Friday photo

Devils Tower, Wyoming. December 2004.

I consider this the most perfect photo of Wyoming that I've ever taken. Geology and culture blended seamlessly. Perhaps it would be even more perfect if the grazing animal were a cow rather than a horse, but that's a pretty close call. After all, one could hardly have run cattle without horses. Either way, this is iconic Wyoming.

And Devil's Tower, that magnificent, 867' tall, exposed igneous intrusion. That is, it was a plume of magma that forced its way into the surrounding rock before cooling some 40,000,000 years ago. That seems ancient, but geologically I suppose that counts as recent history. The rock one finds on the surface today is 200,000,000 years old, five times older than the Tower itself. The ground used to be a lot higher than it is today, but that's all gone now, softer sandstone that's been eroded away over the ages, leaving the harder, granite-like plug standing in place, with nothing left to plug but the sky.

When I first visited Devils Tower, perhaps in 1978, Close Encounters of the Third Kind had recently made the site known to the rest of the world and the Visitor Center bookshop was selling Bob Balaban's diary of the filming of the movie (Balaban played François Truffaut's interpreter and had the honor of being the only actor in the movie to utter the phrase, "close encounter"). I no longer have the book, but I recall his account of being driven to the location. Like most of us at the time, Balaban had never heard of Devils Tower and had no idea what he was going to see, just that there was some sort of Point of Interest. His account of the drive went something like this:

Balaban: "Is that it?"

Driver. "You'll know it when you see it."

Balaban: "Is that it?"

Driver. "You'll know it when you see it."

Balaban: "Is that it?"

Driver. "You'll know it when you see it."

Finally they drove around a bend in the road ... and he knew it when he saw it.

Friday photo

Sequoia tree, Giant Forest. Sequoia National Park, June 2005.

Here's a curious arrangement of rock and tree. I can't say much about it, except that it's obvious the rock was there first. What's peculiar to me is that it looks like the tree has gone out of its way to incorporate the boulder. I suppose the circumference of the tree began to butt up against the stone several centuries ago, altering the pattern of growth. Now it just looks like it can't decide if it's a sequoia tree or a python.

Friday photo

Sand Dune. Stovepipe Wells, Death Valley National Park, April 2002.

I made my one and so-far-only trip to Death Valley at the end of a winter season in 2002. It was late March, shading into April, and I was still acclimated to winter in the Northern Rockies. Shouldn't be too bad, I thought, since the average high in DV this time of year is around the mid-80's. I can do that.

I probably could have, but that isn't what I got. It was already as warm as June when I got there, topping out a few degrees into triple digits. And it turns out there isn't much shade in Death Valley - who knew? I lasted about three days, then decided to spend the rest of my break in Bryce Canyon, at 8000', where the temperatures were a little closer to what I was used to.

I had seen Ansel Adams's photos of sand dunes in Death Valley and from them had ignorantly concluded that the entire park is full of dunes. That's not so, but there is an impressive sandbox-of-your-dreams at Stovepipe Wells. As the interpretive signs explain it, the configuration of the surrounding mountains is such that the normal wind tends to drop in speed, which means it can no longer carry its load of sand and dirt. Thus the dunes pile up in that particular location. I spent most of my time there, because it was the dunes I wanted to shoot.

If you try this, be aware that you want to get up early in the morning. First, you want to be active before the sun gets too high and you can benefit from the long shadows (as this photo does). You can get the shadows in the early evening, too, but that's point number two: it's a lot cooler in the morning. Finally, you're not the only one there and before too many hours have passed, the dunes are thoroughly marked up with footprints. The night breezes will erase the previous day's trampling, but you need to get up pretty early to catch them while they're still clean.

Friday photo

Inspiration Point, Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah. September 1993.

Okay, so everyplace has to have an "Inspiration Point," surely the least inspired place name in the English-speaking world next to "Main Street." It's still worth taking a look at Bryce Canyon. The Paiutes were purportedly inspired to imagine a bunch of people turned to stone; the Mormon settler Ebenezer Bryce was inspired to the hilariously prosaic, "It's a hell of a place to lose a cow."

Bryce Canyon isn't really a canyon -- it's the side of a cliff being eroded away. You might think - it being in the middle of a desert and all - that the hoodoos are created by wind erosion rather than water. This turns out to be wrong; it's all about water. Not a single stream, as canyons are generally carved, but innumerable rivulets formed from a bit of rain and melting snow, with the extra power of an almost year-round freezing and thawing.* On the top of each spire -- or hoodoo -- is a layer of relatively hard rock that doesn't erode away too easily. But once the water works its way through some cracks and reaches the softer rock underneath, it begins to carry away the soft stuff while leaving the hard rock behind. Since the wind isn't doing much of the work at Bryce, all the erosive action is at ground level -- which is why the upper parts of the hoodoos stay put, while the spaces between them just get deeper and deeper.

Utah is full of weird scenery, so weird that it inspired the alien scenery of Calvin & Hobbes. Here's how Bill Watterson described his Spaceman Spiff stories:

The Spiff strips are limited in narrative potential, but I keep doing them because they're so much fun to draw. The planets and monsters offer great visual possibilities, especially in the Sunday strips. Most of the alien landscapes come from the canyons and deserts of southern Utah, a place more weird and spectacular than anything I'd previously been able to make up. The landscapes have become a significant part of the Spaceman Spiff sequences, and I often write the strip around the topography I feel like drawing.**

But even by Utah standards, Bryce is one weird-looking place.

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* Being at high altitude, but mid-latitude, the sun will easily melt much of the snow in the winter, while the temperature also dips below freezing on most summer nights.

** Watterson, The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book, 1995.

Friday photo

Rainbow, Park County, Wyoming. July 2004

There's a thunderstorm rolling through southeast Michigan this morning, so I thought I'd offer up a rainbow. We won't see one in Michigan today, as Midwestern clouds tend to fill the skies for hundreds of miles without a gap. Western skies have more breaks in the clouds and they get rewarded with more frequent rainbows.

In Sunday School, I was taught that the rainbow is God's promise never again to destroy the world through a global flood. In Wyoming, it can also be taken as a taunt that you're lucky to be getting any rain at all.

Friday photo

Teton Range, Wyoming. May 2004

I once heard James Watt speak at the University of Wyoming and he mentioned, with pride, that while he was Secretary of the Interior, he would frequently find himself being led through scenic areas by local politicians, who would coyly ask him what was the most beautiful place he'd ever seen. Anyone would know enough to name the local garden spot, but Watt was one of the worst politicians ever born, and parochial even by Wyoming standards.* He would gleefully insult the locals by replying, "Jackson Hole, Wyoming!"

Watt may not have been worth a fresh buffalo chip as a diplomat, but I can't fault his taste in scenery. I have a dozen or more Most Beautiful Spots on Earth, but the Tetons stand at the top of the list.

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* Imagine a Texan hiding an inferiority complex and you'll get the idea

Jesus, the Sagebrush Rebel

Jesus wants you to join the Sagebrush Rebellion. It may not sound like something he would normally be concerned about. In fact, that whole "Then give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s" business would almost lead you to think he didn't care about government policies, while Luke 12:13-14 could easily be misinterpreted to indicate that Jesus doesn't take sides in property disputes. Good thing we have Henry Lamb to set us straight.

To be fair,Lamb doesn't say anything here about Jesus. It's just the venue that forces me to make the connection. What does a states rights view of public lands have to do with holding a "Christian world view?" As nearly as I can tell, the blending of religion and politics has gone so far that anything, anything at all, that can be associated with conservative politics is assumed to be godly, anything in Matthew or Luke notwithstanding. Public lands are an especially attractive target because many federal regulations involve environmental restrictions and we know that environmentalism is nothing but pagan nature-worship, with no other purpose than to destroy Christianity. Damn those Satan-worshiping tree-huggers at the EPA, anyway.

Lamb is under that old, preposterous delusion that the federal government cannot own land and that all the public lands were stolen from the states:

It is reasonable to conclude that when a state is carved out of a territory, it becomes a state subject to the powers and limitations of all the other states within the jurisdiction of the Constitution, and no longer subject to the federal authority suffered by the people when the land area was a territory.

*snip*

How can it be legal for the federal government to own land in a state that it did not purchase with the consent of the state legislature? How can it be legal for the federal government to exercise sovereignty over land within a sovereign state? Why were the eleven Western states and Alaska treated differently upon admission to the Union than were the other 26 states that joined the Union? when all states were supposed to be admitted on an "equal footing"?

There is only one logical conclusion: the federal government should not own the land it now claims within any state unless it is purchased with the approval of the state legislature for the purposes set forth in Article 1, Section 8, Clause 17.

Lamb is terribly confused here. He's referencing the section of the Constitution that governs the acquisition of DC, which was understood to be land that was already owned or to be acquired by existing states. It has nothing to do with the public lands that the government owned on its own behalf, in places where no state yet existed. Those would be addressed in Article IV, Section 3, which states clearly enough:

The Congress shall have power to dispose of and make all needful rules and regulations respecting the territory or other property belonging to the United States; and nothing in this Constitution shall be so construed as to prejudice any claims of the United States, or of any particular state.

I'm always amazed that some Westerners seem to think that the eastern states were given all the land within their borders as soon as they entered the union. That's not how it worked. The land belonged to the United States and, frankly, was almost the only asset the federal government had for many years. They didn't give it away for nothing; they sold it, or used it for debts they didn't have real money to pay for (many veterans of the Revolutionary War were paid this way). Until sold, the land belonged to the federal government and could be governed by the same.

Typically, the land wouldn't go to the states anyway.* Most of it passed directly into private hands, at which time the land and its owners became subject to (in chronological order, as political development proceeded): the federal government, then the territorial government, and finally the state government.

And I do get a tad indignant - for my ancestors' sake, not my own - that in Indiana much of the land was originally purchased by speculators and the eventual settlers had to purchase it at market value, whatever that turned out to be. The Western states benefited from the various Homestead Acts, which allowed a settler to live on the land for awhile and then purchase at quite nominal prices. In the great westward rush after the Civil War, the government was all but giving the land away to anyone who could make a living on it.**

That, of course, is the rub - Western land is damned hard to make a living on. Despite being the cheapest land ever seen, in over 70 years most of it never sold. The Jeffersonian dream of filling the land with small farmsteads foundered on the drought-prone plains and deserts and only the land with reliable access to water had much value. The people in the Western states had more than enough time to acquire the public lands - they just didn't do it, and for good reasons.

Remember, though, this isn't just about land ownership. Straw-grasping legal analysis, bad history, disdain for nature, and knee-jerk hostility to the government is all part of having a Christian world view. Don't leave the asylum without it.

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* A notable exception: the Yosemite Valley was given to California on condition that it become a public park; it didn't take California long to realize that it was nicer to give it back to the Feds, who would pay the bills while the state continued to reap the benefits.

** And giving it away to railroads, too, who were expected to sell it to private holders; either way, it didn't go to the state governments.

Demise of the Druid pack

The wolf pack that has dominated Yellowstone's Lamar Valley almost since reintroduction is now virtually extinct. Read it here at Ralph Maughan's Wildlife News. It's a very violent soap opera out there.

Friday photo

Grand Teton, October 2004

The highest peak in the Teton range, at 13, 755 feet above sea level. Not the cleverest photograph of a mountain, but I always liked the strip of cloud and the shadow it cast on the peak.

Friday photo

Bristlecone Pine, California. June 2005.

If you want to put human history into perspective, just reflect on the bristlecone pine. High up in the White Mountains of California is a tree that the US Forest Service has chosen to call "Methuselah," because it is oldest known tree in the world. It's almost an insulting moniker, to tell the truth. Methuselah of the Bible was reported to be 969 years old when he died. When the Methuselah tree was a mere 969 years old, there wasn't even a Bible yet. There was no code of laws from Hammurabi yet and it would be at least another 800 years before the House of David ruled in Judah; bronze represented the peak of the metallurgical arts. That's what we call ancient history, when this tree was already nearly a thousand years old. If the core samples are correct, the Methuselah tree sprouted in the year 2831 BC, before the Egyptians had gotten around to thinking, hey, we could stack some towers on top of each other and call them pyramids.

It's one of the few experiences that I consider awe-inspiring - contemplating a living thing whose lifespan has encompassed almost all of what we consider the History of Civilization. When I first encountered the sequoias, their age always impressed me even more than did their size. Some of them are well over 3000 years old, about the age that King David would be if he could have kept adding growth rings down to the present. Amazing, yet the oldest sequoias are young compared to the oldest bristlecones.

The tree in the photo above might be Methusaleh , although it probably isn't. When you visit this grove, the Forest Service literature explains that they're just not going to tell you which tree is the oldest one, because there are a lot of assholes out there who might think it cute to vandalize such a special tree, and for all they know, you might be one of those assholes, so you're just going to have to get by without knowing for sure. They're more diplomatic about it, but that's what they really mean, and they're entirely correct, of course.

The most amazing thing about bristlecones is how underwhelming they are on first sight. Even the oldest - especially the oldest - are just rather squat and twisted, thick but short. The oldest trees live in dry conditions and add only a thin ring of growth every year, resulting in a dense wood that resists decay and insect infestation. Many of them have been nearly girdled, with only a narrow strip of bark keeping the entire tree alive; if you look at the photo again, you'll see that most of the bark is gone, yet the tree still lives.

Because they preserve so many years of growth rings, bristlecones are a perfect subject for dendrochronology, the science of discerning the patterns of wet and dry years by identifying the wide and thin rings in trees. The living tree allow you to peg the record to the present day, while the rings of long-dead trees can be matched up with those living trees to push the record back even farther, in some regions back to 10,000 years with accuracy to the very year. It's an impressive climatic record. At the top of this post, I had to use ancient Near East history to provide context for the Methuselah tree, because no comparable written records exist for California. But there is a historical record there, nonetheless. The bristlecone pines have witnessed thousands of years of that history and are still able to tell us about some of it.

Friday photo

Ames Monument, near Laramie, Wyoming. February 1991.

The Ames Monument honors a pair of brothers, Oakes and Oliver Ames, who played an instrumental role in creating the nation's first transcontinental railroad in 1869.

Oakes was a US Congressman from Massachusetts on the committee for railroads who ended up taking control of the railroad project. His brother Oliver became president of the Union Pacific RR, while Oakes took over the infamous Credit Mobilier company, a construction management company contracting with the UPRR; Credit Mobilier was, all along, a front to defraud investors in the UPRR.

The problem with making a profit in railroading is that you have to create a sustainable business; the beauty of making money in construction is that you get paid first and make your profit even if the railroad ultimately fails. This works even better if the railroad's board of directors are willing to pay inflated prices for your services, and when their board of directors contains the same faces as your board of directors, the negotiations often go smoothly. So Credit Mobilier would offer contracts at high prices; UPRR would pay them; and UPRR investors, believing that the railroad was taking care of its own bottom line, would not realize that their investments were buying far less railroad construction than they should have.

As insurance, Oakes took to cutting his friends in Congress in on the deal, selling Credit Mobilier stock at a steep discount; these gentlemen, in turn, grew less inclined to look critically at appropriations for transcontinental railroads. Eventually, the secret came out and Credit Mobilier became a huge scandal, implicating such prominent Republicans as Indiana's Schulyer Colfax and the future President James Garfield. Oakes died soon thereafter, in 1873, after "suffering" a Congressional censure.

Despite the fraud and the precarious fiscal position of the UPRR, and despite its own shoddy construction practices, the transcontinental railroad was a success, so the damage to the country was probably slight. In Ames's defense, when he took over the railroad had spent several years creating a meandering track of a few dozen miles. By 1869, the Union Pacific and Central Pacific had met up at Promontory Point and goods could travel between the east and west in a fraction of the time they could before. That was a tremendous benefit to the country, even if cranky obstructionists like Sitting Bull claimed otherwise.

The monument itself is a 60' high pyramid, placed at the highest point on the Union Pacific tracks (8,247'). However, the tracks have since been relocated and the Ames Monument was left where it is now, along a dirt road that doesn't go anywhere in particular. It's a pity, because it honors so many elements of the history of its day: the final push to incorporate the entire West into the United States; the rise of distance-destroying technology, especially railroads and the telegraph; the age of unbridled modern capitalism, and almost limitless political corruption of the day (if you think it's never been worse than it is today, you're mistaken).

Friday photo

Snow on aspens, Dixie National Forest, Utah. May 1989.

This is rather one of my favorite photographs. I was traveling through southern Utah, from a miserable winter at the Grand Canyon to my second summer working in Yellowstone. This would be my first season working in accounting, the department that would claim me for the next 16 years, and while I was unhappy to be assigned to Old Faithful Lodge instead of returning to Lake Hotel (damn you, Jay Antil!), I was more than glad to leave the South Rim.

I had no money for motels, but I did have a brand new sleeping bag, so when I got sleepy and noticed a Forest Service campground, I pulled in. I figured that since I didn't plan on setting up my tent, the "Campground Closed" sign didn't really apply to me. I threw the bag down on the ground, went to sleep, and woke up under 4" of freshly fallen snow. A little uncomfortable, since some of it had melted and seeped into the bag, but the clouds had already broken and the morning light was absolutely beautiful.

When I got going, I drove downhill for half an hour before encountering a sign that read "Elevation 7000." No wonder it was cold and the campground still closed! I'd had no idea I had climbed so high in the dark.

Friday photo, special Oregon edition

Phantom Ship, Crater Lake, Oregon. October, 1994.

In honor of Oregon's return to the Rose Bowl, a photo from Oregon, taken during the season they last won a Pac Ten championship.

There seems to be something about blowing the tops off mountains that results in fascinating scenery. Oh, it takes a few years, as a visit to Mount St. Helens will remind you, but eventually you get a Yellowstone or a Crater Lake. Crater Lake is nicely circular - about 5x6 miles across - and contains some of the clearest and bluest water you'll ever see (although you wouldn't know it from this photo, taken on a cloudy day). The water clarity is known to fluctuate, but in 1997, according to the Wikipedia article, a black-and-white disk was visible over 140 below the surface. Try that in Lake Michigan!

The lake is less than 8000 years old, meaning that the explosion of Mount Mazama took place after North America was peopled and would have been the most exciting thing that ever happened in the neighborhood. The Klamath people's legends describe the mountain being destroyed in a great battle between two powerful spirits, so it's entirely plausible that an eyewitness memory of the violent event has been handed down through some 77 centuries.

The Phantom Ship island gets its name because of its resemblance to a ghostly ship, plus the fact that, under variable lighting conditions, it can be rather easy to lose sight of.

Grizzlies on the plains

From Ralph Maughan's Wildlife News:

Grizzlies home on range – again. By Karl Puckett. Great Falls Tribune Staff Writer.

Is anyone interested that grizzlies are abundant enough and northern Montana empty enough that grizzlies are spilling out onto the plains?

Yellowstone grizzlies back on the list

Two years after federal officials announced their "amazing" recovery, grizzly bears near Yellowstone National Park have been given renewed federal protections by a federal judge who expressed concern that climate change, among other factors, could impair the bears' hopes for survival.

Only a short announcement, but you can read a little more here. And a longer article here.

The grizzly bears in Yellowstone seemed to be in real trouble in the early 1970's, when a crash program of closing the garbage dumps that they loved to frequent, plus a hyper-aggressive program of removing bears that spent too much time in campgrounds, combined to eliminate some 88 bears in the years 1970 and 1971. This was out of population that numbered somewhere from 150 to 300, depending on whose numbers you believed*; either way, those kinds of losses were clearly unsustainable and the Yellowstone grizzlies went on the Endangered Species List in 1975.

The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem now contains some 500 bears, the target level for considering grizzlies to be "recovered," and that is indeed a great success story. The bears were taken off the Endangered Species List in 2007. However, the judge agrees with the Greater Yellowstone Coalition that the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and the corresponding state agencies, have failed to establish a plan that has any legal teeth to it, should the bear population start to fall again. So back on the list they go, at least until a more solid management plan can be devised.

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* The dispute over the most accurate bear census was extremely bitter. You can read about the whole fracas in Paul Schullery's The Bears of Yellowstone and Frank Criaghead's Track of the Grizzly.

Friday photo

Kepler Cascades, Yellowstone National Park, in August 1993.

Gustavus Doane, a member of the Washburn-Langford expedition of 1870, had this to say about the Cascades:

These pretty little falls, if located on an eastern stream, would be celebrated in history and song; here, amid objects so grand as to strain conception and stagger belief, they were passed without a halt.

This is true of so much scenery in the West. Not that the East lacks beauty, not at all, but it's an older, more eroded landscape with little remaining on so grand a scale* as the West offers. There are still larger waterfalls in the Yellowstone backcountry which do not yet even have official names.

The longest drop, shown here, is 50', but the entire series of falls drops about 150'. Leaving Old Faithful and heading east toward West Thumb, you find them just a couple miles up the road. In the days before automobiles, they would have been the first "attraction" encountered by tourists on stagecoaches on the day they left Old Faithful, and they were a popular hiking destination for Old Faithful employees who had no transportation - and little free time - to go much farther from home.

This is a 1/2-second exposure, taken in the evening as I was leaving the geyser basin and headed back to Lake. The cool blue light in the shadows contrasts nicely with the warm light from the setting sun; you can see some blur in the lower branches of the tree, from a sudden gust of wind.

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* Although, for grand scale, the Great Lakes need bow to no one.

PS. And how could I possibly forget Niagara Falls, which would impress any Westerner - if for no other reason than that they had no idea so much water even existed in the world.

Those independent Westerners

The NPS doesn't want to keep spending money to clear snow off Sylvan Pass during the winter. Why is that? Here's why:

Only 97 snowmobiles used the east entrance this past winter, and no snow coach tours passed through the east gate. The park spends $325,000 each winter to keep Sylvan Pass open to snowmobiles and snow coaches.

Got that? That's over $3000 for every 'bile that enters the park from the east, essentially a federal subsidy for the town of Cody, Wyoming, and money the park could have used on its failing infrastructure.* The park would long ago have quit wasting all that money, except Cody businessmen make a lot of noise to their Senators. Their livelihood, they claim, depends on those visitors! Yes, the town of Cody will collapse if they lose - what? less than one hundred! - visitors during the course of the year. Just goes to show, any business is profitable when someone else is covering your expenses.

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* Although, truth be told, they'd probably just spend it on a kennel full of drug-sniffing dogs or some such.

Bad wolf management

In a classic example of the dictum Ready, Fire, Aim:

Balyeat bill would cap wolves in state

Senate Bill 183 would enact a wolf plan that does not allow more than 225 wolves in the state and would have the animal managed in a way that ensured it was not affecting big game hunting or the livestock industry. The bill would void any element of federal control of the gray wolf, including enforcement of the Endangered Species Act.

Actually, the bill would bring the full weight of the ESA to bear and Montana would be out of the wolf-managing business in exactly the same way that Wyoming is, as the bill's critics point out:

“Senate Bill 183 will not give the state more control over wolves, it will diminish it. It will not accelerate the wolf being delisted, it will prevent it,” said Chris Smith, deputy director of the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks.

Smith said taking on the federal government in court over their power to manage the gray wolf would be “similar to the legislative basketball team taking on the best NBA team in the league.”

But the bill's sponsor, Joe Balyeat of Belgrade, tried to claim that he's responsible for wolf delisting!

“I’ve been told by my contacts, who will remain nameless... that Senate Bill 183 was part of the reason the Obama administration decided to go forward with wolf delisting,” he said.

How boring ... most children give names to their imaginary friends.

A Westerner should know better

Colorado to McCain: Hands Off Our Water

In an interview Friday with the Pueblo Chieftan, McCain committed what could amount political suicide in the state by saying that the 1922 water compact negotiated between seven western states should be renegotiated to give Arizona, Nevada, and California (the Lower Basin states) more water.

The Denver Post writes:

Memo to: John McCain.

Subject: Forget about winning our nine electoral votes next November. We don't vote for water rustlers in this state; we tar and feather them!

...

Here's some free advice, wrinkly guy: When campaigning in Colorado, you might survive advocating atheism, taking our guns away or outlawing apple pie. But never, ever, mess with our water.