Cary and I started house shopping earlier this year, and after seeing about 15-16 homes, we finally made an offer on Tuesday. After receiving a counter-offer and firing back with a counter-counter-offer, we finally have a contract. With luck that everything else goes smoothly, we’ll be closing on June 27th.
Joss Whedon’s Firefly was a short-lived series on Fox that aired in 2004. Fox cancelled the series, but fan response and astronomical sales of the 15 episodes on DVD convinced Universal to buy the film rights to the show. The film Serenity expanded on the plot of the series. This is the 2-hour pilot episode of Firefly. The title of the pilot shares the film’s title.
One of the most influential science fiction authors of the 20th century has died. While he was an accomplished author, Clarke’s most important contribution to science was his idea that satellites in a geostationary orbit would make ideal communications devices. The geostationary orbit is often called the Clarke orbit in his honor.
2001 is arguably one of the most important science fiction works of the last century, but it is only one story in a body of work that spans 50 years.
He will be missed.
That’s right, it’s March 14th again. Wouldn’t it have been cool to be a geek and alive on March 14th, 1592 at 6:53:58 AM? Think of the nerd celebration that would have ensued then…
Wow. I think I just pegged the geek-o-meter with this post.
I’ve uploaded all of our Arizona pictures to Flickr. You can view them here.
Be warned: there are more than 600 of them. I took a lot of pictures at the baseball game, mainly because I was playing around with camera settings.
Cary and I left Flagstaff around 7:30AM and arrived at Tusayan at about 9:00AM. Tusayan is a small town just outside the Grand Canyon Park gate. There, we went to the National Geographic Welcome Center and saw a rather hokey yet breathtaking IMAX film about the canyon. The film was a mix of really great fly-by Grand Canyon footage and slightly lame historical reenactments of John Powell. Powell is credited as the first person to traverse the entire length of the canyon. He was a Civil War veteran who was missing his right arm below the elbow; and I have to at least give the filmmakers credit for casting an actual amputee in the role.
We were also able to purchase our park pass there. This allowed us to drive through the park gate rather quickly. The pass is good for an entire week, so it’s a pretty good bargain at $25.00 per car load.
We left the welcome center and drove to Mather Point to get our first quick look at the canyon. From there we drove to the Bright Angel Trailhead at the south rim. We stopped at the Bright Angel “Fountain” for a hot dog, lemonade and a pretzel to fortify us for our trek down the Bright Angel Trail. At least, that was our plan; however when we started down the trail, we were warned that it was covered with ice and snow for about a mile and a half. Since this trail is a path about 3 or 4 feet wide which snakes down the wall of the canyon, we decided that it wouldn’t be smart to attempt that trip. So we decided to take the Rim Trail instead.
Taking the Rim Trail turned out to be a much better idea, because it afforded us a greater variety of views of the canyon. We hiked from the Bright Angel Trailhead to Maricopa Point, then to Hopi Point, Mohave Point and The Abyss. At that point, we had hiked more than 4 miles over paved and unpaved trail, and through snow. Shuttle buses drive along the road that runs parallel to the trail ferrying hikers to and from the various points. Cary and I hopped on a shuttle at The Abyss and rode for about 3 miles to Pima Point. We got off the bus and walked the remaining 1.1 miles to the end of the trail at Hermit’s Rest. We perused the gift shop and then took the bus all the way back to the Bright Angel Trailhead.
We then checked in to our cabin at the Bright Angel Lodge and rested for a bit before going to dinner. We had dinner at the Bright Angel Restaurant. Our table at the restaurant had a nice view of the canyon as the sun began to set. We walked to a lodge called El Tovar and waited for sunset, then headed back to the cabin to sleep off a long day of hiking.
(note: this post is now completed)
I’ll add more to the last blog entry once we get some down time, but for now, we wanted to summarize yesterday’s outing while it was still fresh in our minds.
On Friday, we left Sedona early in the morning and drove through Flagstaff to Sunset Crater. We could have taken I-17 to Flagstaff, but we decided to take a more scenic route via highway 89, which twists and turns up the mountains. We arrived at the Sunset Crater park visitor center, spoke with the guide, paid our fee, then headed out to the crater. Driving to the crater, we weren’t expecting what we saw. A recent snow still blanketed much of the ground. As we drove on a mountain road with pine trees on either side, I looked to the left and saw what I can only describe as an immense river of solidified lava. It was a surprise, to say the least. The black rock looked amazing contrasted against the white snow and blue sky.
There are two distinct types of lava flows which are called, in Hawaiian, “‘a’a” (ah-ah) and “pahoehoe” (pa-hoy-hoy)(this info was in the guidebook we carried with us, but amazingly, I remembered it from watching 3-2-1 Contact when I was younger). The flows at Sunset Crater are “ah ah”. I’m not sure if it’s why the Hawaiian’s gave it this name, but I’d imagine it’s called “a’a” because that’s the sound you’d make if you tried walking on the stuff in bare feet. A’a lava consists of sharp broken rocks that jut out in every direction. A’a is walkable, but you have to be very careful not to fall on it. Huge spires of solidified a’a jut out in every direction. We drove for maybe half a mile with the huge river of a’a before arriving at the Sunset Crater trailhead.
Unfortunately, access to the crater itself has been closed to the public since the 70s (I’m starting to think that tourists in the 70s got to have a lot more fun that we do now — at the expense of damaging natural landmarks, but still — so we couldn’t walk up to the site itself. We could still see faint traces of the original hiking trails that wound up the side of the crater. The main trail was about half a mile, and took us over, around and through one of the main lava lows at the base of the crater. Along the way, there were numbered posts which corresponded to pages in the guidebook that described what we were seeing.
It’s Saturday morning, and We’re getting ready to leave for the Grand Canyon now; so I’ll finish up this post on the road.
Hopefully, I’ll be able to write up the rest of our day:
The Rest of Sunset Crater
The Wupatki National Monument
Flagstaff
The Lowell Observatory
Now we’re on our way to the Grand Canyon, so I can finish up this post:
Sunset Crater (continued)
We saw very little wildlife while walking the trails here, aside from a funny looking Abert Squirrel, which I did manage to get a picture of before it scampered higher up the pine tree on which it was perched and out of sight.
The entire surface of Sunset Crater is covered with ejecta from the volcano consisting of slate-grey pebbles. The pebbles are pea-sized on average, and they’re everywhere. You can find fields of the grey stones miles away from the crater. At any time while hiking the trails, we were either walking on those grey pebbles, solidified lava, or snow and ice.
A few tens of meters away from the trail were a couple of vent cones — reddish hills about 30 feet high that allowed gases to escape from the ground when the volcano was active. In a few places on the trail, we came upon some spatter cones — relatively small round structures made of lava that spewed molten rock. Most of the ones we saw were anywhere from three to five feet high and three to 10 feet in diameter. The biggest one we saw had partially collapsed, mainly because tourists had climbed on the walls of the cone and broken them.
In many places, the a’a lava was hollow — there were many caves underneath the surface that ran underground in the area, hollowed out by the molten lava. According to the guidebook, the lava had also buried many pithouses, homes occupied by the Anasazi before the volcano’s eruption. Researchers had found that the pithouses were missing many essential items, including wooden support beams, suggesting that the residents had received ample warning of the eruption, and vacated their homes well beforehand.
Leaving Sunset Crater, we next drove to the Wapatki National Monument. The monument is a red-stone pueblo built on top of red sandstone outcroppings at the foot of the painted desert. We saw three separate pueblos, each about 2 miles apart. The first of these pueblos was called “Wukoki” which is the Hopi word for “Big House”. Originally a three-story structure, there wasn’t much left of it.
The second pueblo — the Wupatki — which was also the biggest of the ones we visited, was near the visitor center. While the Wukoki was more of a small-family dwelling, the Wupatki seemed to be more of a community center. It featured a large multi-room pueblo (many of the rooms are still unexcavated), a ball-court and a peculiar natural feature called a blow-hole. The blow-hole is a hole in the ground that leads to a large subsurface chamber. The blowhole appears to “breathe” as the passage below responds to changes in atmospheric pressure. If the air above the surface of the blow-hole is cold and heavy, it rushes into the blowhole. If the surface air is warm and light, the cold air inside the passage forces its way out. During our visit, the air was rushing into the blow-hole. Cary held her hat above the opening, and when she let go, it was rather violently sucked down. Luckily, the hole is covered by a grating to prevent anyone from losing anything into the hole. According to the information we read at the site, archaeologists have found no uses for the blowhole, and its connection to the Wupatki pueblo is a mystery.
The last of the pueblos we visisted was called “Nalahuki”, which translates to “House outside the village”. After visiting the Wupatki, there wasn’t much more to say about the other pueblos, as they were not as complex or well-preserved.
Leaving the Wupatki area, we returned to Flagstaff on highway 89. Historic Route 66 runs through Flagstaff, and so many of the businesses there capitalize on the history of the road. There’s no shortages of Route 66-themed restaurants, hotels and souvenirs.
We walked through Historic downtown Flagstaff and perused many of the antique stores and shops, then headed to our hotel to rest.
After dinner, we drove up to the Lowell Observatory. The site is named after astronomer Percival Lowell, who was known for, among other things, studying Mars. Lowell mistakenly identified many of the patterns he saw on the surface of Mars as canals dug by the Martians to bring water down from the polar ice caps to their cities. We watched a film on the night sky, then walked up to the viewing telescopes. A couple of smaller telescopes were set up outside. One of them was aimed at the Orion nebula, a bluish cloud of dust and gas on Orion’s belt. Another telescope was pointed at Saturn. We could clearly see the planet’s rings and a couple of its moons. The biggest telescpe at the Observatory was pointed at Mars. We could easily make out the red planet’s polar ice caps. After the viewings, we headed back to the visitor center to browse through the gift shop, then headed back to the hotel. One interesting side note about the observatory was that some of the employees — volunteers who were telling visitors about what they were viewing through the telescopes — were equipped with very high-powered laser pointers. These pen-sized pointers looked like normal laser pointers, but the beam emitted from them was green, and they were so powerful, the beam could be seen in clear air. They used the lasers to point out stars and planets in the sky. You could easily follow the beam of the pointer with your eyes to whatever they were pointing at. I’ve heard about these laser pointers (which cost hundreds of dollars apiece), but have never seen one working in person. Pretty neat.
