Wordless Wednesday: a rainy sunset

An elevated discussion

In my departure post before our trip to Colorado, I mentioned that San Antonio's elevation above sea level was 300 feet. I could have sworn I'd heard that somewhere. However, Henry, attending to his husbandly duty of correcting my mistakes whenever possible, said he thought it was 700 or 800 feet instead.

This got me thinking about who was right. And, being a government information librarian by trade, I knew where to go for the answer: Elevations and Distances in the U.S., a good example of your tax dollars at work. One of the website's sections gives the elevations of the "50 largest cities," of which San Antonio is definitely one. And the elevation answer? I was wrong, astonishingly, and he was more-or-less correct: our elevation varies from 500-1000 feet above sea level. Still practically awash in oxygen compared to our Colorado destinations, but higher than I thought.

Fooling around with the elevation information, though, led me to remember other elevation-related arguments discussions we have had. The first major one concerned the concept of timberline. Just looking at these two pictures, which peaks would you say are at the highest elevation?

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The first picture was taken in Glacier National Park when I was a little girl and I remember very vividly the incredibly rugged peaks there. [You can see more of this '50's-era scenery in my collection of old photos.] So I argued for Montana's mountains having higher elevations than the gentler-looking summits we'd become familiar with in Colorado (the second picture).

Bzzzttxxx! I was wrong again. Colorado's mountains are LOTS higher than the highest peaks in Glacier. I don't have a positive ID on the mountain in my picture above, but the highest it could have been (going by my perusal of our Glacier topo map) is Going-to-the-Sun Mountain at just over 9600'. The highest peak in the park, according to the park website, is Mt. Cleveland at 10,466'. [And, referring again to the Elevations document linked above, I learned that Montana has a grand total of zero 14er's. Not that its scenery is in the least diminished by this lack.] A bit shorter than Mt. Shavano in the Colorado picture above, which weighs in at 14,229'. [And as readers of this blog might remember, Chaffee County, home of Shavano, has more 14-er's than any other Colorado county. So it's not a fluke.]

What threw me off is the treeline. More exposed rock makes a mountain look higher, but the peaks in Glacier have their latitude to thank for this, not their altitude. A friend later gave me a formula that I've since forgotten and can't find on the internet (!) that gives the relationship between latitude and treeline, but I did find [curiously, in several sources like answers.com, this precise example—I wonder where they all got it?]:

"timberline is at about 2,500 ft (750 m) on Mt. McKinley, Alaska; 6,500 ft (1,950 m) on Mt. Shasta, Calif.; and 11,500 ft (3,450 m) in the San Francisco Mts., Ariz."

Anyone who wants to figure out my missing formula from these figures is welcome to do so.

Of course, the vantage-point elevation of the viewer can also impact how high a mountain looks. Which leads to another elevation-related discussion we had once, about the mountains in Hawaii, long before we actually made it there for a visit. Given how small the islands are, how could they possibly have mountains almost as high as the ones we visit in Colorado? That would mean an elevation gain from 0 to almost 14,000' over a very short distance. Well, a quick check in our atlas confirmed that this amazing fact is true. Mauna Kea, on the Big Island, Hawaii's highest peak, according to the USGS, has an elevation of 13,796' ! [California, however, has even this elevation gain beat: its low point is Death Valley, which is below sea level and its highest is Mt. Whitney at 14,494'. However, it covers a lot more real estate than Hawaii.]

Here is a picture we took of the White Mountain in the distance during one of our Hawaii hikes (the white dots on top are the telescopes). Remember how far south it is, which accounts for the high treeline. Otherwise, it looks pretty tall:


One more fun elevation fact. Everyone knows that Denver is the Mile-High-City, right? When they built Coors Field, home field for the Rockies, my second-favorite baseball team [the one that's actually had a good year] they came up with a clever way to highlight this. "While most of the seats in Coors Field are dark green, the seats in the 20th row of the upper deck are purple. This marks the city's one mile elevation point." [from Wikipedia's Coors Field article] Clever decorating, eh?

GO ROX! Hang on to that Wild Card* lead!

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*Although I object in principle to the baseball playoff system. But that's a discussion topic for a future post.

Wordless Wednesday: a gift of flowers

Long, pretty paddle

This must be a blogging first for me—I'm writing this while my shoulders are still sore from the paddling I'm going to report on.

And they're plenty sore. We made a longer-than-usual (for me, anyway) run on the Guadalupe River Saturday, with a flow level lower than we'd hoped for. Which results in more work! Even though I didn't have to paddle constantly because we chose a canoe over kayaks.

But, fortunately, the scenery was still lovely, and the weather was most cooperative—warm enough to encourage stopping for a swim now and then, but not oppressively hot. This picture was taken just after we put in, and is looking back upstream at the bridge and our remaining fellow-paddlers.

On a historical note, Henry, who remembers these details, pointed out that this was the bridge we came out to see during the flood of 1978. Look at the height of the roadbed above the river. And try to imagine the water just about to slop over the asphalt. Doesn't look possible, does it? [We did take some pictures, forever positively dated by the presence of our nephew James as a baby—he who is now a dad himself. But they are buried deep in our slide collection and digitizing those slides will probably end up being a retirement project for me. Maybe someday I can come back and add a vintage picture to this post.]

I did find some statistics that were pretty mind-blowing in a book called Flash Floods in Texas by Jonathan Burnett (yay! Google Books!). The rains that caused this flooding were from remnants of tropical storm Amelia and the river flow gauge at Comfort (a ways upstream from here) went from 50 cfs to over 180,000 cfs in just a couple of days in August. Surf's up, indeed.

But back to our placid paddle. With a few fun, but not dangerous, rapids to get through, and plenty of slow stretches in between, we had ample time to observe wildlife like the vultures above on the left. And also time to enjoy the amazing cypress trees all along the banks. A sample of one of the biggest is above on the right.

And did we ever work up an appetite! As regular readers of the blog know, after-paddling-dining is one of the highlights of these excursions. This time we patronized an old favorite, the Texas 46 Bar & Grill, named for the state highway where it resides. Nothing like a cheeseburger, fries and a cold one to start the recovery process after all that work!

Paddlin' swimmin' & eatin'

I had to work last weekend, but the weekend before that [which was before our big rains] we went paddling on the San Marcos. Being spring-fed, it was the only river with enough water in it prior to the recent rain.

It was a very nice paddle, mostly uneventful except for several sightings of lovely water hyacinths such as this sample on the right posing attractively by a handy log.

There were a lot of logs and other residue of past floods in the water. When a tree still has lots of branches and hangs over the stream we call it a "strainer" since that's what it can do to you if you get caught in it.

Fortunately someone had previously been along and neatly cut up this tree trunk, making a nice gateway to pass through. Note more hyacinths on the left.

The excursion wasn't as completely placid as these photos make it seem, though, since I was tumped twice and got to experience the refreshing water up close and personal. Neither dumping put me in any danger, other than some frantic moments wondering if my drybag containing phone and camera had sunk [both times it stayed quite obediently right at home under the boat—and the drybag stayed dry]. My lovely little sit-on-top kayak [unlike the sit-inside I overturned in Colorado, that promptly filled up with very heavy water] was a breeze to turn back right-side up, and I was on my way. Sorry I don't have pictures of any of this excitement, but I was otherwise occupied.

As were we all after the paddle. Our group's quest to sample each of the eateries that make Lockhart the BBQ Capital of the state [which is really saying something] continued. This week it was the Chisholm Trail's turn and we enjoyed it a lot. Amazing how hungry sliding downstream (and occasionally wrassling with boats) can make you!

According to today's paper, we are no longer in an "exceptional drought," just an "extreme drought." So I'm looking forward to paddling on the Guadalupe tomorrow, for the first time in months. Stay tuned.

Wordless Wednesday: looks like somebody got some rain...

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Heading home

Like all good things, our Colorado sojourn had to come to an end.

Fortunately, we were treated to some great new scenery during our first day driving home, since we chose a different southeasterly route than usual. Here's some beautiful mountains and neat storm clouds, snapped from the car window as we tooled along state highway 69:

We had cool cloudy weather with frequent rain all of our first day, which ended up in back in Texas. Specifically, in Dumas [home of the Ding-Dong-Daddies—not a made up nickname].

Back in Texas! Home of such delightful establishments as....

[Now, to be fair and to fend off criticisms of Texas-bashing, Colorado has its share of amusing signs. Like this one, painted on the tow truck that lives up the hill from our place. I like the slogan....]



We had no scenery for our second day of homeward driving, not even the bleakly beautiful emptiness of southeastern New Mexico that we enjoy when taking our usual route US 285. No, this is the Texas Panhandle and points south, and except for the canyons south of Amarillo [Palo Duro and Caprock] which you can't see much of from the highway anyway, there is nothing in the way of scenery.

In the traditional sense, at least. But if you saw my last Wordless Wednesday post, you might have an idea of where this is heading.

We drove through a virtual forest of wind turbines north and south of Sweetwater (on US 84 north of town, and an assortment of little state roads south of it). We thought we'd seen a lot of the structures in far west Texas alongside IH 10 before, but nothing like this. It's not so hard to believe Texas leads the nation in megawatts produced by wind when you take a look at this scenery:


Not a bad photo for one taken through the windshield of a moving car, but it doesn't really convey the otherworldly quality of this landscape. Sort of spooky, sort of beautiful, perhaps the look of things to come????

Wordless Wednesday: old & new energy in west Texas

Last few days in the mountains...for now

Our last week in Colorado, after our paddling on Sunday, was pretty uneventful. At least as far as blog-worthy activities were concerned. We did spend a lot of time visiting with the friends who joined us. Here's the dinner when we had the most company. It was so good to see all of y'all, however briefly!

The rest of the time was spent doing little maintenance chores around the place(s) and arranging for more major work to get done after we'd left.

In addition to minor electrical and plumbing repairs—some of which were combined with friend-visiting, as guests pitched in to help!—we did have a little excitement. We had to battle some upset bees to put in a new outdoor light fixture, and we experienced a first for both of us—a trip to the Chaffee County landfill to dispose of an old mattress.

We took a break one day and drove up the road across US 50 from our place for a quick picnic. This was the road that led to the big pile of crushed marble that I featured in last Wednesday's Wordless post. I pulled back to take the picture below that shows all three of the piles...

...and here's some of the bigger brothers of the little pieces in the piles:

You can see on the cliff face in the background some more waiting to be mined. I wonder if the whole mountain is marble on the inside? If so, I hope they don't eventually cart it all away.

On the way up to the marble mine, the road passes this older operation, long since abandoned. They probably didn't mine marble here, more likely silver. There's a lot of history, as well as scenery, all around us up here.

We were treated to some wonderful sunsets (which sort of made up for the lack of cloudless nights for star-gazing) during our last few days. Here's the best picture I got of one, looking down the valley towards Salida:


A fitting close for my last post from the high mountains for a while. We did see some interesting things on our way home, though, and I'll show some of them to you next time.

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Henry has more pictures and stories about some of these activities here.

Wordless Wednesday: Marble in the sky

Texas paddlers in Colorado, part 2

Encouraged by our fun outing in Buena Vista [and by the fact that the lost paddle was eventually found—a good omen?] Henry picked out an easy little section of the river for us to paddle on Sunday, downstream from BV. And also well downstream from Browns Canyon, a wild section of class III rapids that we've rafted (but will not ever be running on our own). We also took advantage of helpful friends willing to take our car to the takeout point, right in beautiful downtown Salida.

Here's a sample of the scenery we were treated to while paddling from Big Bend (not the Texas national park) to Salida—about 6 miles. The water level was low enough to cause some preliminary concern, but after a little shallow area at the beginning, it proved to be just about perfect, water-wise. We were also a little concerned about the weather, but in spite of the photogenic gray clouds you can see here, that kept the temperature down a bit, we didn't get too cold, and were only rained on for a few minutes. [and even that wasn't bad at all, since it happened near a bridge where we were able to shelter]

The water was crystal-clear, as you can see on the right here, and cold but not dangerously so. The splashes we got in our boats were just refreshing, not bone-chilling. One of us did manage to get more than just a few splashes, though, as you can see from this shot of Henry pumping out his boat. He claimed it was because the playboat's stubby design didn't cut through the small standing waves as smoothly as my boat did. But perhaps I just knew how to meet them? Probably not, but I can get a little mileage out of photos like this.

The only really hazardous feature on this stretch of the river is a dam at about the halfway point. Apparently in the past there have been some tragic outcomes when paddlers tried to go over this dam, and a chute has been constructed to allow safe, but rather exciting, passage for kayaking tourists.

You can see the dam, glistening in a rare moment of sunshine, above on the left. And on the right is Henry after negotiating the chute. He walked down to it first to scout it out for me, then I set up with the camera at the end to catch him coming through.

Here is my best shot of him coming through the chute. It has three little bumps, and he's at the last one here.

And here he is again, in a typical pose, taking a picture (with some more of that great scenery in the background). When he finally gets his photos cropped and adjusted to his satisfaction, you'll be able to see lots more paddling and other Colorado photos on his blog. [He's got them up, including some rather embarrassing photos of me going through the chute, in this post.]

Here's a final shot of river and mountains. We wish we'd had time to go paddling again this time, but definitely want to hit the Arkansas again on a future Colorado trip. We've got extra boats—anyone want to sign up?