Mooney M-20

Mooney M-20

Pretty airplane in a pretty setting: Leadville-Lake County Airport, Colorado, USA's highest elevation airport @ 9,934'. From AOPA:

"the M20 line has distinguished itself as one that gets the most speed out of the least horsepower."

 

Jet Engine Failure

United 328 Engine Failure B777-200 Denver-Honolulu
JustFly

This seems to happen on a regular basis. though given the zillions of flights that are made every day I suppose it's inevitable.

Via Brian Micklethwait's New Blog

Big Rock Falls Out of Sky

One of the boulders remains embedded in the highway, according to the Colorado DOT, which described it as the size of a building and said it will have to be blasted into smaller pieces before being moved off the highway.

Via Just a Car Guy

Godless

There are some great landscape shots in this show. 

Started watching Godless last night. It's a mini-series on Netflix. The trailer is pretty awful. The show is pretty great. Lovable Jeff Daniels has the role of the murderous leader of a gang. Michelle Dockery (the prima donna from Downton Abbey) runs a ranch with help from her son and a Paiute squaw. I only know it's her because my wife told me. I didn't recognize her. The Guardian has a review. IMDB listing here.

Portions of Colorado & New Mexico, from Utah/Arizona on the West to Oklahoma/Texas on the East. Colorado Springs is near the top, Santa Fe near the bottom.
Creede & LaBelle, two places in the show are orange. Big cities are blue. Narrow gauge railroad is green.

Update: Finished watching this series. It only took us three nights. If there is a lesson to be learned from this show it's keep your damn doors closed.

Shooting in Nederland, Colorado

There was a shooting at a ski resort in Colorado today. An employee shot the manager at an early morning meeting. A Sheriff's Deputy tracked the shooter down and killed him. The Denver Post has the story. 

    So another nut-case goes off the deep end and people end up dead. Why am I writing about it? Because a friend of mine in Ohio has friends that live in Nederland. There were a bunch of people at that early morning meeting. It is only by the grace of god (or pure dumb luck, your choice) that more of them didn't end up dead. 

    I really wish there was a way to identify people who are ready to go over the edge. I suspect the problem might be that the people we should worry about are the ones who are on the fringe of society. Maybe they've been pushed there because of their poor social skills, or maybe they've gone there for their own reasons. People who are on the fringe don't talk to a lot of people, so there aren't going to be a lot chances for someone to notice that they might be getting a little close to the edge.

    Anyway, I had never heard of Nederland before, so I looked it up. It's just west of Boulder, got it's start in mining and now it has a ski resort. I've excerpted a bit from Wikipedia below.

Nederland, Colorado
with Tungsten (lower right), Caribou (upper left) and Eldora ski resort (lower left).

Nederland was established in 1874. The town started as a trading post between Ute Indians and European settlers during the 1850s. The town's first economic boom came when minerals such as tungsten, silver, and gold were discovered near Tungsten (east of Nederland), Caribou (northwest of Nederland, 1859), and Eldora (west of Nederland, 1875). . . .
In 1873 the Caribou Mine, at an elevation of roughly 10,000 feet and 6 miles northwest of the town, was sold to the Mining Company Nederland from the Netherlands. The high elevation meant fierce winds and deep winter snow, so the new owners of the mine decided that it was beneficial to bring ore from Caribou down to Middle Boulder for milling. In the Dutch language, Nederland ("Netherlands" in English) means low land, and based on casual usage by the Dutch miners, Middle Boulder came to be known as Nederland. (This is ironic, considering that the town's elevation is higher than 8,000 feet and most locations in the Netherlands are near or even below sea level.) In 1874 the town was incorporated and adopted Nederland as the official name. - Wikipedia

Colorado Flood

The downpour that inundated parts of Colorado this month was a once-in-a-millennium event for those areas, according to an analysis by the National Weather Service.

The rainfall numbers in the picture are for at most THREE DAYS.

Via Sharon.

Wild, Wild, West

Junction of Green and Yampah Canyons, Utah, 1872
Last night I was looking through a collection of old photos taken by Timothy O'Sullivan. He took these photos while he was on an expedition exploring the Western portion of the United States shortly after the American Civil War (140 years ago). I noticed this one, and I said to myself "that looks familiar". I don't know if the caption triggered my memory, or whether it was just the image. I like to think it was just the image. In any case, it reminded me of this:


View from Echo Park Overlook in Dinosaur National Monument, Colorado
I took this photo last May on my way back from Denver. Turns out we are in exactly the same place! Never mind the different state names, we are right on the modern border. Back when O'Sullivan made his picture I'm pretty sure there was no well defined border.


View Denver Trip in a larger map
The shading looks all backwards because the light is coming from the Southeast instead of from the top of the picture. The road with the placemark is on top of a ridge. The gray green snake is the river.

Art Blart has a collection of some O'Sullivan photos.
O'Sullivan page on Flickr
Daily Mail story with a bunch of O'Sullivan photos.

Update January 2021 replaced missing map and dead map link.

Westbound

I got back from Denver almost six weeks ago, and I am just now getting around to finishing my report. I wonder why that is.

We had a vague idea of visiting Dinosaur National Monument on the way back, so we headed West out of Denver on Interstate 70. It's been a long time since I've been on this road. My wife and I drove to Winter Park using this road 20 odd years ago, and Matt I drove to Los Angeles this way 40 odd years ago. Matt and I had a real good time. (Can you believe it? Blogger's spell checker doesn't like Los Angeles.) Going up that first set of hills, trying to maintain speed while carrying a load of furniture, the truck had to work a bit. At one point I had the engine at redline, the throttle wide open and the transmission upshifted. Bang! That was a little unnerving. I eased off a bit after that.

There are three tunnels on I-70 between Denver and Grand Junction. The first and longest is the Eisenhower Tunnel built in 1979, so it wasn't there when Matt & I made our trip to LA. Reading the Wikipedia article I discovered that there is a height restriction on this tunnel, which may explain why we saw so few trucks on this route. For a while I wondered if we were going to see any, but as time went by we saw a few.

I used an old, paper, Gousha road atlas to navigate. It's been sitting in my bookcase for umpteen years. It is dated 1985, and we discovered no discrepancies between the map and the roads we traveled. That didn't used to be the case, back when the Interstate Highway System was still under construction.

The next morning we got off the Interstate at Loma and started up State Highway 139 toward Dinosaur. Loma is a fine town, full of streets with names like L 7/10 Road. We stopped for gas and donuts. Three other full-size pickup trucks, all hauling stuff, stopped for gas while we were there. The other drivers were all wearing Oakley sunglasses and blue-tooth earpieces. I was the odd man out with my compact truck, $2 sunglasses and a hand-held phone.

Hostess mini-donuts, Squirt and hot dogs were staples of my diet on this trip. The Hostess man must have just been there, because the Hostess rack was overflowing with packages of mini-donuts. Guess I'm not alone in my preference for road food.

State Highway 139 is a two lane blacktop with hardly any traffic. There were some switchbacks going up to Douglas Pass where we stopped to check out the view.

When we got to Dinosaur, we drove into the Monument using a road marked "No Fossils". It seemed to take forever to drive all the way to the end, but only a few minutes to drive back out. It was about 15 miles one way, a mere nit in the overall scheme of things. We stopped at the Echo Park overlook. I used to be really impressed with these views, but now I look and I think how grim and forbidding it looks. Lots of rocks, no water or shade. Well, okay, there is a river at the bottom of the canyon, well, you hope there is anyway. You can't see it from up here, and it's a couple of thousand feet down. Be a hell of a hike to find out the river is dry. Just thinking about it is making me thirsty.

Our next stop was a campground in the Flaming Gorge National Recreation Area. We grilled some hot dogs for lunch. The campground was way up above the lake.

After that it was back on the Interstate. The next day the tarp decided to break loose and start flapping in the wind. We stopped 2 or 3 times to try and fix it before we finally pulled into a store in Wendell, Idaho, and bought 100 feet of cord and ran a zig-zag over the top. 


By coincidence I stopped for gas near Boise at the same place I stopped on the way out. Maybe that's not so surprising being as there is only one gas station every six bajillion miles out here. When we crossed the border into Oregon gas prices jumped up 50 cents a gallon, and for some reason, the bugs really started flying. We had to stop every hour or so to clean the windshield, it was so bad. We considered stopping for another night, but by then we were in Pendleton, and shoot, we're practially home, so we pushed on and got home around midnight.

The next day we're unpacking and I inspect the damage to the tarp. It was really big, so we had folded it over a bit to contain the excess. All that flapping in the breeze had worn a hole in it, and where was the hole? In one corner, where it wouldn't be a big problem? No, because of the way it was folded it was right in the center.

Deseret Power Railway

Driving back from Denver my route took me through Northwest Colorado. Going North on State Highway 139 towards Dinosaur National Monument I noticed what appeared to be a new railroad. It wasn't hard to notice because other than sagebrush, a few cows and the occasional gas pipeline station, there wasn't anything else out there. What's more, it appeared to be an electric railroad. There were wires strung above the tracks just like for the local commuter train here in Portland. Well, that's just downright bizarre. I didn't see a train or even any cars, just this track. Why would someone build an electric railroad all the way out here in the middle of nowhere?

I finally got around to looking it up. It was built for one purpose only: to haul coal from the Deserado Mine northeast of Rangely, Colorado to the Bonanza Power Plant 35 miles away in Utah. The train is fairly short, only 44 cars. Right now the train makes one trip a day, five days a week, and that's enough coal to keep the turbines spinning.

This railway is not connected to any others, so everything for this project (the mine, the power plant, the train and its' track) had to be hauled in by truck.

This mine is an underground mine, so there isn't much to see up top, except for the 3 mile long conveyor belt that carries the coal from the mine to the train load point. The big mines in the Powder River Basin, the ones that supply low sulfur coal to the Midwest and the East Coast, are strip mines.

Desert Power Railway

Update January 2021 replaced missing map.