Chrissy and I went down as far as Indian Gardens. This is an oasis on the Bright Angel trail and it is the logical terminus of a day hike for a person in average condition. It took us around three hours to get down but only around two and a half hours to get back up. It doesn’t make intuitive sense. I think it is because of all the rocks. I walk gingerly among them going downhill. We also had to get to the side of the path to let hikers pass who were coming up or mule trains coming down. There was less oncoming traffic on the return trip and no mule trains came past.
Of course I am not counting the leisurely lunch-break we spent at Indian Gardens. The cottonwoods and willow make very pleasant surroundings. Both are fast-growing adaptive trees but are often unloved because of their weak wood, short lives and susceptibility to wind damage. Of course, it depends on where they are. As long as they are not near houses or roads, they do just fine. Except that they grow in generations, i.e. a lot of them come up the same time and whole clumps grow, live and die together. This is not a problem except during generational change, when the whole clump of cottonwoods begins to die back about the same time.
PS
The morning later I my complaining muscles reminded me that I am no longer in the top condition I used to imagine. The pattern of pain was interesting, more characteristic of overdoing cross country skiing than overdoing ordinary hiking. I suppose it is because of the poles.
My legs hurt a lot less than I would have guessed, but my arms, chest and lats are screaming.
I used to cross country ski a lot when we lived in Norway. I am sure I used the poles the way the Norwegians taught me, which is to push off in back of your body instead of leaning forward on the sticks. I recognize the feelings. The good news is the pain confirms that the poles worked. I pulled myself out of the canyon w/o overstraining my legs or knees.
As they say (for different reasons) in “Animal Farm”, “Four legs good; too legs bad.”
PSPS
The link to my earlier trip down the canyon is at this link. That time we did it in 117 degree heat and went all the way to the river and back. That was stupid. The bottoms of my shoes melted off on the hot rocks. Really.
This time we had perfect weather. Cool at the top and only warm near Indian Gardens. AND we didn’t go all the way down.
Route 66 has been replaced by I-40 through Arizona, but the legend remains. Among the places showing homage to the “mother road” is the Route 66 Grill. My guess is that the clientele includes a lot of bikers and truckers. You get to (have to) grill your own lunch. I chose bratwurst, since I was reasonably sure that I couldn’t mess up with a pre-cooked sausage. I just had to blacken the outside.
Farther down the road is Williams. We visited here in 2003 and you can read about that at this link. Williams has a superb natural location with a nice cool climate in the middle of the ponderosa pine forests on the way to the Grand Canyon, but it is just a little too far out of the way. It has always been thus. The town is named for the mountain man (and son of plainly unimaginative parents) William Williams. According to the plaque at the monument, Williams organized the regional mountain man rendezvous at the site of the current down and generally “did a heap of living.”
Those rendezvous must have been something to experience, with the grizzly men coming out of the woods once a year to trade their pelts for the goods they needed, including whiskey, women & weapons. Merchants came from all over to trade and probably rip them off. Of course, it was dangerous to cross a man who lived by himself most of the time and whose daily life required him to kill animals & fight Indians. Fuel that guy with rye whiskey and you had murder and mayhem waiting to happen.
Mountain men like Jeddiah Smith, Jim Bridger and William Williams went up to the mountains to get away from civilization, but their activities opened up the wilderness and allowed in what they were trying to escape.
The mountain man epoch lasted less than a generation. A lot of their activity was based on chasing beavers to satisfy the vagaries of fashion. The pelts were used for felt hats worn by gentlemen in Europe and the Eastern U.S. The bottom fell out of the market when fashions changed and silk hats became all the rage. Anyway, by that time settlers were moving in and the railroads were binding the nation together. There was no longer any room for the mountain men. Their legend has endured longer than their moment in history.
We headed up to the Grand Canyon via Sedona, which took us through the red rock country along Oak Creek. Our first stop was Montezuma’s Castle, misnamed after the legendary King of the Aztecs, whose people never got this far north. Castle is also a bit of a misnomer. It is essentially a lightly fortified cliff dwelling and it was a Pueblo type people who made the structure as a refuge against enemies. Archeologists call them Sinaqua people.
Looking at the extent that people lived in fortified villages reminds us how precarious life was in the past. Violent marauders or dangerous animals could appear at any time and the lookouts could only detect as far as their naked eyes could see. Since old guys, less useful working in the fields, evidently often got the lookout job, sighting distances were cut even further by failing eyesight.
However, as far as stone-age communities go, this was a top of the line location. It was defensible, as mentioned above. Oak Creek provides a steady supply of water, important to human life and attractive to game animals and the loose soils near the creek were easily worked with simple tools available.
The community thrived for centuries and then just disappeared around 600 years ago. Nobody is sure what happened. There was significant climate change at the time, with the area becoming drier. This might have changed availability of game species. That cannot be the only explanation; since the creek did not dry up and no matter how tough conditions were near the creek, they must have been worse away from it. Below is Oak Creek near Sedona.
I blame Rousseau and his “noble savage” myth for giving us the misconception that life before civilization was good. In fact, life for most was violent, unpredictable, generally brief and often unpleasant. A better question to ask is how people persisted for so long rather than why they disappeared. It was probably a combination of war and changing ecological conditions that drove the people away from this area. Of course, sometimes things just happen. Only around fifty people lived in this village. With a small, preliterate culture a few bad decisions, a couple of nasty neighbors or just a run of bad luck can doom a community. I suppose a bigger question is why they didn’t come back.
I didn’t think of Arizona as a beautiful autumn location, but the sycamore trees along creek were showing off a rich golden color. It was a beautiful fall day at Montezuma’s castle, as you can see from the nearby pictures. We moved up the road and upstream to the town of Oak Creek and the Sedona area. We stayed at the Best Western in Sedona. Below is the view from the balcony.
This is the red rock canyons area with natural beauty all around. It reminded both Chrissy and me of the Petra area of Jordan. Sedona was a cowboy movie location during the 1940s and 1950s and there were markers with handprints of famous actors who played in the movies. The only ones I recognized were Gene Autry and Ernest Borgnine. More recently, it has become a center of arts and crafts and a kind of aging hippie hangout. There is supposed to be some kind of vortex that connects to other dimensions or releases psychic energy or something like that. This and the lyrically beautiful scenery attract various sorts of people. There are also plenty of trails for outdoor activity. It is a nice place generally.
Past Sedona you climb the mountain in a series of switchbacks. You are still following Oak Creek, more or less. That little creek is responsible for most of the beautiful topography. The natural communities change as you climb with scrub, juniper and pinion pines giving way to open ponderosa forests.
The forest service has been managing these piney woods well, at least near the roads where I could see it. I noticed the results of prescribed burning programs and the trees were often in clumps, as they would be in healthy ponderosa forests of the past. I saw lots of evidence of fire along the road. I took a picture of an area that was still warm from the recent burn to show what is supposed to look like. We saw smoke in the distance the day before, which may account for some of the haze we noticed in Sedona.
Maybe it is just that Carl knows them. (Carl is a connector. He knows lots of people and is genuinely interested in their activities.) Maybe a place like this is just particularly attractive to people associated with the aviation and travel industries. Maybe something draws them here. The nearby University of Arizona evidently gets a lot of grants to do aviation related research or it could be just a case of random clustering. Whatever the reason, there seem to be are a lot of pilots and airline employees around here. Many are retired but others own homes here sort of as a base. I suppose they are like FSO in that respect. They travel around so much that they really are no longer tied to a particular place, so they choose a nice place like Marana, with its sunny climate and ample amenities.
Below is a view from a bedroom in one of the model homes,
Below is an “outdoor room” at the development. The doors open completely making the living room and the patio one space.
Carl showed me around his community, which is still an expanding work in progress. It was started around 1990 and spreads up the canyons. The growth is extensive, but well-planned. Distances are significant and it is a long way to grocery stores or services. In other words, it is not a place to walk, except as exercise along the trails or on the golf courses.
You could not call it a retirement community, even though many of the residents are retired or semi retired. Carl and Elise seem to be typical of the community in that I don’t know think you could say that they are retired. They no longer work where they did during the bulk of their working lives, but they are active in their community and pursuing a bevy of business ventures. I mentioned Elise’s Jewelry business. Carl works on a variety of computer related projects and produces things like custom greeting cards. A friend of his take pictures of the local wildlife – and sometimes not local as in Australia or the Galapagos – that they use for the cards. If this is retirement, it is the kind of active and actualized life most of us say we want in both work and leisure.
Putting on the Ritz
There is some income diversity in the community, but the scale runs from well-off to rich. You have to pay to live in a nice place like this. Ritz-Carlton is developing the community up the canyon. The big resort will open in December and the residences around can take advantage of the facilities there. The Ritz will also manage the community in terms of trash pickup and maintenance. This is a step above the average home-owners association, however. The residents have a concierge service. You can call and have service worker sent to your house or if you are waiting for a service worker, they can send down someone to wait for you. No more hanging around the house all day waiting for the cable guy.
When I think of putting on the Ritz, the scene from “Young Frankenstein” comes to mind, BTW.
The climate here is hot in the summer, but very nice most of the year. The higher elevation makes it more pleasant even in the hot months and it is around 5 degrees cooler than Phoenix. If the mountains seem familiar it is because those of us who watched TV during the 1960s saw them a lot. Many of the westerns were filmed around here. Even though Bonanza was set in Nevada, much of Virginia City and the Ponderosa were actually filmed here, for example. The diversity of scenery and almost perpetual good weather made it good for filming.
The community builders are doing an excellent job of conserving nature. I wrote in an earlier post how some people seem to be offended by golf courses, which they claim are ecologically wasteful. Those with that affliction probably should not come here. But Carl pointed out how the golf courses are built around the natural drainage patterns and are irrigated only with gray water. As a conservationist, I believe that we should use resources wisely and that is what they are doing here.
Ample areas are left wild and they make a extraordinary effort to preserve the saguaro cactus. Above is a cactus nursery, where the saguaro wait for a new location. Below is a cactus forest.
Areas of the cactus forests are put off limits to development and care is taken to move the safely saguaro in places where development must occur. These symbols of the Sonora desert take many years to grow, but they have small root systems which makes them very easy to transplant. The apparent anomaly of a shallow root system in a place w/o much water is explained by the hard-pan nature of the soils and the ability of the cactus to suck up and store immense amounts of water during the short times it is available. below and along side is a saguaro crown. This is not something you see every day. It can take many years for a cactus to grow even one arm. This one is certainly more than a century old.
Montgomery is on a flat site so it spreads out easily. The central part of the city is very quiet. It is easy to drive and find your way around the grid pattern streets, and there is ample parking all around. The country’s first electrical trolley line was set up here in 1886. That started spreading out the city’s population. There are no natural barriers, so since it was easy just to move a little farther out and since the city’s population is only 200,000 (a little less than Arlington) the whole place has more the density of a suburb than a city. Above is the state capitol.
Below is the Confederate White House, where Jeff Davis lived. Montgomery was the first Confederate capital. The woman running the reception desk was originally from Czechoslovakia. Her parents fled Sudetenland when Hitler took over, only to be subsumed when he took over the rest of the country after the Munich sell-out. After WWII, her family wisely got out when the communists took over. Although she came to the U.S. when she was only eleven, she still had a trace of a Czech accent, overlaid with the Alabama drawl.
I was a couple hours early for my appointment at the Alabama Forestry Association, so I got a chance to walk around the Capitol area. The buildings are classical revival built with white marble from Alabama or the neighboring states. Below is the Alabama Archives building. There is a museum inside. Notice the classical style with the white marble again.
The city has clearly gentrified. Near the river are a lot of old warehouses and railroad buildings, now converted to loft apartments and nice restaurants. I didn’t take pictures of them, but below is the Dexter Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King served as pastor 1954-1960. It was from here that he organized the Montgomery bus boycott.
At the Alabama Forestry Association, I met Rick Oates. Forestry is an important industry in Alabama. Although the state tree is the longleaf pine, loblolly is a lot more common. Mr. Oates said that woody biomass looks like it will take off and some of the pulp firms are worried about it. I wish. The price of pulp is so low now. It would take a big change in biomass to bring it back up. You can find out more about Alabama forests at this link.
Above is a memorial to police officers at the Alabama Capitol. Below is a traditional Alabama cabin.
The only other time I was in Alabama was in March 1974, almost thirty-five years ago. It was cold in Wisconsin during the spring break so I decided to hitchhike to Florida. I memorized a map, but I got it wrong and ended up two days later in south Alabama. It took me that long to figure out that I didn’t have enough money and no plan, so I turned around and headed home. This trip was my first big adventure and the first time I understood that being on your own was not always much fun.
I got a ride all the way from Nashville to Alabama state highway 10. This was a very local rural road back then. A guy in a pickup truck picked me up. He talked to me for about ten minutes, and I understood not a word. It worried me. It was like being in a foreign country. He dropped me off about two miles down the road, where a farmer was out working in his field. He came over and talked to me (people were very friendly). He had an accent, but it was easy to understand. I mentioned my earlier problem and he just laughed. “That’s old James. He’s the town drunk. Ain’t nobody understands old James,” he told me.
My turn around point was a cemetery near Brantley, Alabama on the way to Opp. I found the place and you can see it up top. I spent the night there, actually right outside. That was not my plan. I was talking to some guys at a local gas station. They warned me about the poisonous snakes in the tall grass. Now I understand that they were just giving me a hard time. As I walked out of town in the dark of early evening, I saw nothing but tall grass, until there was some short grass. I thought it was a roadside, so I spread out my blanket and went to sleep.
In the morning, I saw that it wasn’t a roadside. I was sleeping near the tombstones not far from a graveyard. Had I known where I was, I think I would have slept poorly. As it was, I spend a peaceful night with the quiet neighbors but that was enough. I was hungry and lonely and I wanted to go home. I took a picture near the spot where I think I was. Those leyland cypresses were not there yet. There was just I was grass and some bushes. Just being there brought back the feelings of those days. I did lots of stupid things when I was nineteen, but I think this was the stupidest, on balance. Above and below are pictures are Brantley what used to be the business district thirty-five years ago and some houses along the road.
I started to hitchhike back north from the spot on the top picture outside Brantley, Alabama. (For the last thirty-five years, I have believed that I turned back south of Opp. I remembered that name because it is odd and I saw it in writing. Now, however, I am 99% certain that the spot above is indeed the high water mark of my first lonely travel adventure.) I made it to Nashville by that night.
I might have gotten there earlier. I had a ride going all the way up there, but I got out near Decatur. The driver was drinking whiskey. He claimed that he was going to kill his wife and his former best friend. The wife had run off with the friend. This didn’t seem to bother the guy too much, but they had also taken a couple hundred dollars of his money. This pissed him off. His story sounded a little too much like the words from a Hank Williams, Jr song. I remembered the words of the old Roy Acuff song, “Whiskey and Blood on the Highway” (There was whiskey and blood all together; mixed with glass where they lay; I heard the moans of the dyin’; but I didn’t hear nobody pray) so I bailed. I tried to pay attention to the news the next day and didn’t hear about any spectacular murders, so I figure he was just talking … and drinking. People who picked up hitchhikers often were just looking for someone to talk at and they often are not serious. But guns, booze, anger and cars are not things you should mix or mess with if you can avoid it.
I spent my last $7 on a bus ticket from Nashville to Evansville, Indiana. I didn’t particularly want to go there, but that was as far I my money would take me. What I really wanted was a warm & reasonably secure place to spend the night and the bus was the best I could do. I arrived in Evansville just about dawn and set off up Hwy 41. It was 5 below. They had an ice storm the day before and then it got really cold. Hitchhiking was hard and I picked up only short hops. The worst was when some A-hole dropped me off directly in front of a sign that said something like, “Rockville Prison. Do not pick up hitchhikers”. I later found out that it was a woman’s prison, but the sign didn’t specify.
I got up to Chicago about the time it was getting dark and a really nice guy drove me all the way home to Milwaukee. It is probably not a good idea to depend on the kindness of strangers, but I was glad that I ran into some good people. Besides the Rockville Prison guy and the homicidal boozer, everybody I met treated me okay, some were very friendly and shared lunches with me. I would have been a lot hungrier if not for that.
The whole adventure lasted only four days, but it made a deep impression on me, so much that a half a lifetime later I can still recall details. This was the first time I was really alone and unconnected. I realized that a guy could just disappear. I remembered how it felt to be “homeless” as I drove back from Brantley to my reserved room at Courtyard in Troy, Alabama. It is comforting to have a place to go. The most disturbing part about wandering is looking around for a place to bed down at dusk and hoping that it doesn’t rain or you don’t get rolled. It is nice to be able to come & go when you want, but in the words of that great country philosopher Kris Kristopherson, “freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.”
It was a good lesson and not a very expensive one for me. It was good to learn it early, but it wasn’t smart to set off with no map, no plan and almost no money. I can’t even put myself back in that stupid young-man mindset. I make much more sophisticated stupid old-man choices today. I have always been lucky and luck can substitute for intelligence and foresight … until it doesn’t.
I didn’t stop hitchhiking, BTW. That is how I and many car-free students got around in those days. And I subsequently hitchhiked around Europe. But I prepared better.
The Air War College is located on Maxwell Air Force base in Montgomery, Alabama. It is a pleasant place and it is still summer in Alabama. The housing is nice. I am here for three days of seminars. It has been interesting so far. I like to get away sometimes and think about the work. I only wish I could translate the ideas better into practice.
Above is a B-25. It is also called the Mitchell bomber, named after Billy Mitchell, who warned America that the Japanese could launch a Pearl Harbor style attack. For his insight, he was court martialed, although later he was honored. Too bad he was already dead. He was a Wisconsin boy and the airport in Milwaukee is named for him too.
The Mitchell bombers planes were used in WWII and were the planes used during the Doolittle raids, when we showed the Japanese that we were serious about taking the war to them after Pearl Harbor.
Below is some of the housing on the base.
Below is the Wagon Wheel restaurant, where we had breakfast. It is simple eggs and bacon … and grits for those that like them.
I kept to the smaller roads out of Pottsville. This part of Pennsylvania is very rural. I passed several tree farms; as you can see from the pictures they grow Christmas trees. I also passed a couple of places that advertised themselves as trappers, fur and hide buyers. You would think that they would be more circumspect in this PETA soaked world. It is nice to know that some people are still free enough to resist the pressures of the politically correct. I suppose they are well armed and irascible.
The PETA types that bravely throw red paint on little old ladies in fur coats tend to give a free pass to motorcycle gang members wearing leather coats and even PETA radicals understand that a well-armed guy living by himself who makes a living skinning animals in a dilapidated trailer is probably something you just shouldn’t fool with.
Another “scenic byway” is old Hwy 15 past Gettysburg. The area along the road looks a lot like it must have back in 1863, of course with the addition of the statues and monuments. Many Civil War battlefields are threatened. Most of the actual territory included in the battles is on private property. When the countryside was rural, there was no problem keeping it looking appropriately … rural. But today as shopping centers and subdivisions ooze out across the landscape the authenticity is threatened. Eventually we could be left with a little patch of green & a few cannons surrounded by fast food restaurants and parking lots. Following in the footsteps of Picketts charge across a Wal-Mart parking lot would probably not feel right.
Speaking of new buildings and parking lots, they built a new visitors’ center in Gettysburg. It was needed. The old building was too small for the growing crowds, but the new facility is a little too slick for my tastes, too organized. Part of the joy of visiting historic places is discovering new things, or more correctly discovering old things for yourself. The organization will give more information, but GIVE is the operative word. It is passive. If you get it laid out for you by someone else it is not so much discovery. There is a ridiculous amount of control as you can see from the picture of the sign. The wall in question is around three feet high. It would be hard to fall off in the first place and if you did it would be hard to be hurt. But I suppose the lawyers got at it.
Below is an even more interesting sign, although this one makes a good point. The picture says it all about which is the dominant animal in the relationship. The dog strides proudly off, leaving the man shuffling, hunched and simian-like to clean up behind.
I took one more side road, as I got off the main road and went through Emmitsburg. Below is a monument to the fallen of World War I in Emmitsburg, MD.
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.
The Erie Canal was a wonder for its time. It could move stuff many miles at very low cost. Water was much more reliable than roads of those times. But it moved only as fast as a mule could walk. The golden age of canals was cut short by the advent or railroads. There were a few dead ends, such as plank roads. They were roads made of boards (planks) that elevated the traveler above the mud. They were very good for swampy areas. One of the first plank roads in the U.S. was build right here in North Syracuse. Lots of them were built and they were all the rage. But they cost a lot to construct and wore our faster than their proponent projected. If you included maintenance they were a really bad, if picturesque, idea. Their memory survives in place names.
Those days were not really that different from ours. That was also a time of great changes in technology, relationships and in their case geography. Let’s make a comparison using technological milestones. The first Apple personal computer came out in 1976 – thirty-three years ago. The Erie Canal was completed in 1825. Thirty-three years later half the U.S. had gone from wilderness to settlement. Railroads had spread. The telegraph had been invented and lines were being strung across the county, so messaged that had taken days or weeks now arrived in secondss. A dozen new states had entered the Union but the Union itself was looking shaky. A lifetime in the second quarter of the 19th Century was at least as eventful as ours. BTW, the canal had to pass over rivers with a kind of water bridge or aqueduct. Below is what they look like.
Great fortunes were made and lost betting on which technologies would come out on top. Like today, the best didn’t always win out. Sometimes you just had to jump on the one that had the most users.
I went down to part of the old Erie Canal that was left near Syracuse. Through town most of it is now filled in and forms the middle of Erie Boulevard, BTW. There is a park along much of what is left of the old canal and it is very calm and pleasant. The tow path is paved with gravel and it would make a beautiful running trail. I didn’t have time to try it out myself. I can imagine it was not so nice when it was in use. Picture the mud, mule crap, sewage and garbage. This is how it often is. We get nostalgic for the old facilities and they get better looking with time. Think of all those Civil War battlefields or medieval castles. They were once factories of war. Now they are just pretty and interesting.
A closer look at the area around the canal shows that not everything is as it was. Humans have totally remade the landscape and that goes way beyond digging the ditch that became the canal. look at my pictures above and below. The plants you see in the foreground above are phragmites, an invasive species of reed. There are acres of them in the wetlands nearby. Had you come to this place a generation ago you would have found native American cattails. The phragmites are ecosystem changing species. Look across the pond on the picture below and you see Norway spruce. They too are immigrants. We tend not to call them invasive because they are not as prolific and they are pretty. Not in the pictures but in back of me were Norway maples, which look a lot like sugar maples and are replacing them in some places. A 19th Century naturalist familiar with the fauna along the canal would be very surprised by the unfamiliar plants. I couldn’t get a good picture that showed the ruts on the hills a little farther away. Chrissy’s father explained that to me a long time ago. The cows walk around the hills in habitual ways. Over the years, they create ridges and indicate that the hill was long part of a cow pasture. Of course, the cows and even the grass is not native. Some people consider fescue invasive. Even the earthworms living in the soil were imported from Europe.
We had a weather anomaly. In Pennsylvania and much of western New York it snowed. Parts of PA got SIC inches. This is the earliest significant snow on record. A woman who drove up from nearby Ithaca said there were inches of snow there. But Syracuse was like a donut hole. It was rain or snow all around. Here it was cold, but clear, so I got a good impression of the town. It seems a nice place and Syracuse University is very charming.
We had a good symposium at SU, BTW. I will write about my impressions tomorrow.
