mk5 adventures

Winner: @turbodb!!!

CONGRATULATIONS!!!

You have won a lukewarm can of Coors Light -- COLD AS THE ROCKIES(TM)



Please provide a phone number where we can fax you your prize!!!


Regrettably, I seem to have lost the long-winded deeply researched narrative I wrote about this historical disaster. Hopefully someday I'll find it, but I'm not going to rewrite it now. Here is an abbreviated story that I posted months ago, in a thread that you frequent.

Again, congratulations for correctly guessing this location based solely on the above photographic clue!!!

Bonus: Here is a picture of one of the many ticks I removed from my ... personal region:



Here is a picture of a beaver(?) that startled the fuck out of me as I tried to fish the river at dusk:



Here is a picture of all the fish I caught in the whole entire state of Idaho:

Ha ha, just kidding -- I didn't catch a single fish the whole entire time I spent trying to catch fish in the stupid state of Idaho!​

Here is a picture of my new friend Lary:



Here are several more pictures of the primary intake works:





Here is a confusing perspective:



And a view looking back:




My goal in coming here that night, in addition to general historic interest, was astrophotography... but the skies clouded over at the Idaho border, and my phone was blowing up with severe thunderstorm and flash flood warnings by Pocatello.


Can I call this a haboob? What a funny word, I've always wanted to use it.



Sadly the skies never broke, and I wound up passing out in the idling truck with a mouth full of half-chewed doritos, waiting for another rainstorm to clear.



The rains did make it a bit more ominous down there, with the water level fluctuating by several feet as I fished.



Quite the water slide. I'll also note the phrase in the corner of that drawing:


ALWLAYS THINK SAFETY


https://youtu.be/2nSVehTOM1c


Edit: For a five-can bonus... What's this train carrying?

 

Spent fuel rods from a reactor. It's a DOT transportation vessel.

 

Sure, offer the guy who doesn't drink a can of beer.

Woo


Hoo.

Last time I play that stupid game.

 

Well good thing you didn't win the other five cans, then.

And you know what... I'll upgrade your Coors Light to a can of RC Cola -- just because I'm a nice guy.

​

I'll drink Dan's, but you get the bonus 5!!!

Winner!

DING! DING!! DING!!!!


(also CHOOO CHOOOOOO!!!!)

I believe this is one of the Navy's casks -- the M-290. So given the direction of travel, I conclude this was probably packed with spent submarine or aircraft-carrier fuel.

COOL!

(Err... uh... probably actually hot?)

I read that the '290' in the Navy's naming scheme is for how many tons the car weighs. I think the cask is itself is 260, but who knows. In any case: A fuck-ton, riding on a special 12 axle flat car, plus front and back patio cars, and a fun-time caboose. (More on that later.)

DOE recently built its own fleet of railcars to transport spent fuel from civilian reactors. I didn't even know they transported civilian fuel (I thought we had decided to simply never deal with that problem?) but apparently they're going to 'definitely' get around to this 'someday.' Now at least they'll be able to do so with modern, very-expensive railcars.

DOE's project was called 'Atlas,' which sought to carry a more reasonable 160 tons on more-nimble 8-axle cars. But, for some reason they really wanted to make sure these glorified tuna cans wouldn't derail, rip open, and explode in the middle of Ohio, like normal trains do. And initial results indicated the 8-axle design wasn't going to work for this cask size. So Atlas became a 12-axle car as well, allowing casks up to nearly 220 tons. They finally passed certification this year, after they fixed some minor problems such as derailing and falling apart.

Now they've started a new procurement process for lighter 8-axle cars as well, this time called 'Fortis,' to lug smaller loads up to ~70 tons -- but that's years away. For now, they spent $33 million and 10 years on the Atlas cars. But before you sigh, they also got these kick-ass cabooses, after splitting their development cost with the Navy, who also uses them -- except the Navy's are painted a certain shade of blue.



These are called REV cars, because they offer "Relaxing Enjoyable Views" for the friendly customer-service representatives that work there. They are bigger than normal cabooses because they are full of candy and ice cream machines. This train must have been behind schedule when I saw them, because they didn't invite me aboard for soft-serve and selfies this time. Dang!


Man, I bet they have fun cookouts on those flatcars too!



From the above-linked Navy presentation, it looks like they take the spent fuel and encase it in carbonite... making these gigantic cylinders:



Then they stack these massive things into warehouses for future generations to ... I dunno, dump into the ocean someday?

Just kidding, of course. They stuff them into hollow trees at night!







It turns out that transporting spent nuclear fuel is actually pretty safe. They only ever crashed one of their casks, and that was in a 1971 big-rig rollover accident:


Oof

The cask was essentially undamaged, and didn't leak any radioactive materials at all. In fact, after they scooped it out of the ditch and delivered it for unloading... they essentially just dusted it off, repainted it, and kept using it. That it didn't leak at all was particularly impressive, because apparently such casks leak a bit of radioactive goo from time to time. Never enough to matter, of course, but probably enough to enrage environmentalists... which again, is why we have global warming instead of flying cars today.


All better!

Well, except for the truck itself. That was a loss, and the driver tragically died:



I would like to pause for a moment to reflect on the heroic final acts of this unnamed driver, who swerved off-pavement to avoid an oncoming big-rig that had veered into the oncoming lane. A head-on collision might well have damaged the cask; swerving into the ditch instead cost this driver his (or perhaps her) life, but likely reduced the violence borne upon the cask and its hazardous contents. I deeply enjoy satirical writing, but there's nothing funny about this fatal crash. The driver died, and in doing so, saved the greater public from greater risk of a radiological disaster.

They changed the trailer design after this crash, to keep the center of gravity lower. There were no more rollover accidents, but one of the trailers buckled in half under the cask's weight in 1978. In another incident five years later... the axles fell off. Perhaps this is why they sought to put the fuel casks on trains instead?

By the time they were hauling away core debris from Three Mile Island in 1987, they had apparently switched to using trains... you know, for safety. Of course, that train crashed into a car stalled on the tracks... but the fuel was undamaged. Or I should say: the melted-down core debris wasn't damaged any further.





There are some nuclear materials that are still carried by truck today. But those trucks look like this:



That's a friendly ice-cream van up front.





Congratulations again @AMMO461 for your (1) can of Coor's Light -- COLD AS THE ROCKIES(TM)!!!!

 

Thank you for the Friday beer, and to add to your vast travel library, may I present the 3 Mile Island fuel rod transport cask.

 

We're now a year behind... and to be honest I can't even remember if there was a fourth weekend to this series. I think it was supposed to be four episodes though. [Part 1] [Part 2]

In any case, I present:

Voluntober Weekend 3: Annular Eclipse at Bryce Canyon

I’ve come to regret some of the liberties I’ve taken in posting prior trip narratives. Such as blatantly violating the trust of those who welcomed me to visit unique historical sites. Or literally stealing their photos without credit, to accompany my own incoherent narratives posted on a truck forum. I'm not sure if I'm getting any better at this... but here is a less-verbose narrative of last year’s annular eclipse trip, with only a handful of photos stolen from others. Don’t worry, it’s still incredibly long and boring!



I was a bit late to the party, having served out a full work week before rushing towards Bryce Canyon for the event.

Here I was camped out in the Virgin Gorge on the Arizona strip, catching a few hours’ sleep before resuming the drive to the national park:



I was joining a volunteer group to do eclipse-related public outreach at the national park. I arrived partway through the first day’s events--the day prior to the eclipse--to help man an information station at the visitor center, at which we offered solar telescope viewing and reiterated the message: “Don’t look directly at the sun.”


This photo was taken by someone else in the group... hope he doesn't mind my posting it!

Later that day, I helped align the park's largest telescope -- this is something I'm really good at, even though I'm not an astronomer.



Then I cooked up a mess of Rainbow Trout for my bunkmates -- the final triumph of my recently concluded Colorado trip. Later that evening, we set up a smorgasbord of telescopes in the visitor center parking lot, as a practice run for a public stargazing event that would occur on the canyon rim the following night, after the eclipse. Unlike the rest of the group, which comprised actual astronomers who could actually operate these complex telescopes, I would instead be running a public “astrophotography photo booth” adjacent to the stargazing event, offering anyone who wanted a chance to pose beneath the stars and try their hand at light painting. I had purchased a gazillion-pack of small battery-powered LEDs to give away, as well as countless USB thumb drives on which to hand out the processed photos. Here’s the best practice shot:


Hi, mom!

Luckily, the park service had put us up in employee housing for the night, because it was absolutely frigid. I wound up draining my water tank and flushing in some RV antifreeze before turning in for the night. The low was apparently 22F -- fuck that.



The crowds were pouring in by early the next morning. The most dedicated had already staked their claims at the canyon rim by dawn, erecting sturdy tripods to support marvelous telescopes and professional photography gear, all before I could stumble up to the rim, shivering-cold and groggy-eyed, to watch the sunrise.



Our primary objective prior to and during the eclipse was to hand out free eclipse glasses to anyone who needed them, and to field any questions related to the event. Relatively few arrived without their own glasses, but we were also armed with boxes of Ritz crackers to distribute, which it turns out, make delightful 7-aperture pinhole projectors, but only for the fraction of second before you decide to just devour them instead.



I heard over the radio that the park had reached capacity just as the eclipse began. The gates were closed.



This was actually my first-ever annular eclipse. But I had experienced totality in 2017, so I approached this one with somewhat muted expectations, motivated primarily by this public outreach opportunity, rather than seeking a personal epiphany or a pristine photography experience. It paid off, too: While annularity might lack the profound spirituality of totality, it certainly possesses many of the same properties: attracting vast crowds of people to its centerline, with a well-defined start and endpoint enshrined by growing eeriness as the crowds count down in unison. We interacted with tons and tons of enthusiastic people at this event, and honestly, that is just as rewarding as seeing totality on your own.

I paused only briefly to attempt a photograph during annularity. My filter turned out to be several orders of magnitude too opaque. Iso shot up to like 50k to compensate:



Hard to care – thousands of professional photographers had been shooting non-stop all morning, from this one location alone. No chance I could take a better photo than any I would soon find online. I put the camera down and enjoyed the rest of the moment conventionally... staring around in awe with thousands of others.


That night, the stargazing event unfolded splendidly, on the very same canyon rim. Visitors funneled through a gauntlet of telescopes, enjoying vivid imagery of nearby planets and distant galaxies alike, each accompanied by insightful conversations with skilled volunteer astronomers. Then, some of these folks wandered even further, to my improvised photo booth, overlooking this national park’s namesake attraction in full starlit glory, beneath the surreal glow of our galaxy above. I couldn't offer a great deal of skill or insight as I fumbled around with my camera and laptop, but the good news is that I actually had two good friends helping me man the photo booth – they were part of the story the whole time – and thanks to them, the whole thing was a smashing success. Some folks had to wait a while, but everyone wound up with a unique photo or two by which to remember the night.



At the time, I was kind of disappointed by the long wait times, and by the generally imperfect nature of the photos, but I was content to have given it my best shot. In the months since, however, a handful of participants came out of the woodwork to express their enjoyment of the event and to discuss their own enthusiasm for photography. I can’t imagine a more fulfilling outcome. My only regret is that I deleted the exposures from the camera, as I processed each to jpeg to hand out on flash drives. My concern was for their privacy, which was prudent, but I should have also given them the RAWs so they could try their own hand at processing later! What can I say... I’m an amateur at best.

==========​

The next day, as the volunteer group disbanded, I set sights on a somewhat-nearby destination for just one more night in the national parks before heading back to the reality of work: The North Rim of the Grand Canyon. I’d never been there. My friends joined me on this drive too, although they couldn’t stay for the night.



If I’d had my act together, of course, I could have reserved a camping spot on the rim in advance. But I didn’t, so I was elated to secure the only remaining spot from the back-country office upon arriving to the park. Then, I joined my friends at the majestic north-rim lodge as afternoon gave way to evening.



It turned out that this was the final day of normal operations at the North Rim. The following day, the place would close down for the season. Lucky timing, I guess.




So, after enjoying a leisurely evening overlooking the world's most-grandest canyon, with my co-conspirators of the prior night’s ‘astro photo booth’ at Bryce, we parted ways in the parking lot, just as the sun was setting.



My trek to camp would involve backtracking on pavement to just beyond the park boundary, before diverting westward on unpaved forest roads to find this specific postage-stamp of earth I had been allotted at the canyon’s rim. I found myself wishing I had departed earlier as the sunlight faded.



But then, just at the park boundary, I was flagged down by a stranded motorist. Perhaps he or she had run out of gas, I figured... no worries, I’ve got plenty of spare gas. And this stranded motorist had indeed exhausted his vehicle’s range, but it turned out he was driving a Tesla, so fuck-all my jerry cans of premium unleaded could do.



I doubled back to the now-unmanned park entry gate to see if it might offer him a power outlet. Finding none, I returned to inform him that he was properly fucked. But he pleaded to be towed the rest of the way to the north rim, so this is what I did. Part-way through hooking up the tow-line, my friends emerged from the park on their way home, to snap this photo of the unfolding shenanigans:



I was eventually successful in towing this guy up to the lodge parking lot, during which his battery gained several miles of range through regenerative braking.

There are no EV chargers up there, though, so I’m not sure exactly how or if he eventually resolved the situation.

And in hindsight... I think he may well have done this on purpose.

In any case, now well into dusk, I once again set out to find my camp site.



Everything went perfectly until the final mile or two, save for catching this random buffalo off guard, but as I neared camp I was suddenly overtaken by wildfire smoke. They were doing controlled burns--we had driven through one on pavement earlier, and had seen several more in the distance. Well, it turned out my camp site was smack-dab downwind of one.


Driving through a prescribed burn earlier that day...

To add insult to injury, when I got to my permitted camp spot, someone was already there! I sat there checking my maps and the permit, quite intentionally flooding their tent and vehicle with every photon my vehicle could emit. But this prolonged review of my predicament yielded nothing new – this is where I had been permitted to camp, yet someone was already camped there, and nobody had emerged from this tent or vehicle to discuss the matter. And this was the maximal degree of confrontation I could muster.


Shot from the next morning... this WA-tagged Bronco had taken my permitted camp spot! I reviewed this photo with the ranger who had issued my permit, who was again manning the counter when I returned the next morning. We both agreed: Fuck that guy!

So instead I pushed slightly further to a nearby trailhead. A lousier camp site by most metrics -- I simply parked amidst the handful of vehicles, from which a dozen or two backpackers had hiked down into the canyon on a multi-day itinerary. Yet, this spot offered unobstructed views in all directions save for the billowing clouds of choking smoke. Honestly, I would have probably rather camped here anyway, instead of beneath the shelter of the nearby trees. The point was moot, of course, because everything was inundated by smoke, and I was completely exhausted.


In hindsight... those are Starlink flares on the western horizon. View to the northwest.

The smoke eventually cleared somewhat and I tried to photograph the canyon below, but it was a lost cause. I was coughing up charcoal by the next morning.


Airplane trails here, looking to the southwest. To the left: a presumably legally parked Bronco -- one of several -- redeeming my overall perception of the Bronco community... Sure, one ass-hole had illegally camped at my permitted site, but literally every other Bronco I've seen has been super-cool and followed the rules.

Later, I saw some sort of bizarre UFO dart about the skies to the west... perhaps a drone associated with the controlled burns? No way it was a satellite or a fixed-wing aircraft... but then again, there's no way for the human mind to differentiate between a supernatural UFO and anything else in the night sky, such as stars, distant headlights, swamp gas, or covert military aircraft. Heck, I can barely tell the difference between my own ass and a hole in the ground, stone-cold sober in broad daylight, and there I was in total darkness chugging beer and choking on wildfire smoke.

In any case... I wound up watching "Wayne’s World" in the truck cab... and I don’t remember falling asleep or even waking up.


The next morning


Beautiful drive

I stopped back at the North Rim for breakfast... checked in with the back-country ranger to confirm that my permitted site had indeed been illegally occupied.


Misleading breakfast-menu advertisements en-route...

May well have purchased the last breakfast burrito of the 2023 season!

No sign of the Tesla guy, though.




Edit: Oh, but interestingly, we did try getting a photograph of the eclipse from above. Well, my friend did. I don't get to run that camera. But we had run the calcs to see when to trigger it for our best shot at the eclipse. Unfortunately that was still like 400 miles away, and the camera turned out to be pointed in the wrong direction. He sent me the picture though... I forget if this one was it, but dang, it would have been cool to see the moon's shadow on earth's horizon.

 

Killer write-up and photos, as always.

 

Coming Clean

I've been hiding behind the anonymity of the internet for too long. It's time to come clean and let y'all know who I really am.



My name is Burt Macklin, and I'm an elite agent of the US Census Bureau. Or, at least, I was recently loaned a hi-vis vest that said "US Census Bureau," plus, I really liked the show "Parks and Recreation."

In the grand scheme of things, people are like sheep: Tame, productive... but with a distinct taste when you eat them.

Yet day in and day out, wolves lurk in the shadows, seeking strike at the unlucky amidst our innocent herd.

Our Great Shepherd guides us, but can't protect us individually from this ever-present threat of evil.

Enter the dog.



The dog fends of the wolves, and protects our society from harm.

I am one of those dogs.

But not the kind that fends off the wolves -- just to be clear.

I'm more like the kind of dog that... I dunno, passes out in exhaustion from dry-humping a couch cushion, is startled awake by his own flatulence, then aggressively demands to be fed.

In other words -- a critical cog in the system, working invisibly and thanklessly every day, vigilantly ensuring that we all get to live safe and happy lives, on literally the best planet on Earth.



You're welcome.

 

A Journey to California's Rarest Climate Type

This is a shitpost. I haven't gone anywhere new. Just fucking around at work... per usual, on Wikipedia.

I spent a bit too long looking at the below map, titled "Köppen Climate Types of California"




Full-res link

Okay... makes sense... deserts, yep... mediterranean, some semi-arid between... and some tall-ass tundra-capped mountains, sure.
​

But then in the legend, there's that little green box: "Oceanic?"

I scanned the coast. You know, where the ocean is. No green!

What the fuck, Köppen?​

I'm not here to argue, though. I don't know what a 'Climate Type' even is. And I don't care. Now I just want to find the green.

At last -- FOUND IT:



11 pixels of Oceanic right there... in... are you kidding me, Death Valley?

(No, not the valley itself--that's some damn hot desert down there. But within the national park.)

40 million people in this stupid state, and we only get 11 pixels of Oceanic?

Update: I found a few more green pixels to the north. Still, not very many pixels. And no people live in those pixels!!!
​

I was able to figure out where the 11 pixels are by looking at topos. But I went ahead and overlaid the climate map in Google Earth to make sure. It turned out the picture on Wikipedia is a spherical projection, so I can't line it up perfectly. California is too big to let you get away with that bullshit. I got it kind of close, in the area of interest at least.



Sure enough, I've been to at least one of those green pixels. And probably glimpsed the rest of them from a distance. Here's a photo from that adventure:



This place is called "white top mountain" -- see?



Well, I guess you can't quite see at this resolution. But that's what it says. You can actually see where I'm parked, on that white splooch to the left. I scampered up towards the top of White Top Mountain, but soon became convinced that the top would not be as white as advertised. Should have been called "White Splooch To The Left Of It Mountain."

In any case... I got some nice views of the "cold" and "hot desert" climate types to the east.

And to the west, we can glimpse some of that "tundra" climate type in the distance...



Not far away, I found this collapsed mining shack:



In which I found... an apple, sitting on the countertop:



Which seemed very weird, because apples don't typically grow as well in oceanic climate types. Not an apple tree in sight either... or much sign of human activity for decades. Other than this random apple.

In any case, what I didn't see on my trip to this Oceanic Climate Type? A single god-damned ocean!

What the fuck, Köppen?​

 

Wow. This is extremely timely. We camped at your "Oceanic Apple Cabin" on Thanksgiving.

The next day, we hiked down Big Horn Gorge/Canyon, a true slog. Totally worth it, but better if you have a helicopter, since the interesting 3 miles (and 1500 feet of elevation loss) of the hike begins after 3.5 miles (and ~2000 feet) of elevation loss. Actually, going down all of that isn't bad, but then you have to come back up. That's when you need the helicopter. Big drones - or numerous small ones - aren't good enough, because you can't use them in a National Park.

Naturally, to celebrate the day, we ate chicken Phad Thai, and I indulged in an RC Cola I'd somehow acquired on a previous trip.

Also, it is not an ocean up there right now, because nighttime temperatures are about 21°F.

​

 

Awesome!!! I'm cracking open a lukewarm RC Cola to celebrate this epic update!

Was the apple still there? That would be alarming, as my photo was from several years ago. A mid-pandemic Halloween, if I recall... I was worried the apple was haunted!

(But perhaps either this curse, or the Oceanic Climate, might have preserved it?)



I spent Thanksgiving in Flagstaff. Then I rode a train to literally the North Pole. And I got a cool bell to show for it... until my wife decided I shouldn't have the bell any more, as of this morning. I'm plotting to get it back!


Forgot my damn camera this trip... but here's a cool bridge!

Edit: Oh, and a ho-hum little canyon somewhere in Arizona:



Plus, a super-cool bird:

For the record, taken through the car window, following a continuous line of slow-moving traffic...

 

Guess Where This Is, Round ... 4?

===​

I love to rave about the wildly improbable success of America’s decades-long nuclear weapons development program... but to be clear, its crowning achievement wasn’t the shitload of nuclear weapons they successfully developed -- it’s the fact that they never accidentally vaporized a metropolitan area, or even precipitated a major radiological disaster the whole entire time.

Were there tragic missteps, and are there lingering consequences today? Of course!

But if you think America’s nuclear heritage is anything short of astounding, and are anything less than grateful that our continent is even slightly habitable following a half-century of nuclear brinksmanship which yet somehow ended in our own victory... then ask yourself: “Could I afford to buy a nice house near Three Mile Island, or Rocky Flats, or anywhere else impacted by America’s nuclear ‘disasters’?” The answer is probably not, because these were not major disasters, so the property values there are actually very high. Of course, if you are super-rich, then you can afford to buy property anywhere, so maybe this argument is lost on you. Consider donating to the Chernobyl cleanup, then?

America is a uniquely capable nation; our greatest threat isn’t global warming or illegal immigrants or whatever else folks are upset about today. The sole threat is fucking idiots who believe what they read on Facebook. Or Tiktok. Or whatever else comprises social media today. These are the idiots who think America’s nuclear legacy is anything less than amazing.

Nobody listened to these idiots back when our country was busy winning a cold war.

But I digress...

===​

Answer: The B Reactor in Hanford, WA

Winner: NOBODY

Note: Unless otherwise noted, historical photos replicated here are taken from the report 'Historic American Engineering Record B Reactor (105-B Building), HAER No. WA-164' presently available here.


===

​

​

No era of the atomic age was more impressive than its first -- the Manhattan Project -- when literally nobody had any idea what they were doing, yet worked with unprecedented efficacy in an all-out, no-holds-barred frenzy, all under the duress of existential wartime crisis, to achieve a spectacular success that forever changed the world. And in my opinion, no chapter of the Manhattan Project was more utterly, implausibly successful, than the development of the “B Reactor” in Hanford, WA.


B Reactor, January 1945

Why was it called the “B” reactor, given that it was the first full-scale reactor ever built, not to mention the first built at Hanford, where no “A” reactor was ever built? It is tempting to think its naming was because, at the time they decided to build it, there had only been one other reactor ever brought to criticality on earth. (Sites of nuclear fission had occurred naturally on geological time scales... I’m guessing, due to, like, geology? But this geology was unknown at the time, and is irrelevant to our story.) So logically, this would make Hanford’s B Reactor the second in our modern timeline, and thus deserving the letter ‘B’ in our alphabet, right?


Chicago Pile 1, image from Wikipedia

Well, not exactly. That first reactor was hastily constructed beneath the stadium bleachers at the University of Chicago, by Enrico Fermi’s group in late 1942... and to quote its creator, it was "a crude pile of black bricks and wooden timbers." Chicago Pile-1 reached a peak power of 200 W – and only briefly, due to the overt radiological hazard that posed -- most of its contributions to science occurred at single-digit if not fractional watts of operating power. Yet based on this, they started construction of three 250 MW reactors at Hanford; the first of which to go critical would be the B reactor.

To skip over some subtleties here, that’s a lot like watching the Wright Flyer putter haphazardly above the beach a few times, then immediately starting construction of three Boeing 747s. And then having the first of them enter revenue service less than two years later. (Oh, and to keep the analogy going, after some plumbing upgrades in the 50’s, all three of them became space shuttles, reaching 2 GW in operation!) They all worked essentially perfectly, or at least without ever crashing or blowing up like real 747s and space shuttles, until they simply weren’t needed any more, because of how vastly successful they had been ever since they were blindly and hastily constructed in the 1940s.


X-10 reactor, image from Wikipedia

To double-back to those subtleties: The B Reactor wasn’t built blindly on the heels of Fermi’s CP-1 — it’s just that its development timeline overlapped with the intermediate steps. There was indeed a critical stepping stone between our Wright Flyer and Hanford’s thundering seven-fours... A nimble Cessna or perhaps even a King Air was constructed at Oak Ridge – the air-cooled X-10 reactor at Clinton (Oak Ridge) – which went critical and soon reached 500 kW by late 1943. This was crucial to refining the final design of Hanford’s production reactors. But timeline-wise, construction of the X-10 was well-underway before Fermi’s CP-1 ever went critical, and ground had been broken at Hanford months before X-10 was even fueled. Also, at some point they brought a liquid-phase “water boiler” reactor to criticality at Los Alamos, although this was for an entirely different purpose. So, Hanford’s B Reactor was perhaps actually the fourth manmade reactor to go critical (I’m not sure exactly). Without doubt, it was the first of its scale, but by no metric was it the second in history, so... why did they start with ‘B’?

There is no way anything so strategically ambitious and technologically well-executed could happen today – at least not in our country.

===​

I first came here in the before-days... before the pandemic, and before I had a camera...


Apparently the only photo I've retained from the 2019 visit... my instagram debut!

That first trip is cemented in my memory not only by its sights, sounds, and smells; but by the phone call I had with my wife on the bus ride back to Richmond that afternoon. I hadn’t specifically told her about this side-trip to Hanford – not out of secrecy or anything – but just because it was a tentative plan at the tail-end of a work-trip to Seattle. She knew that, if time permitted, I would spend my last day in Washington sight-seeing... like any other work trip to any other destination. Yet after our phone greetings that afternoon, her first question was:

“Hey, do we have any iodine pills?”

I was perplexed... “You mean, like nutritional supplements? They already put iodine in salt.”

“No,” she said, “like for radiation.”

I naturally assumed her questioning had something to do with my day’s activities. I had likely posted some pictures on social media by then, but to this day, neither my wife nor I generally follow each other’s social media, which I think is healthy. But our families do, so I wondered if word had gotten back to her. “Is this about touring the plutonium reactor today?” I asked, “Don’t worry, it’s perfectly safe, it’s a national park – and you absolutely have to see this place yourself!”

There was a bit of confusion following that... but it turned out she had just watched the first episode of the HBO miniseries “Chernobyl.” And was legitimately concerned about surviving a radiological disaster. (I caught up as soon as I got home, and holy crap, did we enjoy watching the remaining five episodes together as they came out!)



“Yeah, we have plenty of iodine pills,” I assured her, “in the box with the Geiger counters, but I’m not sure where that is...”

“Okay, well I’m glad you had fun at the plutonium reactor, dear!” she said. “Drive safe back to Seattle --I’ll see you tonight!”

I’m still not exactly sure where that box is...

It is interesting to ponder the similarities and differences between Hanford's production reactors and the ill-fated Soviet RBMK reactors. All were graphite-moderated, as is necessary to breed plutonium from natural uranium. And were water cooled, although only the final and most-modern of the US reactors, the 1963 N-Reactor, was designed to produce electrical power, as were the RBMKs. One key difference is that the RBMKs were designed to be cost-effective in this role; in fact, I don't think they ever actually used them to produce plutonium, despite their intentional design to be capable of doing so. The US N-Reactor was designed first and foremost as a production reactor, with power production given lower priority, thus making it less cost-effective as a power reactor -- although certainly more beneficial than the eight other production reactors that preceded it at Hanford. Although detailed analysis concluded that the N reactor was intrinsically safe with regards to the type of power excursion that destroyed Chernobyl, that disaster did ultimately play a role in the decision to shut N-Reactor down for good in the late 80s. (In addition to the fact that ... well, they simply didn't need any more plutonium!)


Ooh, found another from '19 -- a cellphone pano!

One could write thousands of pages just on the differences between these reactor types, and how that impacted their operational histories, but I think we can agree on the key, fundamental difference between the US and Soviet graphite-moderated reactors:

--> None of the US ones blew up <--​

​

===​

Returning now for my second visit, I was hoping to focus more on photography, what with my new-fangled camera and all. This proved difficult, as the place is just so utterly amazing, it’s nearly impossible to resist zoning out and simply gazing upon the bizarre juxtaposition of technological complexity and elegant simplicity on display here:


Hand-painted cinderblock walls with simple signage...


The intricate plumbing of a two-gigawatt reactor face


IT'S HYUUUGE

Note that the plumbing on display here was modified from the original ‘pigtail’ configuration to support ~2 GW operating power in the 1950s. As originally built in the 1940s, for a design power of 250 MW, each channel here carried up to ~20 GPM of cooling water, fed directly (via processing plants) from the Columbia river, at a velocity of ~20 feet per second surrounding the fuel plugs, through an annular gap of 0.086” – that’s just over a sixteenth of an inch -- one of the more crucial dimensions to the reactor’s design. So at any given time, there were only ~400 gallons of water within the reactor itself. Of course, only the central process tubes required maximal cooling; the outer tubes were divided into a handful of zones where smaller flow orifices were installed to restrict the flow.


Original 'pigtail' configuration, Feb 1945

So critical was the flow of water in each process channel, that each was individually instrumented on this massive panel spanning the west side of the control room:





This pre-dates the era of remote sensors much less digital busses. I suspect I could accomplish the same thing with maybe a hundred grand worth of networked pressure transducers and desktop PC today. But gazing upon this historical control room: I’m pretty sure they plumbed pressure-sense capillaries to the back-side of each flow gauge on this panel... at least based on the signage above – I have to assume the physical transduction took place here rather than remotely. In any case, this panel represented the bleeding edge of instrument miniaturization at the time this place was built. It spans several hundred square feet. And it totally worked... at least well enough to win a Cold War.


The wiring and plumbing behind that panel... simply amazing!


All amidst elegant simplicity...


Hello??? Can you imagine building a full-scale nuclear reactor without so much as a single integrated circuit? Me neither!

===
​

Unfortunately, about half-way through today’s tour, my camera’s SD card shit the bed -- fuck!

We had been bussed in, so I didn’t have my full camera bag with spare SD cards. However, I had at least brought my laptop, which I had left on the bus. Retreating back to my seat, I did my best to recover and copy data from the compromised card, knowing that I would have to reformat it to continue shooting, yet weary of the rapidly dwindling time remaining to explore this most-fascinating place. It was largely a lost battle -- essentially all of that morning's shots were garbled. I eventually gave up, reformatted the card, and rushed back to re-shoot some of the more favorable compositions, still hoping to fulfill at least some of the remaining agenda. Unfortunately, the added rush and distraction seems to have sapped my limited photography skills for the remainder of the visit. I can’t say for sure, of course, but I likely lost my best work from that day, not to mention the handful of reasonable photos I’d taken during a spectacular morning drive up the Columbia, including an absolutely impressive close-up of a Bald Eagle taken out the window of a speeding pickup truck. I don’t mean to complain, though; I’m only justifying the lackluster results. This is a really fascinating place -- I would visit here again, camera or not.



Interestingly, from the bus, I did glance the spectacle of a small helicopter restringing nearby transmission lines... and after finally reformatting the card, I managed to snap some pictures, albeit from considerably greater distance than this bizarre circus had initially passed by the reactor.

===​

...anyway, back to the tour! All prior photos are of course re-shot after the card failure, but we’ll pick up the narrative as if it hadn’t happened.


Ever wonder why we speak English in America? Because of England, dummy! But here's part of the reason we didn't have to switch to speaking Russian following WWII.


View from the back door. I wish we could step back further to do justice to the iconic smokestack here.


Speaking of iconic... how about this entry corridor?


Oohh...


And speaking of corridors, here's the ventilation corridor on the opposing side of the building. They really had to think of everything here... and they pretty much did. There is no finer example of the symbiosis of scientific innovation, industrial might, and effective leadership that flourished in 20th century America, than Hanford's' B-Reactor.

Now... to the valve pit, which initially carried ~30,000 GPM of treated Columbia River water on its way to the reactor face (eventually upgraded to carry over twice that in later years):


I was told on my 2019 visit that the valve covers here were removed specifically to allow Russian inspectors to verify that there’s no water flowing through the reactor, as part of an arms treaty.



Which is laughable, because they could also just look outside, and see that the massive water treatment works that once cooled this reactor have been permanently erased from the surrounding landscape! (And with modern technology, the thermographic signatures of an operating nuclear production reactor would be easily discernable even from space.) Nonetheless, it is worth noting that the scale of this reactor was thoroughly dwarfed by that of its cooling infrastructure... I suspect that far more was spent on the water works than the reactor itself.


One of the several massive water plants that once fed this reactor... all long gone.


All that remains today is the reactor building itself.

This is easily the most spectacular and engaging historical site I’ve ever toured. I would kill for a chance to explore beyond the boundaries of the public tour access areas. Here is an example of a ‘beyond the barriers’ tour, from someone who works in nuclear technology education:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6j7wksLhaw

Okay, okay... I wouldn’t actually kill anyone for this – that's a figure of speech of course! But... if you can get me in on such a tour, and need someone to disappear forever... maybe shoot me a PM before we take anything off the table. As a figure of speech of course.


Yours truly at the controls...


Hash Tag SAFETY FIRST!


Inconceivable complexity

The commentary provided by tour docents can be equally distracting, although if you are hoping to interact with the actual people that ran or at least worked at these reactors during the Cold War production era, then your opportunity is rapidly closing. I’m afraid that the folks I interacted with in 2024 knew far less about this reactor than the crew hosting my 2019 visit. I don’t mean that as a point of criticism. This is a simple fact of reality, just like all other historical relics of the Cold War era. People are alive today who actually worked there. But they are rapidly growing too old to act as tour docents. You should visit these places as soon as you possibly can, to best connect with what remains of the living history.


Choo choo, motherfucker!

On display outside is an example trainset... the likes of which would have been used to haul casks of irradiated fuel to one of the nearby chemical processing plants, for extraction of the plutonium. This was to a certain degree an even crazier aspect of Hanford’s heritage – and is not something you can tour today. And likely not ever... while people routinely worked all around the production reactors throughout their history, the chemical vats of the separation plants were off-limits from the day they were first commissioned. Everything had to be remotely operated, and they somehow figured out how to do this with 1940s technology!



I can wrap my head around nuclear reactors, but not chemical separation plants. This shit was black magic. It worked, but generated huge amounts of radioactive waste as by-products. They pumped this waste into holding tanks nearby, but over the years, many of those tanks developed massive leaks. So today, these chemical plants, the hundreds of radioactive waste tanks nearby, and the vast quantities of radioactive waste they’ve already seeped into the ground, are the major ongoing problem at Hanford -- not the production reactors themselves, which have all been safely decommissioned and/or turned into national park museums.


Now that's a spicy meatball!

The problem is that the whole area is a desert – so there are no hollow oak trees into which they can stuff barrels of the radioactive waste at night. It’s a hot mess -- literally.

===​

It is hard to visit a place as spectacular as this, or for example to gaze upon one of the remaining Saturn-V rockets like those that carried humans to the moon over 50 years ago, and not lament the increasingly luffing sails of scientific innovation in the US today. I fear that the growing masses of people today, who blindly fear nuclear technologies or stubbornly deny factual history such as the moon landings, might now outnumber the people smart enough to enable even greater things in the future. And that's fucking depressing.


World-changing industrial might... now a national park. See it yourself!

 

Okay, now catching up on some old business -- an incomplete trip report from 2022! I happen to have that older hard drive hooked up for other reasons today, and am finally able to access the photos to accompany this long-overdue trip narrative.

Don't worry, this is only a temporary deviation from the thread's master plan -- I will eventually bore you all to death with long-winded irrelevant content!


Trip Report: Colorado 2022, day 6

Since it's been a while, here's a quick recap:

Day 1: Departed LA like 16 hours late, made camp near Cima Dome to avoid the sweltering summer heat, slept for like an hour or two.
Day 2: Forged across southern Utah to reach Page, AZ by late afternoon to see Glen Canyon Dam and Horseshoe Bend, arriving to Monument Valley by nightfall to enjoy fine dining and the convenience of a hotel.
Day 3: Toured Monument Valley, then Goosenecks SP, and finally Natural Bridges NM, before ascending to Bears Ears to make camp, only to realize that neither of us knew how to cook any of the food we'd packed.
Day 4: Skipped breakfast due to eggs being frozen solid. Descended from Bears Ears into Beef Basin only to be defeated in battle by a large tumbleweed, then encountered a road crew working Bobby's Hole. Eventually descended into then traversed Canyonlands Needles District with relative ease, reaching camp in daylight to feast upon vast quantities of beef.
Day 5: Awoke brutally hungover; exited Canyonlands via Elephant Hill. Proceeded to Colorado, reaching Ouray via Imogene Pass, only to discover that the brewery was closed. Enjoyed dining at a new-to-us restaurant and staying at a new-to-us hotel.

===
​

Ouray opens up early, so I got up at 7 to go explore the hardware store. I bought so many things I didn’t need… but here’s my favorite:



It’s the world’s tiniest cast-iron frying pan! What’s it even for? I have no idea. I assume it’s for cooking… I mean, I found it in the cookware section, not the toy section. Is it for frying a single egg? I wouldn’t get a chance to find out, because our eggs were still frozen rock-solid in my fridge. But either way, I knew one thing for sure: I had to have this thing--whatever it was!

2024 Update: I have never used this thing or even identified its purpose, yet deeply cherish owning it.

Traffic was thick as ever heading up to the Alpine Loop. I decided to forego Mineral Creek in favor of the Corkscrew route—I just love those red mountains. My dad’s never seen any of the back country up here anyway.



I got a harsh reminder not to launch the flying camera with a cold half-charged battery. I brought it into a hover from the roadside and then hopped back into the truck per usual, directing the former to climb over the chasm to our right while shifting the latter back into gear to continue the drive. But it quickly became evident that the drone lacked enough power to maintain altitude, and by the time I had stopped the truck again to give the situation my full attention, the thing had already descended below the road grade. Facing a split-second decision between unlandable rocky hillsides for hundreds of feet in all directions, or a sketchy dive beyond visual range hoping for a more survivable but potentially unhikable landing site under limited and dwindling control authority, I wound up just crashing it as close to the road as I could manage, after which it tumbled a few dozen yards further down the slope. I scrambled down the unstable hillside to retrieve the stupid thing, and as much of its shattered rotors as I could find. I’d finally done it… the thing was unflyable!

Luckily I had a spare set of rotors so I was able to effect a repair and get it flying at our next stop atop the pass. I was amazed how much quieter and more responsive it was than before. I bet I’d been flying with mangled rotors for quite some time. Battery life seemed a lot longer as well. Who knew?

Here’s a shot I captured after replacing the rotors and sending the camera aloft again:

Good as new!


Corkscrew pass




A cherished place


Can’t not photograph this thing, each time I pass by...


Some kind of... flower?


Some kind of ... bird?


Some kind of .. bicycle?



I stopped at Como lake to see if there were any fish there. Nope. And not in the usual sense where I simply can’t catch them, so I proclaim they don’t exist. In this case I genuinely think it’s a dead lake. Not a single fish jumped, and no signs of regular visitation by anglers. Not that I’m an expert at this, but I didn’t waste much more time testing the theory, as far-better fishing lied ahead. Plus another thunderstorm was rolling in and the lightning was getting too close for comfort.





Animas Forks was an absolute shit-show. My photo doesn’t do it justice -- the lots were jam-packed; no fewer than three massive Jeep convoys were making their way through the area. I overheard one of them on the CB; they were about to head out, so I rushed in vain to try beating them out of the lot. No luck there; I wound up walled-in behind the growing queue. But to great relief they all departed the way I had come, so I wasn’t stuck behind traffic as we cut our way up towards Engineer Pass—easily one of my top-two favorite routes eastward from here.



The lot had cleared out substantially after the convoys left.



Beautiful views from Engineer Pass...



The final approach to Lake City was another source of frustration. Descending from the pass, I had pulled over to let a convoy of side-by-sides pass me. They can usually drive a lot faster than I want to up here, plus I had the flying camera aloft and would need to land it at some point, so I decided to pull aside when I first saw them emerge behind me in the video feed, to retrieve the drone, stretch my legs, and... well, just enjoy the views. We made a number of other sight-seeing stops descending the grade, but the UTVs must have dawdled as well, because I wound up stuck behind the same convoy just as the rocky trail gave way to the glass-smooth graded county road covering the final but lengthy approach to Lake City. Only now, they had inexplicably slowed to like 20 MPH and were stubbornly straddling the middle of the road.


Actual footage of me pulling over, to allow the UTV convoy to overtake me, earlier that day

To be clear, it’s quite normal to wind up stuck behind slower vehicles on high-country Jeep trails, where the opportunities to pass are few and far between, or where the challenge of the terrain tends to divert one’s attention from the rear view mirror for long periods of time. But never have I encountered a slower vehicle that didn’t eventually yield the way, nor have I ever intentionally skipped an opportunity to safely pull aside for faster traffic to overtake me. But down here, we were driving a graded two-lane county road. Wide enough for opposing dump trucks to pass by one another at highway speeds. This is the kind of road where you don’t usually need to pull aside for faster traffic – you can simply drive your desired speed within your own lane, and faster traffic can pass you whenever they want in the opposing lane. But this system is based on the critical concept of “lanes” which I’m afraid is lost on the UTV community, perhaps due to their inability to differentiate between left and right, but more likely due to their innate selfishness, constant inebriation, and inability to comprehend even kindergarten-level social awareness. It should go without saying that the technological marvel we know as the “rear-view mirror” is simply beyond the grasp of their intellect. In any case, they stubbornly and continuously straddled the center of the road, mile after mile.


I don’t have a picture of the UTV fiasco, but here’s a shot of the ‘Hidden Treasure’ dam at the Ute and Ulay, taken just before we caught up with the logjam.

A line of Jeeps grew behind me as our collective impatience grew to a boil. Finally, one towards the rear had had enough. He charged around us, which began in an orderly fashion because those of us driving highway vehicles were aware of the concepts of lanes, and had given this driver plenty of space to pass on our left. Things got sketchy when he came to the UTVs, which stuck steadfast to their claim of both lanes of travel... presumably too busy watching TikTok videos to notice our hero Jeep as he squeezed by them on the left, with only inches to spare between tree trunks and boulders on one side, and these selfish drunken idiots on the other. Through the dust we gazed, hoping for a glimmer of intelligence or situational awareness to emerge from the convoy – a hope that dwindled as we watched the trailing UTVs stubbornly ignored this perilous overtaking, and disappeared as the Jeep cleared the lead UTV by mere inches without prompting so much as a tap of the brakes or nudge of the steering wheel from any of these braindead ass-clowns.

Another Jeep soon followed suit, but then very overtly cut-off and brake-checked the leading UTV before speeding away, sending a ripple of brake lights down the chain of morons. Yet the UTVs stubbornly stuck to the center of the road, inching along at inexplicably slow speeds. I jumped in behind the third overtaking Jeep, chasing closely at his heels, hoping his presence might perhaps nudge some of the UTVs slightly towards the correct side of the road, but unfortunately it was white-knuckle driving for both of us, all the way to the front. It was some of the sketchiest, most ass-hole driving I’ve ever done, and under any other circumstances I’d have felt really bad about it. Yet the UTVers never moved even slightly to the correct side of the road as we overtook them. And of course, no sooner than I had passed the convoy leader, we rounded the final bend into Lake City, making me the ultimate ass-clown of the whole situation. Not only had I spent more time stuck behind these idiots than any of the motorists behind me, but I had done some pretty reckless overtaking, placing myself and others at needless peril, for absolutely no benefit.

In any case: absolutely and without doubt, fuck the whole entire UTV community, thoroughly and mercilessly, and fuck these specific UTV drivers in particular. Whatever these fuckheads were doing, they were very-much doing it on purpose, just to be ass-holes to the rest of us on the road.

Sadly, just as Ouray is a Jeep town, Lake City is a side-by-side town, so these idiots are EVERYWHERE here! I sincerely hope that Hinsdale County, the State of Colorado, and the federal government of the United States, will update their UTVs regulations to include a strict spay/neuter policy, because these people should not be allowed to breed.

Jesus. Fucking. Christ.

This is of course hyperbole, but speaks to the importance of being a decent human being, and realizing that our individual actions impact public perception of the broader group of people we represent. This was a single encounter with a group of perhaps 12 UTVs that day. Yet based on this single experience, I would wholeheartedly support a nation-wide ban on UTVs across all public lands and roads, as well as a forced sterilization program for UTV drivers. The latter is a deeply alarming thing to say, but I'm not going to backpedal it. All because of the behavior of like 12 ass holes on this one day in 2022. So in conclusion... just don't be an ass-hole to other people!

To add insult to injury, the BBQ joint at the gas station was closed for the day. Just that one day. I have yet to actually eat there. Dang!


I mean, the place was open, but there was no BBQ!



We had some great food and drinks at the brewery instead, and I aired up while waiting for the order and contemplating our next move.


How cool is this? Hinsdale County Deputies get to drive tricked-out T4Rs!!!

I had wanted to drive up to the Crested Butte region to find a good fishing spot for the rest of the day. But that area was blanketed with thunderstorms, and forecasts suggested they would linger, whereas rain would be light and intermittent in Lake City. So, I decided, we’d camp here instead, and try our luck at Lake San Cristobal. I figured that would be a more difficult lake to fish for novices like us … but I was looking forward to staying dry, and not worrying as much about getting struck by lightning.

We wound up getting a camp site right at the lake, and immediately set about fishing. I don’t have any photos at all – that’s how serious I was about catching our dinner that night. I strung up the new rod I’d purchased for my dad to use, then we both tried our luck casting from shore. Nothing. After an hour or so, I inflated my boat and rowed out into the lake. There, I was at least surrounded by jumping fish, but the stupid ass-holes just wouldn’t bite. I tried lures, powerbait, worms, salmon eggs, marshmellows, then lures again. Well into dusk, I decided to throw in the towel. I started rowing back to camp, but left the line in the water, trolling the lure. “Fishing is stupid,” I figured, “who cares if I lose my lure to a snag at this point?” Well sure enough, the line did snag; the rod suddenly dipped down and I felt the boat slow. Shit! Now I’d lost another lure!

But to my delight, it turned out the lure wasn’t stuck on a rock or a log. It had hooked a nice trout! (If I recall, the fish was around 8 pounds, and bilingual!) I pulled up a second one with the same technique as I continued rowing back to camp. I guess I have a new method that seems to catch fish, at least on this lake on that day: Haphazardly trolling a spinner behind an inflatable rowboat designed for children in near-total darkness. I had thrown and retrieved the same lure a hundred times already that night. I'm not sure why it suddenly started working, but hot damn, we had some fish to eat!

I remembered to finally grab a camera and start taking photos about halfway through the meal:


Yum!

Setting up camp and cooking dinner in darkness kind of sucked, but hey, at least we had some fish to eat. Mission accomplished. Sorry to our neighbor who crawled into his tent promptly at dusk. I didn’t see that loser catching any fish though, so hopefully he enjoyed eating a bag of Doritos in his shitty little tent while I noisily cooked up a proper feast and then drunkenly set up a tent.


Lakeside camp

 

Preach! Shit is out of control, I need to take a Xanax before taking a popular trail around here. Luckily the giant swarms don't seem to do as many of the difficult trails that I prefer, but the lack of self-awareness and respect for the trail, nature, and others is insane.

 

I love that the local sheriff's use Toyotas. Ouray sheriff drove FJ's years back.

 

Driving up to Cinnamon Pass a couple years ago with @bot102, @Littles, and a couple other TW folks, we had a run-in with somebody in a new Bronco. He was ripping up the trail and passing us without giving us time pull aside. Yelled at him about etiquette a bit when he passed me just below the saddle, got flipped the bird, and watched him take off down towards Animas Forks without stopping. Coming down the pass, we ran into somebody coming up from the other direction who had to stop because this douche had parked diagonally in the middle of the trail to get an Instagram photo or Youtube clip or whatever. People suck.

 

Trip Report: Colorado 2022, day 7

It had been a fun week with the old man, but it was time to bid him farewell today – I had to get him to Glenwood Springs in time to catch his train back to the shithole state in which he resides. Of course, Colorado is the best state in America, so one could argue that all other states are shitholes by comparison. But many states are nearly as awesome as Colorado and thus underserving of ‘shithole’ status—including California, where I live, as well as all other states in the Pacific and Mountain time zones, plus at least Alaska and Hawaii, and possibly most other states as well, except for where my Dad lives. For example, I've heard good things about Tennessee and the eastern seaboard. But my dad was travelling to the Midwest, which is an undeniable shithole by any metric. Too bad for him!

We awoke to an early alarm and packed up camp in a rush, but then we remembered that this is America, so his train would likely be several hours late. He called the train hotline to confirm this fact, then we took our time checking out and chatting with the campground host. Great guy!

Today we’re heading north to Glenwood Springs via no-shenanigans highways. (We don’t want to miss the already-hours-late train, after all.) Crossing Blue Mesa Reservoir revealed an abysmally low pool, and in hindsight, I wish it had occurred to me to see if I could identify the old D&RG grade down there. Instead I just took this picture of some cars parked out where there should normally be boats, as we passed over the bridge.


Note the full-pool line visible to the right. There should normally be a gigantic lake beneath this bridge.

Following the most direct route, which in Colorado sometimes isn’t actually that direct, we followed the north bank of the Gunnison towards Hotchkiss along SR 92. Just past Blue Mesa Dam, I had scoured the maps in advance to identify a little sliver of highway from which I could legally operate the drone as we skirted the upper canyon:



Then, it was slow-going along the north rim until we finally escaped this wretched terrain just after Hermit’s Rest.



The view from Hermit’s Rest southward is a bit misleading. We’re looking down at Morrow Point Reservoir, with its dam just out of view to the right of the visible pool. We’ve just emerged from skirting the canyon rim to the left, having wasted hours steering through its six million hairpin turns. But beyond the end of the reservoir, far-right-center in the photo, there appears to be a gigantic gap leading to low plains in the distance. Clearly, this is where the river should flow, right? Think of how much easier that would be!

Well, the stupid river didn’t see it that way, so instead it forged its way westward through a deep and formidable canyon – the Black Canyon of the Gunnison. The gap that appears to lead to lower terrain as viewed from Hermit's Rest, is in fact a tributary feeding into the Gunnison on its way into this canyon (the Cimarron River), joining it just below Morrow Point Dam. And although roads and rails typically follow rivers through their valleys and canyons as the obvious path of least resistance, there is not, has never been, nor will there ever be a road or railway route constructed through the Black Canyon of the Gunnnison. It’s a challenge for even skilled kayakers to navigate its class-V rapids – I’m pretty sure the vast majority of them die each year. The former D&RG route from Gunnison, now buried beneath the modern reservoir before us, diverted from the river’s course here and climbed upwards through the gigantic gap (again, somewhat visible to the far right above) ascending this tributary, to bypass the utterly untamable canyon to the west. Recall that this is the same railroad that fought and won a war to lay its rails through the rugged Royal Gorge. Yet even the D&RG wasn’t dumb enough to attempt forging a grade through the Black Canyon. Here’s a photo of its route up and out of the canyon, through that prominent gap, taken on a prior trip and looking back towards the river just downstream of the dam (the crest of the dam is just barely visible in the background, above the caboose):


Here we can see why this route was abandoned: The railroad designers forgot to build train tracks connecting their train bridge to anything else! This train engine has been stuck here for over 100 years.

Historical note: Efforts to complete a modern highway through the Black Canyon were briefly considered, but to this day, SR92 veers north here, rather than continuing through the canyon directly to Grand Junction. Preliminary surveys conducted at Hermits Rest in the 1990s indicated that most drivers would rather plunge their vehicles over the cliff edge than endure so much as a single additional hairpin turn on this bullshit fucking highway. The thought of hearing the terrified final screams of their loved ones during this fatal plummet was ranked as universally favorable to the thought of encountering even a single additional rumble-strip along the route. The study was terminated prematurely due to the alarming frequency of violence among responders, but based even on its preliminary results, the projected costs of suicide barriers alone was deemed to be cost-prohibitive for completion of the route. Furthermore, the local economy was judged to be inadequate for supplying a sufficient quantity of barf bags necessary for anticipated traffic volumes, should the route be constructed. Ultimately, none of the survey participants really wanted to go to Grand Junction anyway, and instead lamented their decision to drive SR92 in the first place while vowing to never again make this mistake.
​

Hermit's Rest

So with this bit of history in mind, we followed the highway northbound towards Crawford, glad to forever be done with this godforsaken bullshit stretch of road, its relentless hairpin turns, and the infuriatingly nagging drone of its three million rumble strips, which for no good reason, all span both lanes of travel. The nausea and motion sickness had worn off by Hotchkiss, and by Paonia, we were able to top off the tank without risking a rage-fueled altercation with the inanimate gas pump, even though I was still praying for the stupid sun to just fucking explode already.


A Random Bug at Hermit's Rest

So... should be an easy drive up and over McClure from here, right?

===​

Well, I had another trick up my sleeve--another obscure novelty of Colorado I had stumbled across when scanning the satellite maps in years prior, that I now wanted to glimpse myself. After passing through Paonia, the first hint as to our bizarre destination came into view… a gigantic coal-mining operation (and associated railroad) – I can’t figure out what name(s) to use here, but it’s all part of Bill Koch’s ‘Oxbow’ empire. That’s right--one of the Koch brothers. No, not one of the Koch brothers, but literally, their brother. This Koch brother didn’t play the same pivotal role in financing conservative politics like the Koch brothers did, but is nonetheless a super ridiculously rich guy who owns things like coal mines and railroads—we’re talking fuck-you money and then some. The internet estimates his net worth at around $4B -- so, approximately $4B more than my current net worth, although I'm hoping to narrow that gap by winning the PowerBall™ lottery twelve times consecutively.


Oxbow-owned coal mine at Somerset... which recently decided to stop providing municipal water to the town's residents.

That kind of money can buy you a lot. For example, it can get you a 6400-acre ranch west of Crested Butte. Helicopters to whisk you and your guests to and from this ranch to anywhere else... for example, any of your four separate luxury estates in Aspen. You could even build your own wild-west frontier town out there if you wanted—with over 50 buildings, including a 21,000 square foot mansion—the single largest residence in Gunnison County.

You could also fly in the executives that ran your mining company to confront them and allegedly hold them against their will after discovering they’d stolen and embezzled your money, which also happened here, but that’s kind of a side-story. (Note: Koch maintained his innocence, and the legal case was dismissed.)

So back to that wild-west frontier town… I’m talking horses and wagons, boardwalks and hoopskirts, massive Victorian homes, a saloon, a blacksmith's shop, a school house, a brothel, a general store, and even a train station—plus a whole-ass steam train with a fucking whistle and bell!

What better a place to locate your vast collection of over a million relics of the Old West, including a single photograph you purchased for $2.3 million?

Make no mistake: this isn’t tucked away on a paltry postage stamp of your typical barren western-slope shitscape--this is a vast swath of workable mid-elevation beautiful ranching terrain, with ample water rights, surrounded by spectacular peaks, completely off-limits to everyone else, and almost completely out of view to the general public.

This is the dream that only fuck-you money can buy.

‘Wild Bill’ Koch made it a reality here. And now I’m lumbering up a little-used road on a sliver of public land that bisects it, hoping to catch a glimpse of its glory. Say what you want, but this has to be one of the most American things in all of America. I have nothing negative to say about Bill Koch; as far as I'm concerned, the man is literally the American Dream.



And there it was: Bear Ranch. (Crop-zooms to follow below!)

This was one of the most bizarre random things I’ve stumbled across while scouring satellite maps over the years, looking for interesting places to camp, or for back-country driving routes to explore. What drew my initial attention was a just a gravel road bypassing Paonia Reservoir to the east. Perhaps I could follow this road, so as to spend less time on pavement if I was driving through the area? It’s supposedly a county road--Route 2 according to online maps--but then again, the satellite images showed pretty clear evidence of massive gates near both ends of that road. And partway along its length was this massive old-west frontier town, with huge adjoining structures still under construction, all with oddly detailed parcel data suggesting the whole place was quite recently built. That’s all it took—I was intrigued. What was this place, adjacent to this potentially drivable gravel road, with its intentionally unpaved streets, boardwalk sidewalks, and literally a whole-ass steam train, out in the middle of nowhere?


Whole-ass steam train partially visible behind rightmost structure

It took me quite some time to figure it out. Pondered it for days, checking increasingly esoteric maps and guessing increasingly creative search terms. “Steam Engine Paonia Colorado?” Nope. “Frontier-Town Resort Kebler Pass?” Nope. Was it a government facility? Could I find anything based on the parcel addresses? … Search after search kept turning up dry. I love this kind of shit!


Wonder which one is the brothel... planning to win some lottery money any day now!

I don’t remember how I figured it out in the end, but eventually I stumbled upon a series of articles [1] [2] [3] describing the property, as well as some controversy surrounding it and its owner. (Note: all three references are good here, but I recommend #2 as the most insightful and relevant to the following discussion.) I’m not here to comment on any of that, save for this: Several years ago, Koch sought to acquire a strip of public land bisecting this ranch – the one I’m driving across today – which would finally put this private frontier-town wonderland out of public view forever, and would join the two huge parcels comprising Bear Ranch into a contiguous empire with an overwhelmingly more-convex perimeter. To be fair, in exchange, he offered the government larger swaths of arguably more valuable lands he held elsewhere in Colorado and in Utah, and offered to construct new hiking trails for accessing the public lands beyond his ranch from the north. However, local public opposition grew, which I believe was one of the seminal factors in the creation of Colorado Wild Public Lands, a non-profit that essentially exists to oppose land-swaps between the federal government and billionaire land barons.

But--and here’s the problem--that’s where the story ends, at least as far as I can find on the internet. Did Koch effect the land swap? Did CWPL prevail? Is it still public land? Can I drive there? Is someone watching me through a rifle scope? I had to find out!



And that’s what brought me to this point, right at the edge of what appears to still be public land abutting Bear Ranch as of Summer 2022. There was no gate, but it was signed against trespass, so that’s where I turned back. I wondered if an easement might exist for what was apparently at least once a public county road—route 2—but I wasn’t there to find out the hard way. Or even the easy way; I probably could have just called the county to ask. And no, I didn’t send out a flying camera to invade anyone’s privacy either, nor did I try to flag down a vehicle I saw proceeding into the ranch. I was simply quite genuinely curious, and wanted to politely explore the public roadway(s). So, I did.

The photos I've posted here are no different than those accompanying the various news articles pertaining to the ranch... they're just uniquely my own. I'm not sure I'd recommend visiting here, unless you are into such esoteric things, nor am I likely to ever return. But damn, it sure was a fun side-adventure!

At the end of the day I have to wonder… if I was born into fuck-you money, and was successful in growing that wealth… what would I do with it? I’d like to think I’d spend it philanthropically, seeking to improve life for the less-fortunate… feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, curing the sick. But looking out over this profoundly beautiful swath of pristine mountain terrain, with a frontier town straight out of a western movie, its elaborate mansions, and literally a whole-ass steam train with a fucking whistle and a bell…

You know what -- fuck philanthropy -- I’d buy Bear Ranch too!

Plus like three helicopters.

And fuck it--let’s put whistles and bells on the helicopters, too.


Some beautiful terrain up there...

Following that brief moment of introspection, I doubled back to the highway, pressed north over McClure pass, and burned the brakes all the way down to Carbondale. Traffic got pretty bad as we approached Glenwood Springs, but that was to be expected. So too was the fact that the train was even further delayed by the time we arrived…. this is America after all, and public transportation is only for peasants who can’t afford their own helicopters or whole-ass steam trains. Gross. I wasn’t about to sit around with my dad, waiting for this rickety vessel of poverty to hopefully eventually arrive – I was on day two of a five-day fishing license, and the sun was up. It was time to go catch some fish.

Good luck, old man... catch you next time!

===​

Side note: I found this article, while not directly related to the Bear Ranch issue, to be particularly insightful reading material. Marston died in 2018 at the age of 78, from complications of West Nile Virus (yikes!) His obituary suggests he was successful in his efforts to prevent Koch's proposed land swap, which is the only reporting I can find on this issue since it received press coverage in the early 2010s. I'm left to conclude, based on this, and the fact that I was able to drive up the public access road bisecting the ranch, that the land swap was never completed.

===​

Hagerman pass has always been on my to-do list, but I’d never managed to make my way up there… that is, until today! Connecting Basalt to its west with Leadville to its east, this route once carried the Colorado Midland Railroad over the continental divide – the first standard-gauge line to span the Colorado Rockies.


Way back in the early days of the mining boom, countless high-mounting mining districts had materialized practically overnight, surrounded by limitless untapped mineral wealth awaiting anyone with a shovel. To put it in perspective, at its peak, the population of Leadville rivaled that of Denver. With the mines producing literal trainloads of gold and silver (and I guess probably lead too, based on the fact they called it ‘leadville’?) on a daily basis, railroads were suddenly needed to connect these desolate places through inhospitable high-altitude terrain to the rest of civilization.

So logically, the mining districts pooled their resources to collectively build a well-surveyed, efficient, and mutually profitable rail network that would reliably serve the region’s transportation needs for throughout the decades of consistent, environmentally responsible mining activities. We can thank this visionary foresight for the modern all-electrified rail network we enjoy today, ensuring the public year-round low-cost access to all major tourist destinations and ski resorts throughout the Rockies, which is why there are never any weekend traffic jams on I-70.

Wait... I’m getting an update here: Apparently this is the exact opposite of what happened.
​

What actually happened was that, dozens of railroads were formed based on wild speculation, and those that raised funds blindly forged their ways into the Rockies from all directions, fighting and racing each other like rambunctious children at a birthday party. Mining districts emerged like platters of chicken nuggets and buckets of ice cream, each instigating a new reckless rush to reach them before anyone else could.

Planning their routes in crayon on grease-stained napkins, the early railroads hastily constructed mediocre narrow-gauge lines in a frantic race, resulting in a rail network that was simultaneously redundant yet inadequate. Certainly, the crown jewel of this era was the Denver, South Park and Pacific Railroad (“South Park Line”), which somehow managed to route itself over a high-mountain pass between each and every major population center it served, including three separate crossings of the continental divide, which—surprise—didn’t work out so well in the winter.

Eventually a grown-up arrived to the party and decided to build a proper route for real trains, as opposed to the Fisher Price narrowgauge bullshit everyone else had built. This was the Colorado Midland, and they completed their route around 1887. And unlike the crayon-eaters at the South Park Line, they managed to pick a halfway intelligent route, requiring only a single high-alpine crossing of the continental divide, at Hagerman Pass, to connect from the plains (at Colorado Springs) to the western slope (through Glenwood Springs to Grand Junction) via Leadville, which was the single-most lucrative district between the two. Hagerman pass itself reaches ~12k feet elevation—far too high for winter operations—but the initial construction of the route tunneled through at ~11,500 feet via the ~2000-foot Hagerman Tunnel, putting the rail summit on par with the South Park Line’s Alpine Tunnel (11,600 feet) to the south, then already in operation, as well the future Rollins Pass route (11,700 feet) of Moffat’s line to the north, built 15 years later as Denver stubbornly sought a less-stupid rail link to the west than its ill-fated South Park Line had foolishly constructed. Furthermore, the route’s summit was subsequently reduced to just below 11,000 feet by the 1893 construction of the Busk-Ivanhoe Tunnel, nearly two miles in length.

And based on this hyperbole-laden narrative, you might expect that the Midland route would have survived to the present day, or at least outlasted its competitors. But that didn’t turn out to be the case, and although I’m certainly not an expert on the matter, here’s my read on how things turned out:

First and foremost, those early days of railroading were marked by cutthroat competition, deception, litigation, and physical altercations between the railroads and their executives, lawyers, workforces, and hired guns. For example, although the South Park Line was the first to reach Buena Vista, it was tricked out of continuing its construction northward to Leadville by a seemingly lucrative offer from the D&RG, which had trailed just behind them in reaching BV, to share the rails D&RG would soon build to Leadville anyway. Predictably, D&RG backed out of the agreement not long after the rails were laid, prompting the South Park Line to frantically build a ridiculous and untenable route into Leadville via Boreas and Fremont passes in hopes of retaining its prior customers there. So without doubt, business decisions were often made for reasons of fervent speculation, deception, or spite, rather than being based on a clear long-term vision, and this type of behavior probably played a role in the planning and construction of the Midland route as well.

Second, throughout the era, wild boom and bust cycles forced all railroads into bankruptcy at various times, many repeatedly, which led to seemingly constant renaming, restructuring, merging, and juggling of assets between various companies. The fates of each route rarely wound up in the hands of their creators, so although in this context we refer to the routes by their original names, they were generally all owned or operated by different people and different companies when they were eventually mismanaged, neglected, pillaged, and ultimately driven into the ground. Many routes were abandoned simply because they had become redundant through consolidation. And sometimes things came down to timing and luck, which is how the Midland met its final demise despite facing a huge uptick in traffic related to WWI—at that moment, it was simply too cash-strapped and dilapidated to keep up with the rapid surge in traffic, and this momentary faltering drove away its final customer, the US government. Operations ceased in 1918, and most of the line was scrapped by the early 20s.

Third, and somewhat unique to this railroad, was a particularly poor decision by the cash-strapped Midland when it came to construction of the lower Busk-Ivanhoe tunnel. Unable to finance the project, an agreement was reached in which a different company would construct and retain ownership of the tunnel. The Midland would then pay tolls to use it. The tunnel company soon demanded tolls far beyond what the rail revenue could provide, leading to a stalemate and ill-fated attempts to rehabilitate the original, higher route over the pass. The railroad eventually bought out the tunnel, and I'm not sure if this setback played a major role in its eventual failure, but it was certainly a classic shit-show of early-American railroading.

Finally, although the Midland route wasn’t the worst over the Rockies, it wasn’t the best, and this is probably the more fundamental reason for its ultimate demise. Although its route from Colorado Springs to Leadville was well-engineered and well-equipped from its outset, built to standard gauge, with numerous tunnels, cuts, and fills to speed travel; although its traverse into the Arkansas watershed was relatively easy via Trout Creek Pass; and although the Busk-Ivanhoe tunnel had lowered the route’s summit below 11,000 feet, it stood largely parallel to an even-better engineered narrowgauge route built by the D&RG. Starting in Pueblo, the latter followed the Arkansas up its entire length, following a hard-fought and technically challenging right of way along the Royal Gorge, which afforded it the easiest grades and fewest unnecessary climbs of any route to Leadville. This portion had already been built when the Midland was planned, but in response to impending arrival of this new competitor which would connect Leadville to the western slope over Hagerman Pass, the D&RG then forged its own route from Leadville to the west via Tennessee Pass, thus cementing its fate as the superior route of the era. Tennessee Pass is easily the most favorable high-alpine crossing of the Rockies for hundreds of miles in either direction, with modest grades and a summit below 10,500 feet, which was soon eased even further by a comparatively short tunnel. The remaining challenge was not another untenable high-altitude pass, but a rugged canyon—in this case Glenwood Canyon to the west—which the D&RG once again forged through in a marvelous feat of railroad engineering -- the only portion of their route that still carries trains today, and perhaps the most scenic portion of the entire US rail network. Hagerman pass, even with the longer and lower Busk-Ivanhoe tunnel, had challenging grades on both approaches, and was frequently closed by snow. Traffic was slowly consolidated to the Tennessee Pass route, which was eventually also rebuilt to standard-gauge. It served as the primary standard-gauge route across Colorado for decades, until completion of the Moffatt tunnel below Rollins Pass, which today is the only remaining mainline rail route through the Colorado high country, and which still uses the original Tennessee Pass route from Glenwood Canyon and westward. Rails remain on the rest of the Tennessee Pass route from Peublo through BV and Leadville, but have been disused for decades, whereas most of the Midland and South Park routes have long since been abandoned and torn up, yielding a treasure trove of amazing jeep trails, decaying tunnels, and other relics of these historic railroads awaiting the avid explorer today.

===​

Wow, that was a long way of saying that, after dropping the old man off in Glenwood Springs, I drove up Hagerman Pass, hoping to catch some more fish. And gee golly, did I catch some fine fish up there!


Definitely a railroad grade here...


Countless cuts and fills on the way up from Basalt


The final approach of the Midland grade to the Busk-Ivanhoe tunnel is now submerged by a small lake. The tunnel portal is at the far end of the lake, and is now used to convey water to the east.

But first, I had to check out the old Midland grade, including the original Hagerman Tunnel!


Now well above the lake, I am driving up the remaining grade to the earlier, shorter Hagerman Tunnel...


... whose approach is now partially collapsed, but ...


... one can still hike up and peer into the tunnel from near its ceiling. It appears that the collapsed approaches have effectively dammed both ends of the tunnel, allowing it to fill with eerily green frigid water to a depth of perhaps 10 feet. (I didn't dive in to check its depth!) Approaching lightning strikes quickly curtailed my appetite for any more exploration up her, and I cowardly scampered back to the truck.


Back at the lake, I met a friendly guy in a full-size truck with a kick-ass camper setup. I forgot his name... was it Chuck, or maybe Chris? I’m going to go with Chad. Anyway, Carl was looking for a place to set up camp, and I welcomed him to join me at this lakeside spot, which I would soon be vacating, as I had plans on the other side of the continental divide that evening.


Another view of the lake and tunnel arrangement. The older grade is visible beyond. I found a a 10th Mountain Division hut further back up there too, but I don't think there are any thru-routes from here... at least driving a mostly-stock Tacoma.


Craig initially put me to absolute shame with his fly-fishing setup, hauling in a handful of brookies and cutthroats as I struggled to keep my line untangled enough to even cast a lure. He eventually offered me one of them out of pitty – thanks, Clark!



But I soon too hit my stride, reeling in two cutthroats and a brown within mere minutes. I wasn’t sure of specific bag limits, and I figured four fish in total was more than enough to call it a day, so I thanked Chase again for that first fish and the fantastically good luck it had imparted to me, wished him well, and backtracked to the rugged 4x4 trail that would take me over Hagerman Pass to Leadville.

===​

First encounter with this thing at the summit...

Now here is perhaps the most remarkable chapter of this day’s story, although perhaps not as interesting as historical railroads or a billionaire's sprawling ranch... I had made tentative, vague plans to meet a friend from Denver, somewhere near Leadville that night, for a hike the following morning. But it had been weeks since we last texted each other, and I wasn't sure if he was even going to make it, much less where and when we might meet. I sent him a single text message that afternoon, prior to leaving cell service for the rest of the day:

“Headed up Hagerman Pass from Basalt, meet up somewhere on the Leadville side?”


Leadville coming into view below

That was it -- he never even replied... not that it mattered, as I had no signal between Ruedi and the divide, and although AT&T operates numerous towers throughout the upper Arkansas corridor, they've never connected any of them to the outside world, so the seemingly strong signal I picked up as Leadville came into sight was utterly useless per usual.

But low and behold, just as I descended past the lower tunnel (which now carries water, obviously), I met window-to-window with my friend on the road, in the middle of nowhere in the Colorado Rockies!

We decided to make camp at a nearby trailhead, as both of us would simply be sleeping in our cars. I cooked up a fine mess of fish for us that night!


That night’s menu


Oh, and here’s a shitty photo from the moonlit parking lot:

 

Black Canyon is awesome. Spectacular views, and a surprisingly non-busy campground during peak season for a National Park. $10 for the night, I think it was. I really want to go out there again to check out the views from the east side.

Also, if you ever return to Leadville, you have to stop at Quincy's for prime rib.

 

Ah yes -- I felt bad skipping Quincy's this trip.

Forgive me if I've already told the story, but several years prior, my old man and I had spent the night in Leadville, at the luxurious and historic Delaware Hotel. Having spent the day coming in over Mosquito Pass at over 13k feet, we had been gasping for air for quite some time when we strolled down to Quincy's for some fine dining that night. Lumbering back up the stairs at the Delaware was apparently the final straw, as soon both of us became convinced we were dying of heart attacks. We stumbled back down to the car, then drove over to the nearby medical center to sit idling in the parking lot, trying to decide if it was worth a deductible payment to find out if we actually dying of heart attacks, or had simply eaten too much beef.

The funniest part... the medical staff eventually came out to the parking lot to talk to us. Apparently this kind of thing happens a lot! They told us to get to lower elevation... Salida would be a safe bet.

We of course ignored their sound advice and fought through a terrible night of hypoxia back at the hotel. I fainted and hit my head at one point, breaking my glasses in half.

It was fantastic -- easily one of my favorite Colorado adventures!


Edit -- oh, yeah, the Black Canyon is definitely my favorite National Park campground in the state! Love that scrub-oak terrain.

 

Trip Report: Colorado 2022, day 8



We awoke to an influx of early-morning hikers arriving at the trailhead parking lot. Soon, we had geared up and began our own trek up to the alpine tundra above.


My friend's dog


Some kind of bug?


Some kind of bird?

We reached a spectacular vista, from which we followed some game trails to a series of small high-alpine lakes, without encountering so much as a single other person. We had the tundra to ourselves, which was awesome! With great optimism, I cast lures repeatedly into each of these lakes, as my friend and his dog circled their shores. Not much evidence of fish up there – not that I’m complaining. Hard to beat a morning of serene natural beauty and hypoxic euphoria.


One of the upper lakes


This delightful game trail was covered with flowers...





We eventually descended to a larger, more popular lake, where we saw countless other hikers, as well as fish jumping from its surface. I didn’t have any luck hooking one though – but not for lack of effort. Probably for the best – I think there’s some kind of protected fish species in this lake, I would feel bad dragging one of them to shore.


The larger, best-visited lake of the area


Maybe a nibble, but no bites!

Back at the trailhead, I saw Chip’s tricked-out camper truck parked at the far end of the lot. Hopefully he was having better luck up there than I had!


Some colorful 'shrooms on the trail...

I said goodbye to my friend and proceeded down to Leadville to gas up. Unfortunately, perhaps due to the ongoing hypoxia, I left the tailgate down for several miles headed out of town, causing me to lose the brand-new once-used fishing pole I had bought for my old man. Dang!


Where I finally stopped and noticed the open tailgate... not sure if I knew the fishing setup had fallen out at this point, but there was little hope I’d find it, as I’d already circled around all sorts of mines up there.

Nobody to blame but myself... but also, I blame my dashcam for shitting the bed earlier in the trip. Had it been operational, I would have seen the lowered tailgate on my way out of town!


No luck at one of the smaller lakes up here either...

In any case, I made my way up and out of Leadville over Mosquito Pass, per tradition.




Always slow-going, but fun!


Bye, Leadville!



Found a spot to camp at one of the distant mines, perhaps around 12k feet. Too high for a comfortable night’s sleep, but I don’t think I passed out and hit my head at least.





In fact, I think I took a nice hot shower and ate some delicious trout instead.