Category Archives: Travel

Including places I never expected to see.

Valley of Dreams, Part 1: Finding It

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The American Southwest is an amazing, mysterious, and visually stunning place. I’ve had a fascination with it my whole life, and make excursions whenever an opportunity arises.  A few years ago, Poldi and I discovered an area in New Mexico with remarkable geologic features:  badlands, hoodoos, and petrified wood!  It was the Bisti Wilderness Area, held apart from private and reservation land by the Bureau of Land Management for the benefit of the public.  It is only very lightly “managed” by the BLM.  There are no visitor centers, no picnic areas or campgrounds, and no trails.  There is a small parking area at the end of a difficult dirt road, marked by a signpost and featuring an outhouse.  

Despite the lack of trails, we were able to follow the breadcrumb descriptions posted online by a photographer who explores Bisti for its photogenic subjects.  We located and visited the Alien Egg hatchery, a 30-foot-long petrified log, and a hoodoo village.  In the years since, we have wanted to return and explore more of this fascinating area.

Poldi in the nest of alien eggs
Petrified log
Hoodoo village
Photos of Bisti Wilderness, November 2022. Click to expand, then scroll

We were able to do so this year.  The timing was right—late Spring, before the desert becomes intolerably hot.  We both researched and found several more sites with novel features bearing names like “King of Wings”, “Chocolate Penguin King”, and “Alien Throne”.  These are not roadside points of interest with explanatory markers; they are deep in wilderness area, accessible to intrepid hikers willing to explore the desert and locate them.  Those that are successful bring back stunning photographs.

Those photographs inspired us to consider visiting them.  A particularly novel feature, “The Alien Throne”, made me wonder if I could get a picture of it with a night sky backdrop.  I read the accounts of others who had made the trip.  Maybe it was possible!

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Bill Glass is Gone

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Bill Glass and I participate in a welcome ritual for tourist visitors to Kenya, 2013.

Hard to believe.  A man who was larger than life in our circle of friends and coworkers is gone.  He was regarded as a wizard in our particular cohort of engineers, enabling computers to perform powerful tasks beyond everyone’s expectations.  He was among the pioneers of computer graphics, a key contributor to a technology that garnered an Academy Award for motion picture special effects.  If, in our work, we encountered an insoluble problem, it was assigned to Bill.  Which he then solved.

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Open Pits and Bathtubs

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I had to agree that it was an unusual gas station. 

It looked like an airport control tower with a cantilevered roof that protected the customers at the gas pumps – protection from rain and sun that is common today but in 1978, and certainly 20 years earlier when built, it was novel.  The pumps were fueling the local cars:  a mix of old gas guzzlers and newer more fuel-efficient models that were a response to the oil embargos of the 70s.

We were on the way to our business destination—the US Steel mine near Mountain Iron Minnesota, a town slowly being eaten up by the open pit mine as it followed the deposits of diffuse iron known as taconite.

I was the passenger in Steve Haverberg’s VW microbus.  Steve was familiar with the area and knew I would enjoy seeing a gas station that had been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.  We needed gas anyway and it was a good time to stop and stretch. 

Another vehicle was also on its way to the mine, but had taken a more direct route.  It was equipped with a 4-foot long cylindrical probe, to be lowered by cable into a drill hole.  A custom-built instrument specialized for detecting iron ore was also in that truck.

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Eyewitness to Climate Change

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A hiking group finds its way across Grinnell Glacier in 1970.

Most people now acknowledge that the climate has changed, even if they don’t agree on the reasons for it.  Some of us are old enough to have seen the change firsthand.

As a teenager in 1970, I went on a hike with my family in Glacier National Park, a six-mile and 2000 foot climb to Grinnell Glacier.  It was a thrilling experience to be hiking in the mountains, and then to actually walk out onto a real glacier!  Both mountains and glaciers were things I had read about, but never personally experienced. 

It was a ranger-led hike, and I learned a lot from the ranger’s descriptions of the geology, the plant and animal life, and the nature of glaciers, for which this park was named.  I remember him telling us that the glaciers were shrinking.  Nobody knew why, but it was possible that in a century they would all be gone.  The park would still be called “Glacier”, but for the characteristic and beautiful glacier-cut valleys, not for the presence of glaciers themselves.

I have since had the opportunity to visit a few other glaciers including Sperry Glacier, also in Glacier Park, and the Athabasca Glacier, part of the Columbia Ice Fields of Banff National Park in Alberta Canada.  Of course, whenever I have made these excursions, I have taken pictures, which have remained sequestered away in old photo albums or shoeboxes.

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The Binning Mosaic Mural

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We discover the Binning mural in the upper floor of a drug store.

Poldi was not done with her “hidden treasures of Vancouver” list. The next one would take some sleuthing to locate. It was another architectural feature, this time a large mural crafted from Italian glass tiles that had been commissioned in the 1950s for the Imperial Bank of Canada to adorn the vast banking teller hall of their new building. The bank has long since moved out of the building and the magnificent space currently is being used by a drug store. Poldi knew the name of the drug store (“Shoppers Drug Mart”) but not its location, and this was a chain of stores that had many outlets.

Our inquiries at the hotel concierge desk were met with quizzical looks. No one seemed to know about the Binnings mosaic mural. B. C. Binning was a highly regarded artist in his day, but is not as well known now. But they could help locate the right store by making calls to each, and asking if their store had a mural in it. This didn’t really work. Everyone who answered seemed unaware of any mural.

So we decided to embark on our version of the traveling salesman problem. We would visit the nearby Shoppers Drug Mart stores (there were three or four within walking distance) and look for ourselves.

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The Vancouver Marine Building

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An art deco overhead lighting fixture featuring shipping and ocean themes.

I am not the only one who enjoys encountering unique examples of architecture. I was accompanied in my quest to find the Harvard Biology Building with its intriguing doors, sculpted façades, and anatomically exact statues of rhinoceroses, by my (newly married) wife Poldi. That was the culmination of a scavenger hunt to locate a novel architectural feature that had been captured in an old photograph my grandfather had taken, soon after the building had been inaugurated. We really enjoyed the experience.

Recently, Poldi, while planning a trip that would take us through Vancouver British Columbia, learned of another unique building, built at about the same time. Our destination was Banff, but we had a day before our train’s departure, to explore this famous port city of western Canada. She encountered references to the “Marine Building”, an art deco monument completed in 1930. At the time, it was the tallest building in the city (22 stories), and it was intended to be a grand statement of the value of Vancouver, especially its importance as a major seaport. They thought of it as their version of the mighty Chrysler building in New York City, completed earlier that same year.

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Eclipse Party 2024– cloud coverup

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Eclipse dress rehearsal in my back yard.

When I was first learning astrophotography, I had the bad luck of beginner’s luck. I got an early good result, a picture of the Andromeda Galaxy, and then spent years discovering all the things that can go wrong with this technical hobby.

The equipment has improved immensely since those days of making long duration, manually guided exposures onto film, but the opportunities for fatal mistakes has not seemed to diminish, and the challenges of solar imaging are no less demanding than those of deep sky imaging– just different.

So I knew that I needed to practice my plan to photograph the solar eclipse. There were too many things that all needed to go right, and too many opportunities to make a mistake.

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Eclipse Party 2024- eclipse day!

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Our group consumes coffee! Five French presses were hard pressed to keep up.

Eclipse Monday arrived and we proceeded as planned.  Delicious French-pressed coffee and cinnamon rolls greeted our eclipse party guests, but the sky was covered in intermittent clouds, a mix of high and low layers, only occasionally offering a clear sunny view.  

This did not seem to affect the group.  They proceeded to continue their exploration of the campground and vicinity, logging birdcalls and trekking new hiking trails.

By the time the eclipse started, a little past noon, we all convened at our observing site.  Cabin H, it turns out, is the only cabin at Zuber’s that had a full view of Old Baldy, and it provided us with a perfect open area in front to view the eclipsed sun!

I had completed the setup of my cameras (more on this later).  In principle, they were automated enough that I could relax and enjoy the show with my friends.  I looked around and saw that our full group of black t-shirted eclipse observers had positioned their camp chairs to claim their personal view of the sky, making guesses about the sun’s location as it occasionally peeked through the clouds.  Some had binoculars, properly filtered of course, and their punched name cards were near at hand.

Over on top of Old Baldy we could see the silhouettes of many people who had climbed it– to get a closer look, I guess.  When they started striking odd poses and making wild gestures, I realized this was the gathering spot for the Wiccans and Druids.  And sure enough, whenever the clouds presented an opening that showed a partially eclipsed sun, they could be heard whooping and hollering at it!

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Eclipse Party 2024- pre-eclipse

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At Zuber’s River Camp, with Old Baldy in the background.

The terms of the campground reservation required a three-day stay.  This was fine with us; it was a beautiful location, and we would be entirely avoiding the post-eclipse traffic jams.  So Saturday and Sunday and even Monday morning—eclipse day– were open to enjoy the scenery at our place in Texas Hill Country.

Our compound within the camp comprised “Cabin H” with power and plumbing, and three shelters (“7” “8”, and “9”), which were basically screened-in porches with an electrical outlet.  The shelters were surrounded by outdoor space to pitch a tent or park a camper.

Our fellow eclipse partiers gradually joined us on Saturday and Sunday.  They set up their camping arrangements (tents, campers, shelters, or cabin facilities) and then went exploring.

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Eclipse Party 2024- it begins

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Our plans came together well. We were worried about bringing all that we needed to host a group of 17 and worried it would all fit in our vehicle. But then, as it seemed we were ready to go a full day ahead of time, we worried that we must be forgetting something. I never have my stuff together by the scheduled departure! What was I missing? Well, we decided to leave as planned anyway– we’d figure it out later if we needed to. But isn’t that how all trips start? It was just the lack of rushed panic at the end of packing that was missing.

My friend Rich traveled to Texas as a passenger in a caravan that included more friends, John and Karen, and friends of friends Jennelle and Mike. John is a professor emeritus of environmental engineering, but I think if he wasn’t, he’d be a long-haul trucker. He insisted on driving the full distance, no sharing the wheel with other potential driving shifts. Stopping for gas was a necessary interruption, but stopping for a meal was lost time entirely– they could eat sandwiches on the road. They made the trip from Minneapolis to Zuber’s in two days. I’m glad to be in a different caravan.

Rich arrives at Zuber’s with his descriptively labeled beer, just for the occasion.
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