On the road again
Two days til grad school starts: time for a quick post in list form! Here are some random musings, observations, rants, and pictures from a two-week, 2,500 mile end-of-summer road trip through Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California, Oregon, and Washington:
- Packing everything you own into the backseat and trunk of a Toyota Corolla IS possible, if only for 15 miles until you get to the closest UPS store so you can pack 61 pounds of crap into a box and ship it so your car doesn’t bottom out going across every single expansion joint in the road
- A small passenger car with over 180,000 miles, power steering leaks, suspension maladies, and mysterious engine and electrical issues is nevertheless capable of successfully completing a 2,500 mile road-trip including travel up and over several 10,000 foot mountain passes, on roads through several deserts with temperatures soaring to 108 degrees, all while fully loaded with nary a squeak.
- Said road trip is also possible to complete without the aid of a GPS unit, smartphone, or other computerized mapping device.
- To anyone who claims their home town/state/country/etc has the best sunsets ever, please go to the Grand Canyon and watch the sun go down from Desert View. I’ll be expecting a formal, written retraction of your blasphemous statement in the mail any day now.
Grand Canyon from Mohave Point
- Pink Jeep Tour guides are really good at spotting Deeres.
- It is impossible to make money in Las Vegas. Even if you win a decent amount of dough, you will be tempted into spending your winnings on drinks served in three-foot-tall brightly-colored souvenir “cups” and $7 slices of crappy pizza in the casino food court at 2am. But you won’t know its 2am because there are no clocks anywhere.
- When traveling through particularly desolate stretches of Nevada, it is amazing how quickly your mind begins voluntarily generating thoughts such as “I wonder how many hours it’s been since I’ve seen another car…” and “I bet I could take my hands off the steering wheel for 10 whole minutes and not hit anything.”
Tufa towers on the shores of Mono Lake, CA
- If you never thought you encounter a situation in which you would consider $4.89 a screaming good deal on a gallon of gasoline, go visit Lee Vining, California (and look at what the Chevron is charging first…)
- Americans like Yosemite more than they dislike getting hantavirus.
Tenaya Lake, Yosemite National Park
- Tropical plants will die if you leave them in the backseat of a hot car for a week with no access to food or water.
- Camping in bear country is a pain in the ass. A typical night terror in Yosemite consists of waking in the middle of the night in a panicked and frantic state wondering if you remembered to take that tube of mildly scented chapstick out of your pocket and put it in the bear box.
Bumpass Hell thermal area, Lassen Volcanic National Park
- Even if people say they aren’t buying you something from your Amazon wish-list, never buy anything from your Amazon wishlist.
- Eugene, Portland, and Bellingham should secede and create a new autonomous state called Hippie-gon-ton. Seriously, these are the kind of places where I deeply wish I had the courage to take pictures of random people I encounter on the street; I’d have a collection to rival People of Wal-Mart in no time, albeit in a very, very different way. Also, on a related note, Portland is the perfect city to arrive in when you haven’t showered for 3 days.
Yosemite Valley and Half Dome
- The awesomeness of Powell’s bookstore in Portland, OR is still difficult for me to comprehend…I could spend WEEKS there. One’s need for a smartphone with navigational capabilities is greater WITHIN THIS STORE than it is in perhaps any major metropolitan area in the country, with the possible exception of:
- Seattle, which has quite possibly the worst maintained and most confusing street network of ANY CITY ANYWHERE. Someone should probably go rescue the pothole crew because they clearly have been being held hostage somewhere…since the Eisenhower administration. Also, let’s stop it with the whole “Wouldn’t it be cool to make this street randomly dead-end and then reappear 5 blocks later?” thing. If I’m driving down a numbered street, it should be a thru-street and not be broken into 8 billion separate sections.
- On the plus side, if you can somehow manage to navigate Seattle streets without blowing a tire, breaking an axle, or needing to pull over somewhere and cry, there are a lot of good eats to be had, including the 3rd best Philly cheese steak restaurant this side of Philadelphia and some seriously good pizza.
- Sea anemones shrivel up when you poke them. Also, it is possible to be surrounded by so many fat purple starfish that you feel afraid.
- Randomly arriving in a new city where you know nobody and finding a place to live using Craigslist is way easier than it sounds. And no, I’m not living with a convicted felon.
- The Pacific Northwest is really nice and sunny in the summer…which is conveniently when I am never there.
- Finding that a “Vegan Revolution” bumper sticker has been pasted onto your car over a pro-meat sticker instantly turns you into a card-carrying vegan drives you to east as much meat as humanly possible the next day (such as a Philly cheese steak and a delicious bacon cheeseburger perhaps).
- On another related note, a maple long john topped with strips of bacon is just about the best thing e…….. (Zach has heart attack)
Sunset over the San Francisco Peaks, Flagstaff, AZ
A Crater Lake Comparison
College and blogging go together about as well as tofu and….well…about anything. Keeping up with this site, which by definition requires photographs, is even more challenging. Apart from several thousand photographs of Whitman Mission National Historic Site (where I volunteer and write another photography blog), I take very few photos during the semester, given that pictures of classrooms are boring and I don’t often take to lugging a DSLR around to weekend frivolities.
It was a visit to Crater Lake in the summer two years ago that prompted me to start this website in the first place. Somehow though, that attempt went fallow and I never got past creating an account and drafting a first post. That post, with the awe-inspiring title of “Photography Challenges at Crater Lake National Park”, and packed with 576 words of my mind-numbingly painful drivel, still sits in my “Drafts” folder to this day, staring at me with sad eyes much like whatever this is.
Happily, I now have a second Crater Lake visit to share photos from. If you’ve ever wanted to see snowdrifts engulfing multi-story buildings, you should visit Crater Lake NP in the early spring. Driving up Oregon Hwy 62 from Medford, my thought progression went something like this: “Hmm…not very much snow yet”, “Strange, I thought we’d be getting into some snow by now”, “Wow, maybe we’ll actually be able to hike around a little at the lake”, “Holy crap, the snowbanks are taller than the car”, “Whoa, now they are taller than my 6′ 3″ housemate!” I truly have never seen such quantities of snow in my life. Entering the few remaining open buildings required travel through snow tunnels in order to access the doors. The road to the rim of the lake is kept open year-round, and after seeing the massive snowbanks and realizing how much manpower must be required to accomplish this, I had to ask the question “why”? The volunteer ranger on duty didn’t really have a clear cut answer, mumbling only something about “politics” and “tradition.” We were also informed that this winter had been “a dry one” and that the fact that we were even able to see the lake was rather fortuitous, as more than 50% of winter days are so cloudy that the lake surface is not even visible from the rim.
Crazy snow.
Crater Lake Lodge, closed for the season
Wandering around the shuttered Crater Lake Lodge area felt eerily like a scene from The Shining (filmed at the nearby Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood) with the Crater Lake Lodge buried up to the 4th floor by snowdrifts. One advantage to the snow was the lack of the oppressing clouds of mosquitoes that plagued us during the summer visit.
Crater Lake Panorama, March 2012
For comparison purposes, here are some images from that July 2010 visit, starting with a shot taken from almost the exact same vantage point at the first photo in this post (note the position of the peak towering over the lodge). The only difference in that here I’m not standing on top of thirty feet of snow.
Crater Lake Lodge, sans 30' snow drifts
The Moon and Venus setting behind Crater Lake
Crater Lake Panorama, July 2010
I clearly remember being surprised on that visit at how much snow remained present, even in mid-July. Several trails were still closed. After last week, this no longer seems extraordinary. If anything it seems a small miracle that it ever melts at all and that Crater Lake is not covered by some sort of permanent glacier.
Back to the Northwest: the Land of Homework and Geology
Yes, I am still alive. Although I imagine that someone who wasn’t would have marginally more time to attend to a photo blog than I have over the past few months. Between a full class schedule, 15 or more hours of work a week, writing a thesis, and occasionally taking time to interact with other human beings in a social setting leaves sadly little time for photo editing and blogging. But now that the annual bundle of happiness that is the four days off from school offered by Columbus Day weekend is here, I find myself with free time (gasp!) and no shortage of photos to sift through from the past several months.
My most recent excursion was the 4-day whirlwind of turtle tops, rock hammers, marshmallow volcanoes, humorous jokes, campfires, burritos, and all-around general merriment that is our bi-annual Regional Geology field trip. This year we made a circuit through central Oregon to look at the ancient Cascade volcanoes and some of the best preserved fossil beds in the world. Rather then bore you with my umpteen pictures of rock outcrops with my lens cap or pencil in them for scale, I’ll share the ones that show why trips like these are the biggest perk of being a geology student:
Smith Rock State Park, Oregon: a rock climbers paradise and caldera of an ancient supervolcano.
Preserved ancient soils in the Painted Hills, John Day Fossil Beds National Monument
Mescall Overlook, John Day Valley, OR
Dogs in Oregon apparently like chasing flying moustaches...who knew?!
Thick lava flows beneath the US 97 Bridge over the Crooked River, near Bend, OR
My big fossil find of the weekend: ammonites native to Asia plastered onto North America via plate tectonics!
Community Hall in Izee, OR
P.S. For those of you stumped by the marshmallow volcano reference, watch this to see what to see a geology department tradition and learn what happens when you stuff several bags of marshmallows inside an empty beer can. Yes, this is how geologists entertain themselves.
Zach Schierl Photography 
