to anybody who has watched old westerns. I could imagine the sheriff coming up to see if outlaws were holed up in a place like this.
We came here to look at TNC lands with Apache pines. I will write about that in a few hours. But meanwhile we enjoyed some nice things in southern Arizona.
We drove through Bisbee, Arizona. It used to be a big mining town and there were lots of rich people there at the turn in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.They built some nice houses, often in the eclectic style of people newly in the money. But the boom did not last and prosperity moved elsewhere, leaving a smaller city with a bigger past. The funky atmosphere, pleasant climate and inexpensive real estate attracted lots of the children of the 1960s, after Haight-Ashbury got too expensive and too square. They ended up here, where they seem to have aged in place, making it a kind of new age haven. Lately, there has evidently been a boom in brewing, which is a good thing.
First picture shows Chrissy & I hoisting a couple of local beers in Bisbee. Next is Chrissy in the rental car. After that is the bar where we drank the beer and a street scene from Bisbee. Last is the pre-dawn sky from cousin Elise and Carl’s house.
Here is my daily beer drinking picture tree farming style. The hat is dopey looking, but the fringe keeps the bugs off. I brought down a bench where I can sit and have lunch, as you can see in the second photo. I have my usual Love’s picture. The price of driving has gone up. Penultimate photo, we got some rocks for the parts of the road that are persistently muddy. Hope it works. Last is one of the plots we will convert to pollinator habitat. It already has lots of what is needed.
I would like to say that I was having the beer after a morning of hard work, but I was doing mostly in anticipation of working.
I went down to the farms mostly to talk the the NRCS folks. They are giving me cost share to establish pollinator habitat and do some prescribed burning. I did do some of the usual vine cutting. The good things about that on a hot day is that you work mostly in the shade of the forests.
It was hot today, the hottest day so far in September. That is a bit ironic, given that it is almost officially fall.
Alex and I visited Dinosaur National Monument, near Vernal, Utah. It is literally a dinosaur quarry.
What is now Utah was wet and tropical in the Jurassic Period, and a river ran through it. This river attracted dinosaurs and over the eons some of them died and fell in.The river washed their remains together, where they were covered by sediment and some of the bones turned to stone. There is a survivor bias among the bones. Small animal remains were just crushed, while the big ones persisted long enough to turn into fossils.
With changes in climate, the river ran dry and the former river bed was buried. But the earth never rests. As plates moved, the former river bed was tilted and thrust up to the surface. The dinosaurs rested in the rock until 1909 when Earl Douglass of the Carnegie Museum went to Utah to search for dinosaur skeletons. This is where he found the mother lode. The four corner area is the richest dinosaur region in the world. It is not so much that there were more dinosaurs living here, or that there are more preserved here, but the dry conditions and exposed rock makes them easy to find. It is also the case that there were/are more people looking for fossils in the U.S. than in most other places. It is likely that the local Native Americans occasionally stumbled on these fossils, and may have noticed them, but with no scientific or cultural infrastructure, they remained only curiosities, maybe not even that.
The first picture is Alex in front of the dinosaur quarry wall, now enclosed and protected. Next is Alex in front of the model stegosaurus. It was nice to see his enthusiasm, only a little more concealed than when he first came here when he was only four years old. The third picture are model dinosaurs. Notice the model ranger to give perspective. Penultimate is the lonely and winding road. There is an amazing amount of space out here. Many stretches were you get no bars on your mobile phone. Last is a grouse wing collection spot. It is not mere morbid collecting. Researchers use the wings to study bird numbers and migration patterns.
I thought maybe I would post the beer picture first this time rather than last of the day. This one was taken at the Vernal Brewery. Alex said that I merely have the same photo each time, so I changed it up by putting on my hat.
Vernal Brewery has a nice outdoor seating area and it is conveniently located across the street from the dinosaur museum. Alex and I went to the museum and then just walked over.
I have been enjoying my time with Alex and I am happy to think that he is enjoying his time with me. One of his friends was supposed to go along but dropped out because he could not get off from work. I feel bad for Alex, but it worked out better for me. My role on the trip would have been much more passive. I think it likely that I would avoided some of the more strenuous hikes, like the one to Angel’s Landing.
This is the second time Alex and I have been to the dinosaur places in Vernal. He does not remember well the first time in 1992, when the whole family drove from Spokane, Washington to Washington, DC between our assignments in Norway & Poland. FSOs get “home leave” to be reacquainted with our country. On our home leaves, we crossed the country going east from San Francisco to by train, from Seattle, Spokane & Phoenix by car. Now I have to do it on my own, but I still want to do it.
As I sat in the Vernal Brewery across from my adult son thinking of the boy so excited by the same dinosaurs that I could still see across the street, I felt acutely the passage of time. Looking down at my aging hand, I doubted I would ever pass this way again. This might be the last big hiking trip with Alex and we will certainly never again do a family cross country trip. Driving with three kids asking when we were going to get there was not fun at the time, but it is remembered better than it was lived.
My first picture is my beer photo with the permutation of a hat. Next is Vernal Brewery. When you look at the building, one thought should enter your mind – it could have been built faster and better in the same form using cross laminated timber. That is what popped into my head.
Number three the the traditional duel between triceratops and tyrannosaurus. It was standard fare for the dino myths of my childhood. Scientists now believe that such things never happened, that tyrannosaurus was colorfully feathered and that they didn’t walk around in that clumsy clipped kangaroo fashion. But besides that, it is accurate and it was the best science at the time. Next is a full skeleton of a long necked dinosaur. Finally is something called a “mochops”. I never heard of it before, but I appreciated the quizzical look on its face. I noticed that several of the animals depicted have looks like that. I think that is more the result of the artist than the science. Maybe he used his dog as a template.
