Vacation: Day 4 - Corkscrew & Cunningham Gulches...

We got up early this morning and hit the road just as the mountaintops got the first touches of sunshine.  We headed down toward Silverton until we hit the entrance to Corkscrew Gulch, then dropped into four wheel drive and low range to head up the mountain.  This was a relatively easy four-wheel drive, rugged in only a few places and never challenging.  We saw several deer and most memorably a fearless chipmunk who let us drive up to within 5 or 6 feet of him – close enough to see his little nose quivering.  Near the highest point we reached today, we found this icy pond.  The knolls around it had abundant (and tiny!) arctic wildflowers.  An odd bird cry repeated frequently; I only caught a glimpse of it and couldn't even begin to identify it.  It appeared to be the size of a small duck, and was light-colored (perhaps grey).  When I spotted it, it was flying low away from a pond and up to a snowbank.  We're speculating that it was a ptarmigan, mainly because we can't think what else it could be.

After leaving this summit, we drove down the canyon straight into Silverton.  We saw some beautiful ice formations just below the summit, formed above a little rivulet draining the tundra.  On the beginning of this drive, we saw lots of deer and chipmunks, and fat marmots.  One of the marmots we saw was carrying a baby, apparently moving it from one place to another.  This marmot ran straight up the road toward our jeep, stopping every 100 feet or so to rest – that baby was about 1/3 the size of the mother, spherical, fluffy, and cute!

The scenery at the beginning of the drive down to Silverton was beautiful, but there weren't many flowers.  The snow hasn't been gone from the higher areas for more than a week or two.  As we got closer to Silverton (and lower in elevation), we could watch the season advancing.  About a mile outside Silverton, we took a little side road to the east for about a mile.  A deer ran across the road right in front of us.  The road climbed steeply up through spruce and aspen groves, and the occasional meadow of a few acres in size.  Most of these meadows had streams running through them, and all of them had wildflowers.  These weren't spectacular, but they were the best we'd seen up to that point.


Here are a couple more pictures taken along the drive down:

In several of these meadows, we let the dogs out to run, off-leash.  They had a blast!  The most fun for them (and for us!) was the dog's find of the day: a little spring that formed a mud-hole.  That mud was black as could be, and Race was terrifically excited about the opportunity to dig in it.  He dug out great globs of mud and sent them flying behind him, some of them smacking Miki right in the head (and Miki looked mighty put out about this!).  When Race got done with this, he was all black – every bit of his white fur was caked with black mud the same color as his black fur.  Later we found a clear-running stream for him to wash off in, and our black-and-white Race returned.  Miki refused to get into this clear stream.  When I tried to get him in, he simply leaped over it (our agility dog!).  Race, on the other hand, absolutely loved playing in the stream.  He got all wound up, chasing something he thought he saw in the stream, and making funny whimpering noises.  It was hard to get him to leave – I think he'd have stayed in there all day.  Later on the drive, Race would watch any water we were driving by, and looked expectantly at us, as if to say “Here?  Is this where we play in the water again?”...

After leaving this lovely area, we drove on down to Silverton, grabbed a cup of iced coffee, and headed toward Stony Pass.  We never actually went up Stony Pass, though – we first took the road to Cunningham Gulch and ended up spending the rest of our day there because it was so beautiful.  Gorgeous waterfalls seemed to pop up every 6 feet or so.  There were dozens of them along our route, and we didn't even go to the end of the road.  Then there were wildflowers – more wildflowers by far than we'd seen anywhere else.  This, despite the altitude of up to 11,000 feet.  The valley runs north-to-south, but so did the valley we took down to Silverton earlier in the day, and the wildflower abundance couldn't be more different.  The altitude ranges were comparable as well.  So we have no idea why we had an abundance of wildflowers in Cunningham Gulch.  But who cares?  They were there!


On the way out of Cunningham Gulch we had the best treat of all.  Looking across the gulch, Debbie spotted white dots moving on the talus slope perhaps 2/3 of a mile away.  When she got the binoculars on them, we discovered that we were watching a family of Rocky Mountain goats: the momma, the poppa, and a baby.  We were able to watch them for about 10 or 15 minutes as they made their way across a talus slope into a stand of spruce, where they apparently were grazing or taking a nap.  What fun that was to watch them!


Ok, here are the flowers:

Vacation: Day 3 - Yankee Boy Basin...

We got up this morning rather late by our standards, had a little breakfast, and then walked over to the Riverside Inn to pick up our rental jeep.  It was quite a different experience than the usual rental pickup, as Angela and Rodney (who helped us) seemed more like friends than counter clerks.  The whole process was both pleasant and painless, not a hitch anywhere in the process.  Within 30 minutes or so, after Rodney walked us through a familiarization, we were driving out in our jeep.  We took an easy and familiar road today (the road to Yankee Boy Basin, which is where I took the shot at right), partly to let me get familiar with the “feel” of this machine that is so much smaller than the LandCruiser I'm most familiar with.  After a few miles, I was feeling pretty confident in it.

Our overwhelming impression from today's trip was water.  This year's heavy snowpack is melting, and the runoff is visible everywhere.  Every cleft in the mountains has a stream in it.  Streams we remember as rivulets a foot or two wide are raging rivers.  Water is sluicing off the mountainsides from places that don't look like likely sources of water at all.  Forests have turned into marshlands, some of them with a foot or more of standing water.  It's nothing at all like the dry-floored forests we remember from our visit a few years ago.

Yankee Boy Basin is mostly above 11,000', and it's too early for it to be in bloom.  We see a super-abundance of plant life bursting out of the ground, but very little is in bloom.  We did see some, though, as you can see in the photos below.

As far as wildlife, all we saw today were marmots.  Lots of marmots.  We also saw a few deer.  We did see a very few birds (mostly crows), but no lizards or snakes, and no other mammals.  I'm guessing it's still too early in the season...

We also took a couple of short side trips, just to see what was open.  First we tried to go up to Governor Basin, but we were turned around in short order by snow drifting over the road.  Then we drove for a mile or so down the road to Imogene Pass, which was clear but wet (nothing hard to get through, though).  We'll be coming back to both areas before the trip is over.

Ok, now for the plant and flower photos.  There are only a few of these that I can identify...

Vacation: Day 2...

Made it to Ouray after a beautiful day's drive and sight-seeing – but it's late, and we're tired.  Also a little cranky, as the cabin wasn't open as promised, and we had to scramble for over an hour to locate someone to let us in.  Furthermore, the cabin itself is a bit disappointing – not awful, but not what we thought we were getting based on the description.

But we're here, we're unloaded, we've made a local friend already (more on that later), and now we're headed for bed.  More tomorrow, with photos...


Update (6/26/2011):


We left Cedar City at 4 am.  The only place to get coffee at that hour was the local 24-hour McDonald's, so we grabbed a cup and hit the road.  The road to Cedar Breaks was open, so we headed up there; dawn was just lightening the sky as we arrived.  We spotted a porcupine along the drive, scurrying away from the road.  In the dim light he was sort of ghostly looking – his light-colored spines looked like a cloud moving around him.  

Coming down the mountain to the northeast of Cedar Breaks, we passed through some beautiful lake and farm country.  At one spot, we saw some happy cows munching away on grass and flowers, amongst steaming streams and ponds.  This was just before sunrise, and the lighting made for a very attractive scene.

Then we headed down to Panguitch, a sleepy little farm town, and saw something most unexpected: a hot-air balloon rally.  We like the Smokey Bear balloon (at left in the photo at right)...

After that we headed past Bryce Canyon and down to Escalante town, just before crossing the Escalante Staircase country.  There we had a great cup of espresso to wake us up, and in the same shop purchased a replacement hat for my old Tilley hat (which had ripped when I put it on this morning).  The staircase country is one of my favorite parts of Utah.  I can't quite put my finger on exactly why, and certainly not everybody sees it the same way (Debbie, for instance, would be quite happy to skip it altogether).  But I do love it.  There's something about the beautiful contrasts of off-white and red rock with the bright green foliage from the water-rich canyons that just grabs me.  The photo at right is a great example of the vistas that I love the best...

Then we zoomed through Capitol Reef National Park, where I really hated to be in a hurry.  It was still early morning, and the lighting was just beautiful.  But hurry we did, through the park and down to Hanksville, up to the I-70 and through Green River, melon capital of the U.S.  We drove through town looking for melon sellers, but apparently it's too early in the season; there wasn't a one to be seen.  Oh, well.  Then more zooming down to Moab, a brief stop for Debbie to do some turquoise shopping, and then a loop to the west and then south of the La Sal Mountains, place of many previous adventures of ours.  We continued east into Colorado.

There the highway drops suddenly down into a long, broad valley full of farms.  We're not sure what the name of this valley is, but it's the start of some farm country that we really enjoy driving through.  Many of the little towns look like they're stuck in the '50s, and they're chock full of earnest, pleasant, hard-working people.  Along the way through this valley we saw an honest-to-goodness cattle drive, complete with 4 or 5 cowboys on horses, a half-dozen working dogs, and a whole mess of steer.  Lots of hamburger on the hoof!  We were so enjoying watching the cattle drive that I completely forgot to snap a few photos!  We passed through the town of Bedrock (Post Office below), and saw lots of a beautifully backlit grass.  

After that, it was zoom, zoom, zoom all the way to Ouray.  Well, first there was a detour to Montrose for some shopping (groceries and a few four-wheeling supplies), then down to our cabin in Ouray.



This is when our beautiful day started to go downhill.  We had warned the innkeeper that we'd be arriving late, and we had arranged for the cabin to be left unlocked for our arrival.  But when we got there – at 9 pm on Saturday – we found it locked up tight.  The property managers didn't answer their phone, and the message I left got us nowhere.  I left email; same result.  We had nothing else to go on, so we thought we were in big trouble.


We wandered across the street to the Riverside Inn, hoping that they were the ones taking care of the property.  They weren't, unfortunately.  But they were very sympathetic, and immediately offered to provide us with a room to hold us, our dogs, and our rapidly-warming groceries.  We were on the verge of accepting their offer when it occurred to me that I had a name of someone who lived in Ouray who was associated with the cabin.  I asked Angela at Riverside Inn if she could help me locate this person, and she whipped out the Ouray phone directory (a single sheet of paper!) and found my person.  She dialed the number for me and shortly I was connected with the very person I'd been trying to reach for the preceding hour.  This person was disbelieving that our cabin was locked, but she came down (not enthusiastically by any means) and unlocked it – we were in!  Then we spent the next couple of hours unloading the truck, unpacking, and generally settling in.  We were disappointed that the cabin wasn't a standalone unit as we'd expected, but rather a quad (four "cabins" in a single building).  We didn't get to bed until nearly midnight, and we were grumpy.  But at least we had our cabin...

Vacation: Day 1...

Today was a big push of a drive: Jamul to Cedar City, Utah.  We went straight up the I-15, and if you know that route than you know we saw little of interest until we got past Los Vegas and into Arizona.  There the Virgin River Canyon was quite pretty, with more water than we've seen before (presumably the record snow packs melting).

On the way up, we stopped at Baker to fuel up the truck, walk the dogs – and to get gyros and stuffed grape leaves at the Mad Greek's (excellent!).  We had one scare on the way up, as we were headed up the Virgin River Canyon – just in front of us, a truck was pulling a stock trailer with two axles and loaded with one animal (horse or cow, we couldn't see which).  We were perhaps 50 feet behind him when his right trailer tire exploded with a loud bang, and pieces of tire shredded off and flew all over.  We managed to miss all the debris.  To our surprise, the driver kept right on going at 70 mph!  We pulled up alongside and Debbie signaled the driver that his tire had exploded; he nodded his understanding and kept right on going.  Several miles later, never slowing down, he finally pulled off.  Sheesh!

The scenic hilight of the day was a trip down Kolob Canyon.  The panorama at right (click to enlarge) gives you some idea of the country we were driving through.  This canyon is actually the northern reaches of Zion, and is part of the same national park.  It's only a five mile drive off the I-15, and (unlike the main part of Zion) it's uncrowded.

The globe mallow at left was common all along the drive.  It puts our local San Diego species to shame for showiness.  There were great expanses (up to about an acre) of solid mallow, all in bloom, in several places.

At right is another panorama, this time taken vertically.  It shows one particular peak in the Kolob, and everything between me and it.

After settling into the hotel (a pet-friendly Super 8 that is otherwise completely unremarkable), we set off to find ourselves some dinner.  We found a winner: Milt's Stage Stop, a few miles east of town on State 14.  This is a steak and seafood joint.  After looking over the menu, we both decided on seared ahi topped with a mixture of sun-dried tomatoes, mushrooms, capers, garlic, spinach, and millet.  Absolutely delicious!  The salad bar was great (especially the pickled beets – best I've had in years), and the dinner rolls were outstanding (especially the German-style black bread).  Yum!  

Now we're off to bed, to get ready for a 4 am launch tomorrow morning...

Helene...

Helene is one of the Trojan moons of Saturn.  The Cassini robotic explorer recently captured this image of it (as always, click to enlarge).  APOD has it in the form of a 3-D (anaglyph) image. 

Seven years into its mission, Cassini is still going strong – a wonderful example of what NASA could be doing instead of wasting money on purposeless manned space flight...

Steyn on Free Speech...

Mark Steyn's opinions frequently clash with those of Andrew Bolt (aka Bolta), the Australian newspaper columnist.  But there's one thing they share: they've both been sued for something they said.  Here Mark defends Andrew's right of free speech, despite their differences in beliefs – which is, after all, the very point of free speech.

Hansen Near Exposure?

NASA scientist James Hansen is one of the most egregious self-promoters in the AGW movement.  Some ten years ago, his blatant posturings raised the first questions in my mind about the integrity of climate change science, and the AGW proponents in particular.

This morning I read that a watchdog group has filed suit against NASA, claiming that it is withholding documents that show Hansen has accepted over $1M in unethical compensation – from the same groups that profit by his public statements about AGW.  From the article:

In a lawsuit filed Tuesday in Washington, D.C., a group claims NASA is withholding documents that show James Hansen failed to comply with ethics rules and financial disclosures regarding substantial compensation he earned outside his $180,000 taxpayer-paid position as director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

"Hansen's office appears to be somewhat of a rogue operation. It's clearly a taxpayer-funded global warming advocacy organization," said Chris Horner, a co-founder of The American Tradition Institute, which filed the lawsuit. "The real issue here is, has Hansen been asking NASA in writing, in advance, for permission for these outside activities? We have reason to believe that has not been occurring."

The lawsuit claims Hansen privately profited from his public job in violation of federal ethics rules, and NASA allowed him to do it because of his influence in the media and celebrity status among environmental groups, which rewarded him handsomely the last four years.

Let's hope the suit has some success, and we all get to see what this guy has been doing to climate science...

There Once Was...

Via Amy L.:

There once was a pervert named Weiner
Who had a perverted demeanor
Forced from the Hill
For acting like Bill
Now Congress is one weiner leaner

Beautiful Chaparral Morning...

The dogs and I were out for a walk at 3:15 am.  A two-thirds moon hung in the clear southern sky, brightly lighting everything around us – no flashlight needed this morning.  The moonlight washed out most of the stars, but a bright planet was low in the northeast, and I could make out most of Ursa major (the Big Dipper).  Won't be long now before I start seeing Orion in the morning...

The dogs behaved normally until we were about halfway down our driveway.  Just as I detected a funny scent, all four dogs went on full alert and started straining at the leash, trying to pull me down the hill (and damned near succeeding!).  They had spotted a skunk, smack in the middle of our driveway, about 20 feet away.  The skunk looked mildly perturbed, held his ground for a minute, then slowly ambled down the hill toward our gate.  As soon as he left our yard, the dogs all acted like someone had flipped a switch – they went straight back to their normal behavior, as though the skunk had never existed.  Dogs surely do live in the moment...

This Friday Debbie and I leave on a vacation to the San Juan Mountains in southwestern Colorado.  We're just about fully prepared; all we have to do is pack and take off.  We have broadband Internet access at all the places we're staying, so with any luck at all I'll be able to post daily, including photographs...

Father's Day Quote...

When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.

Mark Twain

Wonder how much he's learned in the next 38 years? Happy Father's Day, dad...

Awesome...

Yes!

The New Moonbeam...

Our very own Governor Moonbeam (Jerry Brown) vetoed the wacky (but typical, unfortunately) state budget his Democratic compadres passed. I have to give him credit for honoring his pledge to veto any budget that included accounting “tricks” and more debt. The budget sent to him contained plenty of both, and he vetoed it. Kudos!

Now let's see if the Democrats and Republicans can get together on a budget that includes some serious spending cuts. So far we have an impasse: the Democrats are refusing to substantially cut spending, and the Republicans are refusing to increase taxes...

Another Ticket...

Via reader Dave H.:

Another Presidential Ticket

Rumor has it that Anthony Weiner is going to run for president.
He has chosen attorney general Eric Holder as his running mate.
Get your Weiner-Holder bumper stickers early, before they are all gone.

The Platform...

I miss Reagan's style and humor...

A Simple Plan...

From my mom:

Brilliant in its simplicity...

A. Back off and let those men who want to marry men, marry men.
B. Allow those women who want to marry women, marry women.
C. Allow those folks who want to abort their babies, abort their babies.
D. In three generations, there will be no Democrats.

Damn - I love it when a plan comes together.

Is a New Ice Age on the Way?

Short answer: nobody really knows.

The news of some scientists predicting the possibility of a new “little Ice Age” broke a few days ago.  I didn't post anything right away, as I wanted to read up on both the original story and reactions to it.  Here's my summary, after reading a lot of articles:

• All the report really says is that what's being observed today looks an awful lot like what little we know about the beginning of the Maunder Minimum.
  
  
• The authors of the report then speculate about the possibility that this indicates we're about to enter such a period.
  
  
• It would take several years of consistently low sunspot counts before we could really say with any certainty that this was happening.
  
  
• The pro-AGW crowd is quite predictably reacting negatively to this potential destruction of their world view.  I'd expect nothing else.  But just because they're predictable doesn't mean they're wrong.

Debbie and I own property in Southern California and in Northern Idaho.  If we really did enter a new little Ice Age, I wonder what that would do to property values?  Idaho surely would become less attractive.  Southern California I'm not so sure about – it probably depends to a large extent about what reduced temperatures would do to rainfall...

Life Expectancy in the U.S...

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) has a fascinating interactive map that shows the changes in life expectancy over time.  At right I took a screenshot of the most recent data (green is good, red is bad).  I'm fascinated by how much regional difference there is even in a country as homogenous as the U.S.

If you visit their map page, play with the sliders at the bottom to select the period of time you're interested in...

Mercury, via MESSENGER...

MESSENGER has now spent more than one Mercury year (88 Earth days) in orbit, doing solid science.  Recently it made an adjustment to its orbit, bringing its closest approach to just 200 km high.  Some recent imagery is at right (click to enlarge), in false color, via APOD.  By all reports, MESSENGER is doing exactly what its science team had hoped it would do, and all of its systems are (in NASA-speak) “nominal”.

Long-time readers would be disappointed if I didn't include here my usual rant about the effectiveness (and glory!) of unmanned space exploration, as compared to the utter waste and uselessness of the current and proposed manned space program...

Libyan Rebels and Their Weapons...

The Libyan rebels aren't (at least to my knowledge) being supplied by anyone with a regular supply of weaponry and ammunition.  They're up against a relatively well-equipped regular Libyan Army and Air Force.  What do you do in such a situation?  You improvise, and improvise they have – like the homemade armored car at right...

Moon's Motion...

A very nice time-lapse video showing (in particular) how much the moon “wobbles” due to our changing perspective of it:

ORM: the Anti-Pattern?

Interesting post about the pros and cons of ORM (Object-Relational Mapping).  I have lots of experience using both ORM frameworks and roll-your-own flavor, and just one experience using a key-value store.  I've never tried a hybrid approach, but my one experience with a key-value store got me thinking that way...

Introversion...

One of the best collections of facts about introverts I've seen, all in clear layman's terms.  This resonates very strongly with me, each and every point...

Playing With the New Camera...

The photo below is of the entrance to the building where I work.  The subject matter isn't particularly interesting, but the context is: I took this photo at about 4:30 am, long before sunrise, with no flash.  There was no moon.  The only lighting is the landscape lighting.  This is possible because the camera's sensitivity can be set as high as ISO 6400 (this photo was taken at ISO 5000, lens wide open, shutter speed 1/60th). 

Awesome.

Force-Feed State Machines...

Generally my peers think I'm pretty weird (and that's an objective of mine!).  There are a few things about my development likes and dislikes that stand out to them, and are a frequent source of odd looks and sadly shaking heads as my peers ponder my deteriorating mental condition.  One of these is my attraction to regular expressions.  Another is my fondness for finite state machines.

Here's someone who shares my appreciation of the latter, so much that he recommends forcing developers to use them!

Myself, I wouldn't go that far.  For me, a developer's understanding of, and use of, state machines is more an interesting metric of their ability to make software that works reliably in the real world, as that's one of the things that state machines are very good at...

Cool Couette...

Awesome demonstration of laminar flow.  Unless you already know about Couette cells, you probably won't know why this is cool until the very end of the video...

I Take Some Comfort In This...

Older developers are better, at least by some measures...

Oh, How I Want to Build One of These...

...only much bigger, of course.  Perhaps with 16 bit registers and 32 bit accumulators!





How can you not love a place called “Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories”?

Hard Disk Cost...

To myself and a few of my friends, the chart at right brings back a lot of memories.  We used to work for Stac (where the Stacker disk compression utility was developed).  In the early '90s, we noted the steep decline in the cost per megabyte of disk storage, and wondered what that meant to the future of disk compression.  We concluded that disk cost was trending toward free (quite rapidly!), and that when disks were free, the value of disk compression would approach zero.  Then we thought about the implications of “free” disk space, and what sort of software might leverage it.  We came up with the notion of backing up to disk (instead of the then-pervasive tape backup), and the idea of compressing the data from many computers through what is today called “de-duplication”.   Unfortunately for us, and for many reasons, we never figured out how to turn that idea into a lucrative business.

Here's something that looks very much like an updated version of the chart we created back in the early '90s:

Matt Komorowski is the fellow who put this data together.  He also calculated the regression equation (at right).  He pointed me to another trove of data on historical disk storage costs. 

Reading through all this stuff was a real trip down memory lane for me...

Cassini Mission...

A nice video summary of one of my favorite robotic space explorers:

CASSINI MISSION from Chris Abbas on Vimeo.

Fire in Lawson Valley...

...and way too close to home!  But there were several pieces of good news in this experience...

Our neighbors Jim and Michelle B. called me around 3:15 pm with the news that there was a fire directly across the valley from us.  At right (click to enlarge) you can see the scene from our front yard.  The mountain in the distance is Viejas Mountain; the fire is almost due north of us.  The wind was blowing toward the northeast, away from us and up onto a small peak that's in Cleveland National Forest.  The reddish color is from the retardant dropped just before I snapped this photo, by the tanker plan exiting stage left.

Forty-five minutes later, the fire appeared to be out, with just smoldering embers remaining.  As I write this, the command plane is still circling but there's no other aerial activity.  At the peak of the battle, there were at least two helicopters and two tanker planes fighting the fire, a ground crew on the scene, and a command plane circling overhead.  It was a very impressive demonstration of our firefighting capability, and a far cry from what we saw four years ago.  As you might imagine, we find this quite comforting.  Loveland Reservoir has more water in it than it has had for years, and it's right over that ridge that sits in front of Viejas Mountain.  The helicopters and planes were cycling back and forth between the reservoir and the fire quite quickly.  Another comforting factor!

The black bordered area on the map below shows my best estimate of where the fire was located.

Palo Verde Tree...

... in our front yard.