Atherton Family Notes

Cece’s post on her adventure with Flat Stanley kind of stole the thunder from this post, but our drive to Cañon City was so interesting I’m going to write about it anyway.

Before we left Colorado Springs, Sandi picked up a tourist guide about Cañon City from the lobby of our hotel. As I looked through it, I noticed the guide had three suggestions for scenic drives. I also noticed that all three of the routes terminated in Florissant, which I knew from the map was not too far around Pikes Peak from Colorado Springs. So I looked through the list of interesting sites along the route and picked the middle route as the way would would take to Cañon City that afternoon without much more thought about it than that.

After we finished up at Pikes Peak, Old Colorado City and Manitou Springs, we headed out for Florissant. The drive into Florissant was beautiful; The road follows the valley visible in the panorama from the top of Pikes Peak that I posted earlier.

Once we arrived in Florissant, we turned south towards the fossil beds. While it was unfortunate that we didn’t get to see the national monument due to our late arrival, the drive through the area was still gorgeous. At one point, we noticed that from one spot, we could see three distinct types of terrain divided up into neat thirds in our view: grasslands at the bottom, a forest in the middle and Pikes Peak in the distance against a clear blue sky.

We missed the turn onto the scenic route out of the town of Cripple Creek, but we didn’t realize it at the time, so we ended up driving out of town up towards an old gold mine. At the top of the hill, we realized our mistake, but stopped for a few minutes anyway to get some pictures of the area.

By the time we got back down into Cripple Creek, we were starting to understand why we had missed the turn. Sandi had gotten the GPS out by then and punched in a route for Cañon CIty. The GPS asked her if it was OK to route us on unpaved roads. We cautiously said yes, then began following the road out of town towards a mining area. We briefly entered an unpaved road as we got onto the main route, and thought maybe that was it — until the GPS told us to take a turn off that road onto another dirt road that quickly descended into the valley.

The route we had chosen is called Teller County Road 88, or Shelf Road. It gets this name because a fair amount of the road hangs on a narrow shelf on the side of a steep hill with a valley that varies from a few feet below to a few hundred feet below.

As we turned onto the road, Sandi noticed a sign that said “4 Wheel Drive or High Clearance Vehicle Recommended” and she pointed out that the map I had glossed over that morning said much the same thing. Since I am always up for an adventure, though, and because I was driving, I stepped on the gas and we were off on our trip down Shelf Road in our, umm… rental Toyota Camry…

Shelf Road apparently began life as a stage coach route, and therefore has some historical significance. Today people drive to see its natural beauty or to reach one of several impressive rock faces for climbing.

At first the drive wasn’t that bad. We were down in the bottom of the valley, following along Cripple Creek and the road was fairly wide. After a while we began noticing that the valley floor was further and further below us. At one point, we came around a corner to find deer grazing on an outcropping.

Shortly afterwards, we were back at the bottom of the valley again. Not so bad, but Sandi and the girls were on high alert by then. Carissa kept alternating between carefully watching everything that was going on and burying her head in a book so that she didn’t have to watch anything going on.

We crossed over the creek bed on something that was almost a bridge. About this time Sandi noticed an even narrower, less stable road that split off from the main road and shot up a nearby hill. At the top of the hill was a house under construction, miles from anywhere. Sandi was quite impressed by the idea that people would live in this area deliberately.

Then we passed by Window Rock and suddenly we were out in the open in a field.

And that’s when things started to get interesting. The road that ran through the field, our GPS decided, was not actually a road. The road we should have been on was about 300 feet east and about 50 feet up.

It’s true that there did seem to be a road there, but it was on gated private property marked as a mining zone. So we pushed ahead and came to this:

There is at least one too many warning signs here for comfort (especially the small white one). Fortunately, it turns out that the primary concern was that the creek could have flooded out the bridge, and there was no sign of that. At the time, though, it had been more than 30 minutes since we had seen anyone else on the road and we were really beginning to feel like we were lost in the wilderness. As best we could tell, we were about halfway through the route, so turning back would be as painful as moving on.

So we decided to press onward. We started a steep ascent up the side of the valley wall on a tiny sliver of a road that seemed to get narrower and more precarious in proportion to its height above the floor. We were clearly on a one-lane road now, and often that description seemed generous. At some points, the road seemed more like three-quarters or even five-eighths of a lane. This was especially disconcerting to Carissa and I, who were on the driver’s side of the car hanging off the edge over Oblivion (which I think is the name of the cattle ranch for sale that we could see at the bottom).

As we came up the side though, the view improved, and we could look out into the distance to check to see if anyone was coming the other way on the road, which made us feel at least a little better because we could plan ahead. At one point, we saw a truck coming our way and stopped at one of the few wide spots in the road to allow it to pass.

While waiting, I took this picture:

This is why it was worth the trip.

Then, one or two turns through the canyon later, we were suddenly back on a paved road, on flat land, driving in a straight line. Despite the white knuckles, the nail-biting and the worried squeaks from the back seat, we’d made it through and were on our way to the hotel for the night.

It had been a long two hours.

The next day, I tried to talk Sandi into taking a scenic tour out of the Royal Gorge area that would have taken us up to I-70 through Leadville (early home of Molly Brown), but she summarily vetoed even the thought… I think I had used up all of my adventuring good will for this trip.

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I have a strange habit and I don’t know where it came from. Whenever I’m going somewhere, if there is a song associated with that place, I will probably have that song stuck in my head during the entire visit.

This habit probably is related to the fact that I know lots of songs, and those songs are constantly rattling around in my head. The habit is worse now than it was when I was living in Europe, but that’s probably because there are fewer English language songs that mention European places. On the other hand, I must have hummed “Christmas in Killarney”, “It’s a long way to Tipperary”, and “My Ding-A-Ling” (due to the sound similarity with the Dingle peninsula and also because I am an idiot) at least 5000 times each while we were in Ireland. This was in addition to the 50 or so various other Irish tunes that I sang repeatedly enough to make St. Patrick barf.

I remember a similar affliction in parts of England, and I must have sung “Angel of Berlin” so much while in Germany’s capital that the lyrics have lost all meaning. OK, maybe that was true before I started singing the song.

So our trip to Colorado bought this habit back in full force. Here are some examples of the songs I found myself singing on our trip:

St. Louis: “East St. Louis Toodle-oo”, “Meet Me in St. Louis”
Kansas City: “Everything’s Up to Date in Kansas City”, “Going to Kansas City”
Rocky Mountains: “Rocky Mountain High”
Cripple Creek: “Up on Cripple Creek” (Yes, I know that the Cripple Creek in the song is in Louisiana, but that doesn’t matter.)

I’ll skip telling you about the number of times I sang the not-real-song “Colorado, Here I Come”.

This habit can be pretty annoying to me and anyone caught in earshot during those moments I start singing out loud. And if I’ve done my job right, now you are singing at least one of these songs to yourself right now.

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I’ve posted before about the interesting things I’ve learned about this blog by using Google. I’m fascinated by how Google creates a set of rules, scours through the web and puts together a database that you can query and almost always find what you are looking for. Even better, Google has a free set of tools that anyone running a website can use to see how Google views their website — and how people access it.

I logged into Google’s webmaster tools yesterday to see what search terms people have been using recently to reach our blog. For the most part, the results were what I expected. The 3d Kirigami Snowflake is still by far our most popular page, and I see that the majority of the search terms are related to this. The snowflake pattern literally attracts a 25 to 1 ratio of hits compared to the next most popular page. There are several other new search terms around the panoramas I have recently started posting, especially the Eiffel Tower one (which is the second most popular page), although good ol’ Salem Sue is holding her own.

But there is one term that people were using in Google images that completely caught me off guard: “nfl cheerleaders.”

At first I was flabbergasted… What kind of blog do people think this is? Then I was confused, because a quick search of my own using this search term yielded lots of cheerleaders, but no obvious references to this site. So I tried a new search that was specific to this site. These were the results.

Hmm. “The world’s ugliest cheerleaders. No wonder the NFL has never caught on in France.”

This is a great example showing the limits of Google’s context-aware indexing. A human reading that text knows instantly that the post isn’t really about NFL cheerleaders, but the GoogleBot doesn’t.

It also appears that the reason I couldn’t find our blog by searching for “nfl cheerleaders” is that Google only reports what it considers to be the key search term. It seems much more likely that someone found our blog using this search.

Even better, look at this search. We’re #1! We’re #1! We’re #1!

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I am a fan of advertising paraphrenalia, especially when the items in question border on the antique. One reason for this is as I look back at old advertising, they feel like more of a true sales effort because when new products come on the market, the advertiser often has to actually explain the purpose or advantage of his product. As the product reaches maturity in its life cycle, less needs to be said outright about the product, and the game becomes more about reminding the customer of the brand’s existence.

The Sinclair Dinosaur is a great example of this lifecycle. Sinclair Oil dreamed up the dinosaur as a way to convey that it products were the “oldest” which presumably translated into the best. A lot of early Sinclar advertising goes to great lengths to make the connection between the dinosaur and their products, and it seems the company was largely successful. After a while the dinosaur became closely associated with the company in such a way that the advertising copy was no longer strictly necessary.

Sometime after the assocation between the dino and Sinclair became commonplace, the company began installing fiberglass dinosaurs at its gas stations. Some of these are actually quite large and still in existence. From what I gather, the bulk of the extant ones are located in Colorado, and certainly we saw several of them, all of which were of the same basic mold.

Sinclair Dinosaur Stereogram

We met this fellow at a gas station just a few miles into Colorado. While Sandi and the kids were in the restroom, I snapped a couple of quick pictures to put together as a stereogram. FYI, the background will appear a little weird because there is a car and a semi that moved in-between shots.

By the way, I think most people would recognize that the Sinclair dinosaur is a Brontosaurus, but the official company website says that it is actually an Apatosaurus.

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The primary reason we decided to go down to Cañon City was to visit Royal Gorge.  In a manner similar to Garden of the Gods, Royal Gorge is run by the city as a park.  Unlike Garden of the Gods, though, it is not free.  We did get in on the off-season price, though, so that helped some.

The main reason that people visit the gorge is because of the way you get to visit the gorge.  There is the world’s highest suspension bridge, the world’s steepest incline railroad, and a tram (which hangs on the world’s longest open span).  It’s almost as impressive as being a seven-time world champion.

When we arrived, it was a beautiful (although cool) day. We walked across the bridge, but when we turned around to look back the other way, we could see a storm rolling in — in a hurry. By the time we came out of the theater that shows a movie about the gorge, the storm was upon us. As we trekked up toward the way-station for the tram, the temperature dropped 20 degrees and it started snowing. By this time Sadie was crying, and we discovered that the tram station was closed. So we walked back down to the gift shopped to wait it out.

It didn’t take long for the storm to pass. The storm was being pushed by a fairly stiff wind, and we decided to head back to the other side of the gorge.

The trip back was much more exciting than the trip across… The stiff wind (about 50 mph) made the bridge crawl beneath our feet. It was not unlike walking on a boat, if that boat was suspended 1000 feet above the water.

Since the weather was beginning to clear up, we decided to brave the trip down to the bottom of the gorge on the incline railway. The railway is an interesting operation in that it is basically a set of cages on wheels. We had it all to ourselves though, and we were able to spread out comfortably. The bottom of the gorge is not much to look at, really. I guess the trip itself is the attraction.

Once Carissa and Sadie actually saw the tram in motion, they both quickly decided that there was no way they were getting on it. Our little daredevil Celia still wanted to go, though, so I volunteered to go with her. The trip across the gorge in the tram was actually much smoother than the walk across the bridge but felt more nerve-wracking to me since it seemed like there was less holding us up. It didn’t phase Cece at all… at least not until we bumped the guide rail when approaching the way station on the far side. The made her eyes get pretty big and she stood closer to me for the rest of the trip.

There were only three passengers on the tram, so we got a lot of time to talk to the tram operator, who regaled us with stories of all the times that he’s made trips across and bad things have happened. Like the time the electric motor got struck by lightning and everyone had to wait in the middle of the gorge while the maintenance team figured out how to hook up the old diesel motor, or the time a wind gust knocked a full load of people off their feet.

It was interesting to hear, but I did notice that Cece and I both spent most of our time standing in the middle of the tram.

Panorama of Royal Gorge

View from the incline railway.

Stereogram of the tram crossing Royal Gorge.  The 3D effect is a bit exaggerated since the tram moved between the first and second frame.

Stereogram of the Royal Gorge Suspension Bridge.

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Sadie, skating her way through the neighborhood.

After dinner last night, Sadie suggested that we go for a walk.  Almost before we had a chance to say yes, she had put on her skates and headed out the door.

Last night was one of the first few mights this spring that it’s been nice enough to walk outside in the evening, and she was ready to go.

I snapped this picture just a few seconds before she crashed into the ground once again in “one of the ten times I hurt myself tonight.”

But the weather was good and darned if she wasn’t going to skate.

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Over the last few weeks, I’ve posted several stereograms from our trip to Colorado.  When I was posting the Royal Gorge suspension bridge one, it occurred to me that this is exactly the kind of view that would have been captured as a stereocard, a fairly popular item in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

So far, I’ve been unable to to unearth such a picture on the internet.  Google keeps returning links to my picture of the bridge, and then random other unrelated stereograms.

However, during the search I did find a lot of stereocards posted on the net, and I thought I’d share some of the more interesting ones.

Stereocard of Abraham Lincoln, from a collection in the Library of Congress.

Like most stereocards (and all of the ones shown here in particular), this one must be viewed by staring into the distance, rather than eye-crossing.

Stereocard of the Giza Pyramids.  View original post here.

The Lotus of the Nile.  View original post here.

There are several other interesting collections of stereocards available on the internet. The University of Washington hosts one here, and the San Diego Historical Society hosts one here.

Finally, here is a site that isn’t about stereocards, but I found it during my search, and they do host some amazing stereograms.  In particular, look at the links Oakland International Stereo Exhibition pages. There is also a link to the 2003 exhibition.

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Way back when we were planning our trip to Colorado, we decided that we would spend the last day in Denver since that’s where we needed to be to catch our flight back home. We didn’t have a clear idae of what to do on that day, but we talked about going to tour the Denver Mint.

Just before we left on the trip, we discovered that if you didn’t make reservations weeks in advance that you probably wouldn’t get to go on the tour.  So we decided to hang loose and decide what to do after we got to Denver.

When I was in our hotel researching researching the possibilities for our day in Denver, I just happened to find a blurb about Dinosaur Ridge, a small natural history site near the Red Rock Amphitheater in Morrison.  As it turns out, Dinosaur Ridge is one of the sites where the dinosaur gold rush of the 19th century kicked off, and is where the first apatosaurus/brontosaurus skeletons were found as well as several other famous varieties.

Later, in 1937, when a road was built on the ridge, long after the initial discoveries had been picked clean, the road crew caused a series of small landslides uncovering more bones, and even more interestingly, a series of dinosaur tracks that have yielded new clues about the size and structure of dinosaurs like the Iguanodon — including the likelihood that the sharp bone originally misidentified as a horn was probably a claw on the animal’s front feet.  It had already been named after the iguana, though, so the name has stuck.

A view of the exposed dinosaur tracks at Dinosaur Ridge.  The tracks are primarily  made by Iguanadons.

The ridge is composed of several different rock strata that have been pushed upwards as the Rocky Mountains have emerged over the last hundred million years *or so*, as they say. Scientists believe that this area of Colorado was once underwater and there is some evidence of this in the upper layers of the ridge.

This is where the picture above is taken.  The east side of the ridge is the “young” side.  The upward pressure is coming from the west side, and on that side is where the various strata can be seen.

This downwardly-curved formation is known as a Brontosaurus bulge.  It is believed to be the underside view of a large footprint made long before the rock had hardened.  The animal making the track would have been enormous.  There are several other similar bulges spaced regularly nearby, which has allowed scientists to estimate the size of the creature, and since there have been Brontosaurus bones unearthed nearby, it seems likely to be a Brontosaurus track.

We were all pretty impressed by our visit to the ridge.  It’s one thing to see museum displays that talk about dinosaurs — it’s quite another to go where they have been!

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Our last big stop in Colorado was Hammond’s Candy Factory. Hammond’s is famous as a factory that makes old fashioned hard candies, such as the ribbon candies many of of associate with our grandparents.

Or if you are Carissa, it is the candy served to Coraline in the movie of the same name by these lovely ladies:

Hammond’s is also famous for the candy canes that it makes in all sorts of flavors.  We saw a show on the Food Network about how they make the candy canes a few years ago and decided to put the factory on our list of places to visit if we ever made it to Denver.  It’s a labor intensive process aided by heavy machinery, not too much different from the way they’ve made candy for almost 90 years.  We went on  a short factory tour to see it for ourselves.

After the ingredients are combined and cooked, much of the candy ends up here.  The pulling motion aerates and lightens the color of the candy.

Next the candy is combined with other pieces that have had coloring and flavoring added.  These added pieces create the colorful stripes in the candy when it is pulled.

The candy is pulled into a long rope.  Depending on the type of candy they are making, the rope may then be cut and shaped into candy canes, twisted into ribbons or made into one of several other shapes.

After the tour, we bought big lollipops for the kids, a burgundy-flavored candy cane (yes, like the wine), and a bag of broken pieces containing many different flavors (and as everyone knows, with all the calories having leaked out of the cracks…)

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A couple of years ago, Wal-mart made a decision to start evaluating sustainable technologies through two experimental stores.  The goal is to look at lots of different technologies, find what works, and then roll those technologies out either in new stores or in retrofitted existing stores.

It just so happens that one of those two stores is located in Aurora, Colorado, not too far away from the hotel we stayed at our last night Colorado.  And as we are wont to do, we stopped by to buy food for dinner.

The store is quite striking and very different from most Wal-marts that I’ve been into, although it’s clear that some of the innovations used in this store have already been rolled out to some other stores already.

Many of the changes are visible as soon as you enter the parking lot.  Many of the signs and lights have their own solar panels, there is a wind powered generator out back, and the parking lot itself has an interesting drainage system designed to minimize runoff.

Inside the store, there are obvious changes.  The store has far fewer lights than most Wal-marts, and in the daytime, most of the light is provided by a large number of sky lights.  The ventilation system is impressive too.  Most of the conduits are made of fabric, and instead of standard vents, there are tiny holes that distribute the air.

The refrigerator and freezer cases are lit with LEDs that turn off when no one is standing nearby.  This innovation has made it to other stores as well, and give me an odd sense of importance when I’ve walked by them in the early mornings on occasion.  It feels like the store springs to life as I walk by and then goes back to sleep after I’m gone.

I also noticed that the bathrooms are equiped with waterless urinals and use the infrared operated sinks that have started to pop up in other Wal-marts.

Obviously, Wal-mart is using this store as a major boost to their public relations.  They have a fair amount of information available on their website about the store.  The press kit is especially impressive. Much of what they’ve learned about sustainable technologies is also available on-line. I also found an interesting article about the store here. If you are interested in what sustainability might look like in the future, take a look at these sites. It’s really fascinating stuff.

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