My last pictures for the day. I am posting my relaxing photos. They are all the same, but in different places. This one is in Carver Brewery in Durango, Colorado. They have good beer that they make on the premises.
On the walk back, we passed Durango Distillery. They are only recently in business and have so far made moonshine, i.e. clear and not aged whisky and vodka. They are in process of making a Bourbon-like beverage. It was aging in white oak barrels, but will not be ready for another two years. I tried the products on offer and bought a bottle of “Mayday Moonshine,” which I will share and enjoy with Chrissy when I get home.
My first picture is me and beer. Next is the brew pub outside, followed by the Durango Distillery. Second last is from the visitor center at Mesa Verde. I thought it was sort of artistic. Last shows our guide for one of the ranger programs at Mesa Verde.
Day’s end My end of day post with my daily beer. This one was at Golden Block Brewery and Restaurant in Silverton, Colorado. Chrissy pointed out that my beer pictures imply that I am a boozer. I do tend to drink beer almost every day, but I do not drink all day. I usually have no more than a couple beers, often have only one, and some sad days none at all. I like the “beer experience,” but I do not habitually pound down very many.
Fires of the past I have been observing the ghosts of forest fires past during my trip. I mentioned the fire that destroyed the piñon pine-juniper ecosystem at Mesa Verde. I will put the link to that one in the comments section. It did not recover even after almost fifteen years. Today I saw the effects of an even older fire. The Lime Creek fire destroyed 25,000 acres of spruce-fir forest way back in 1879. It has not recovered even now. This is very different from the fire regimes in Virginia and the Southeast, where the forests begin to recover the next growing season and where many forests are actually fire dependent. I visited the site of the Peshtigo Fire that in 1871 was the largest fire in American history. Those forests have grew back through natural regeneration.
Location and the precise ecology is very important. Look at the pictures and notice that the trees are in rows. People started to plant trees back in 1911 and the process is still continuing. I didn’t climb up to look, but it looks like there has been little natural regeneration in places not planted. Again, this is so different from what I observe in the rainier pine forests in the south and the lake states.
Quick moves among ecosystems
A remarkable thing about the west is how fast you can move among vastly different ecosystems. Yesterday, we were in the high desert. We went to the piñon pine-juniper ecology by midday and ended the day among the ponderosa montane forests. Today, we moved through the ponderosa and into the spruce-fir ecology, where these pictures are taken.
Glen Canyon We went over Glen Canyon Dam. It is about as tall as Hoover Dam, but a lot narrower and impounds less water.
First is the Colorado River below the dam, next the dam and the river above. Last three are from the dirt road that we took to Buckskin Canyon. The colors and contrasts are very bright here. Alex pointed out that blue and orange contrast on the color wheel, since lots of the ground is reddish-orange it sets off strongly from the blue skies.
Buckskin Canyon We hiked down and through Buckskin Canyon. This is an iconic slot canyon often featured in magazines. It is an easy hike except for one place where a big rock has blocked the way. The canyon is very narrow and you can understand how a flash flood would be deadly, but we had blue skies and little sign of water in general.
Farmington Latest in our travel: beer drinking, filling up with gas at Sinclair and eating at Porter’s Smokehouse. We had a couple of flights of beer, which is why the cups are so small. You can see me, Sinclair, Porter’s Restaurant and Alex in the wash on the way to Buckskin Canyon.
Alex & I walked down to the Iron Horse restaurant. It had a good outdoor place to eat and drink and keeping with my natural beer garden environment, I felt right at home. I had the Ghost Rider IPA by Wasatch Brewery.
But I was lured off the patio and inside the restaurant by good country music. This guy played all the old songs I liked. Alex tolerated them, but knew none. I bought the guy’s CD. I think I have a CD player, but I made the purchase more out of solidarity than desire to have a CD.
They asked for requests and played two of mine: “Ghost Riders in the Sky” & “El Paso.” They didn’t do my other request: “Where the Mountains Meet the Sky.” Maybe they didn’t know it. Not many people do these days.
Kanab is an interesting little town. It used to be a bigger deal for movie making and there are lots of pictures of old timey actors. I knew most of them by their faces and some even by their names. Alex knew none except John Wayne.
They named the steaks at the Iron Horse, and named one for the Duke. The John Wayne steak is 36 ounce rib eye. If you eat the whole thing, you got to be in the John Wayne club. It seems to me that if you win you lose and if you lose you lose, so better not to play that game at all. Alex had the Joel McCrea steak. Said it was good. I just went with pulled pork.
The ranger laughed when he saw the mud on our car. He knew that the GPS has directed us down the dirt road. It doesn’t usually rain much around here, but it rained this morning and made it muddy. There was a paved road. It was a little longer. We took that one on the way out.
It was an atypical day at Coral Pink Dunes, cool and with drizzling rain. I imagine it must be a different experience with hot sun. I liked the day we got.
The sand moves too much for plant roots to take hold on most of the dunes. They are the classic shifting sands. But Some have vegetation that holds them in place. Where there is enough stability and water, they even get trees. You can see all sorts of dunes on the first picture, moving sand, brush and trees. We had some low clouds that added to the experience, as you see in the second & third pictures. Forth is a hummock. The roots grab the sand on the leeward side and catches more sand. As the roots are buried, they reach farther down and can access water more easily.If it gets stable enough, it can be colonized by gambel oaks. Last picture is Alex trying to look like an explorer.
German bakery in the high desert Had lunch at a German bakery. They had a nice set up. We had brats and beer. Just like Germany, except different geography, drier conditions, much lower population density …
Fixing the tire We got a slow leak on one of the tires. Lucky we found a place to fix it. You can see the shop waiting area with the big elk. The guys evidently liked hunting. The waiting area featured lots of mule deer, a pronghorn and a bighorn sheep.
Desert rain After visiting Bryce Canyon, we had a short but very intense summer rain storm. It was over in about ten minutes and dried out right after. There are also a few more photos of the canyon.
Beer belongs
I like to think of my “natural environment” as the forests and fields, but I think it might actually beer gardens.
As long as I am in Utah & Colorado, I think I will transfer my allegiance from Love’s to Sinclair. I have three good reasons. First, I like the dinosaur logo. Second, when I was a kid, there was a Sinclair station on Howell Avenue near my house. Third, there don’t seem to be many/any Love’s around here.
Good mileage I have been getting very good gas mileage for the SUV around here. Maybe it is the “dinocare” from Sinclair. More likely, it is because I am driving on good highways, but at lower and more efficient speed.
Alex and I climbed to “Angel’s Landing” in Zion. It was not a very long hike, but it is steep, arduous & scary. When you get near the top, it is impossible to climb safely w/o the help of chains anchored to the living rock. At some point there is drop off of hundreds of feet on both sides of a narrow causeway.
Angel landing The pictures I took do not show the reality. I am not naturally afraid of heights, but I felt a little dizzy sometimes and held fast to the chains at all times.
A lot of people climb up. It takes almost an hour to climb down from the rocks to the ordinary trail, as you have to take turns and wait for people coming up, and you are packed in. It is like when they are doing road construction and traffic can move only one way. We had some pretty French girls in front of us and some nice looking American girls behind.
We were talking to the girls at one of the stops. One of them pointed out that I was an inspiration to the people coming the other way. I felt proud until she continued that the oncoming folks would feel encourage that if an old guy like me could make it, they could too. She quickly realized that she had inadvertently told the truth and tried to dissemble, but I told her that she was right.
As I said, the pictures do not do it justice. I suggest that you Google a video of “Angel’s Landing.” The video shows it better. The trail has two summits. You get up to “Scout’s Landing” and then you climb some chains and you think you are almost to the top. When you get to the top, you see there is much more, as you can see in the first photos.
Last pictures. First is Alex and I near the top of the Angel’s Landing climb. Next is a monument to the CCC boys, who did a lot of work in Zion. After that is Alex’s supper and finally the beer menu. Evidently, beer can be only 4% alcohol in Utah.
Point Special Beer was not my favorite when I was actually in Stevens Point, but today it is a tradition to get some. I went to the Point brewery to get some Point Beer. They are now classified as a craft brewery. I bought a case of Point Special (the blue bullet) and one of the craft beer variety pack.
You can see the picture of the brewery. The steam engine in nearby, unrelated but interesting. Save
I like beer and like the fact that there are lots of kinds. Today we have more breweries than ever in the U.S.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I evidently started drinking beer at the low point of breweries in the U.S. Wisconsin still had a few. We had Point Brewery where I went to school, Leinenkugel in Chippewa Falls, Heileman’s Old Style in Lacrosse & Huber in Monroe, plus the bigger brewers like Pabst & Schlitz. I think they are all gone now or owned by others.
I remember we used to make a big deal about getting Coors. It was not sold far from Colorado because it was not pasteurized and needed to be kept cold. Coors was also one of the first to use recyclable aluminum cans. We thought it was cool that you could crush the soft can in one hand. Steel cans were not so easy. They even made a movie, “Smokey and the Bandit,” about bringing Coors east. Now you can get Coors everywhere. I still like it but only during the day. I usually take a couple cans when I do work on the tree farm. It is very refreshing on a hot day but a little to light to sit and drink in the evening.
Anyway, it is good to see that there is more variety, but it does make life complicated. In the old days, there were lots of types of beer, but they were local. You had to travel to get them. Today they are all or mostly all available in your local liquor store. In some ways that ruins the fun. It was nice to have some things you had to travel to get or could bring back from a trip.
Lago Sul, where I live, is much nicer than the city of Brasilia. They say that the plan for Brasilia was a tribute to modernism. I think that says it all. The guy who is responsible for lots of the design is still alive. I think he is more than 100 years old. He defends his concept with vigor to this day, but he lives in Rio. In any case, the city is turning out better than he planned. Brazilian people are smarter than a few old planners.
But Lago Sul grew up more organically. It has sidewalks, trees, private houses & streets with corners. People prefer to live in places like this. Modernism is just not a human system. It reminds me of science fiction written in the 1950s and 1960s. They thought the future would be something like modernism, with a clear break from the past and a kind of rational collectivism. Fortunately, it didn’t happen. Of course, Lago Sul is not the inexpensive part of town, so there is no surprise it is pleasant.
The weather around here is perfect every day. I can well understand why it is easy to put things off. The old saying that “you have to make hay while the sun is shining” has no real meaning here.* In Virginia, I sometimes pushed myself out for a run on a nice day, anticipating a worsening of the weather later. In Brasilia I can be reasonably sure that tomorrow morning will be just like today. In a few months the rainy season will start. That means that we will get precipitation every day, but still very much predictable and while it will rain almost every day, it will not rain all day.
One of the great things about having a pleasant climate is the way people can mix outdoor and indoor space. Indoor space can extend out into the yard and if you have it covered against the rain and sun it can be essentially the same room, with what we might characterize as indoor furniture and activities. You cannot do this in Wisconsin because of the cold much of the years and the unpleasant humidity and/or legions of mosquitoes the rest. In Florida, they have the so-called “Florida rooms,” but they need to be screened in against the bugs and do not provide the real seamless interface. I saw some of the outdoor room concept in Arizona. It works there about half of the year, when it is not too hot. In Brasilia it is essentially a year-round option.
The picture that shows the straw roof is of a restaurant we went to for the going away party for one of the staff. It was a nice place with ostensibly indigenous food. It was good, but much of the charm came from the indoor, outdoor interface. If you ate “inside” you felt the influence of the outside and vice-versa.
I have to add a disclaimer, lest I annoy some colleagues. I like the Brasilia climate. I liked it last time I was here and I like it even more now. But my discussions with others indicate my opinion may not be universal. I am easy to please. I like most places. I even liked Iraq in many ways. You just had to get up early in the morning to enjoy it. People say, and I suppose they are right, that Brasilia suffers from an overly dry climate in the winter and an overly wet one in the summer. Some people can’t take it. They get asthma, nosebleeds & other respiratory troubles. I know that is true, but I cannot say I actually understand it at a personal level. It seems to me that you just have to adapt your activities to do most things in the early morning or evening, drink a lot of water and eat things like watermelon. It is not different from Arizona in that way, but I suppose the green surrounding create a deception. The dust and smoke can be annoying during the very dry-burning season. I don’t look forward to that, but it only lasts a few weeks. After that, we get rainbow season. Wait to see the pictures.
BTW -the picture of the beer cans just shows my task ahead of trying all Brazilian beers. It is a hard job, but somebody has to do it.
*It occurs to me that I have to explain that old saying to some readers. Making hay, means putting the hay up in bales. It is a job that must be done in sunny and dry weather because if the hay is wet it decays and the decaying process makes heat. Packed together closely enough in a barn, the heat can be enough to start a fire, spontaneous combustion. I don’t really know much about hay making. Chrissy used to do it on the farm, so most of my knowledge comes second hand from her, but I have seen piles of wet grass smolder. When you dig inside, the inner layers are black and hot. Hay is very tightly packed. I can well imagine that if you had enough of this packed together the inner core could get hot enough to burn. Anyway, the saying means that you have to do things when you have the opportunity and the time is right, not when you feel like it.
You have to get off the Interstates. I made a few short detours on my way back from Syracuse. I only wish the weather had been a bit better. It is a lot more fun to drive if you can see better. You can see from the pictures when the weather was clearer that fall is coming to New York and Pennsylvania. Actually, it was more like winter in some places. I heard on the news that they got as much as six inches in some of the Pennsylvania hills. Never before has snow come this early. It stopped traffic at one point, as you can see from my picture. Doesn’t look like October, does it?
In Scranton was the anthracite coal museum. I didn’t have time to see the whole thing. The have a whole mine tour with an outdoor museum including miners houses etc. It would be a day-long study. I went only to the indoor museum. Anthracite is hard coal with few impurities, so it burns cleaner than other coals. It used to be important for home heating, where cleaner burning was important, but it has since been supplanted by natural gas, which is cheaper, cleaner and more convenient. Anthracite is too expensive for extensive use in power plants. Below is a small engine used in the mines.
Below is a typical miner bar. It looks a lot like working bars everywhere. Life sucked for the miners in the old days. They were not well treated by the bosses and the work was inherently nasty and dangerous. These guys were working class heroes and I can understand why they would want to hit the bars after a day in the mines.
About an hour down the road, I visited Pottsville and the Yuengling brewery. They claim that it is the oldest continuously working brewery in the U.S. It is still owned by the same family that founded in 1829. The brewery building is below.
I had my first bottle of Yuengling when I stopped Gettysburg back in 2004, on my way to pick up Mariza in VA to take her back to New Hampshire. At that time it was just a local brew, but now it is available in Northern Va. I am glad that they seem to be prospering, but it is a danger to grow too big. The firm that gets too big loses its personality and ultimately its independence. I remember that happened with Point Brewery, Leinenkugel and with G Heileman, maker of Old Style and Special Export. You can still buy those brands, but now they are just part of the bigger corporation. I mourned their passing, although their beers are still about the same and Leinies has come out with a good wheat beer. We can all get what we want in this era of mass customization, but I long for the authenticity of old brewers.
Above and below are street scenes from Pottsville. It is a cleans & cute town with lots of impressive old houses in a pretty natural setting. The one below is the kind of house they could feature in a ghost movie, IMO.
I went with my sister to the Miller brewery and then around the old neighborhood. Below are the boiler vats. They are eighteen feet deep.
Miller Genuine Draft is good beer. Miller Highlife & Miller Lite are not. Miller also has a partnership with Leinenkugel, which is very good and it distributes Pilsner Urquell and Fosters, both of which are among my favorite beers. It was fun to see where they were made.
This is King Gambrinus, the patron saint of beer. This statue is in the “cave”, caverns dug into the hill where they used to keep beer cold before refrigeration. They used to gather ice from the local lakes during the winter and pack it around in the caverns. This cooled the temperature during the summers. Evidently the ice would last until the next winter. People lived closer to their environment in those days. You have to be more innovative if you have to do more than flick a switch to get air conditioning.
The plant in Milwaukee makes a half million cases of beer a day and all this beer moves out EACH day. This plant serves the upper Midwest and around 40% of the beer goes to Chicago. Five other plants around the country serve other regions.
BTW – According to the Bier Reinheitsgebot (beer purity law) issued by Wilhelm IV of Bavaria in 1516 all beer sold can be made of only malted barley, hops, water, and yeast. This rule still applies on Germany. Beer can be made from any grain. Miller mixes in some corn with the other ingredients and Budweiser uses rice. That means by German rules these are not really beers.
Only 1600 people work at the plant and half of them are corporate staff. That means that around 800 workers make all that beer. The plant is mostly automated. I was thinking again re the loss of jobs. Those jobs have not gone to China; they have just gone away. below is the Miller warehouse, clean, tidy and almost w/o workers. A half million cases will move through it today. You can easily see the jobs that automation takes.
On the other hand, other jobs are created but hard to see. My cousin Tony works for a company that runs webpages called www.officefurniture2go.com and www.homefurniture2go.com. The firm was founded in 2006, has about a dozen employees and distributes furniture around the country – w/o a significant bricks and mortar operation. We still think in the old industrial model where lots of people come together in one place. The new model has people distributed thinly and in small groups. It is hard to get used to it.
Anyway, we had another beautiful fall day. Milwaukee has nice parks as you can see from the pictures. Above and below is Humboldt Park. Pictures cannot capture such a glorious day. Even if the visuals could be perfect, you would not have the smell, sound and feel of the day.
I also drove down to Franksville. It is not a major tourist spot. It used to be where they made Franks Kraut. I don’t know if they still do, but I did see lots of cabbage fields. The brand is actually owned by the Ohio based Fremont Company, makers of all sorts of Kraut and catsup. Franksville is interesting for me because it was for a long time the edge of my biking world, as far south as I could reasonably ride and return in one day. It is still familiar. below is a cabbage patch.
Below a pumpkin patch near Franksville in Racine County.
