a new cover

I have a confession to make. When I first published Repeating History last summer, I really had no idea of how to make a cover, very rudimentary knowledge of Adobe InDesign, and not much else. Since then I've learned just a little more, and this is the result:

The pocketwatch is a public domain image. The geyser is a photo of Grand Geyser that I took the day I had the inspiration for the book in question (it's the same photo that's on the old cover, but I lightened the photo for the old cover to make the title stand out). The banner is because the colors in the geyser photo run the gamut from almost black to almost white, and make it impossible (at least with the skills I have at my disposal) to keep it from washing out almost any letter color or pattern I chose. The banner colors are chosen from the photo.

The lettering is two variations of woodgrain, via Photoshop. The font is akaPosse, from dafont.com.

I would love to know what you think of it. Please tell me.

aw, shucks

According to this article and some scientists in Hong Kong, time travel isn't possible.  Nobody'd better try to tell that to Chuck McManis, though.  Who is Chuck McManis?  He's the hero of Repeating History, my new novel now out on Amazon and Smashwords.

Maybe they should have tried using a geyser.  Or an earthquake.  Or maybe both? [g]

11 years ago today, Day 12

I was in another national park, Yosemite, on the September 11th.  I woke up in a tent cabin at Camp Curry to a bunch of schoolkids outside yelling about how someone had bombed New York.  I briefly wondered what movie they'd been watching the night before, then went for an all-day hike up the Mist Trail.  It wasn't until I got back that evening that I found out the tragedy was for real.

Of course, two years earlier September 11th was just another day.  A three-ring-circus of a day, but just a day.

My then-friend H was a whirlwind.  There's really no other word to describe her.  We'd been email friends for a year or so at that point, but we'd never met in person before.  In retrospect, I should have known she'd be as hyperactive as the science fiction hero she'd introduced me to (Miles Vorkosigan, whose author is Lois McMaster Bujold) who is still my alltime favorite fictional character, but how was I to know?

And she was determined to give her friend V, who'd never been to Yellowstone before, the, well, whirlwind tour.  So we climbed in the car and during the course of that day "did" Mammoth again, and Norris, and Lower, Middle, and Upper Geyser Basins, before heading down to the Tetons for a dinner cruise on Jackson Lake. 

The cruise was wonderful, and something I'd not have thought to do on my own.  It was a beautiful cloudless evening, and several dozen of us piled into the large motor launch that took us over to an island in the middle of Jackson Lake for a cookout.  The scenery was spectacular, of course:

The Tetons from the boat

And from the island.

My friend (on the left) and her friend, the one time I was able to get her to stand still long enough to have their photo taken

The food was good, too, a choice of steak or trout.  Since H hadn't let us stop long enough to eat all day, hunger sauce probably made it even better.

After supper, watching sunset

Those barely visible specks in the sky are a flock of sandhill cranes, according to our guide

We drove back into Yellowstone in the dark, arriving at Canyon to check into a cabin just before midnight.  The drive along the shore of Lake Yellowstone by starlight was beautiful, but unfortunately my camera wouldn't do it justice. 

Not to mention that I was half asleep by the time we staggered to our beds.  Whirlwinds are something to behold, but as traveling companions?  Well...

11 years ago today, Day 10 -- waiting for things to go off

My third full day at Yellowstone was spent entirely in the Upper Geyser Basin, waiting for things to go off.  In order to really get to see the geysers properly, you need a couple of things, plenty of patience, and plenty of time.  I had the latter, or at least a whole day, and I helped myself out with the former by loading my daypack up with a picnic, a book, my journal, and my camera, and then stopping by the visitor center to collect eruption predictions.

Oh, and good walking shoes.  I must have walked at least six miles that day.

The first thing I did was walk down to Morning Glory Pool:

Morning Glory Pool isn't as blue as it used to be because of vandals throwing stuff in it.  How can people be that stupid?

Riverside Geyser was due to go off next, so I stopped there and waited:

Riverside erupts out over the Firehole River, and afternoon eruptions (which this wasn't), often have rainbows in the steam.

Next was Grotto Geyser.  Ahem.  Okay, this is a G-rated blog, so I'm not going to make the obvious comment, but honestly.

Grotto Geyser.  'Nuff said.

Those are supposedly trees that have been coated with sinter over the last few thousand years.

Next was a geyser I'd wanted to see ever since my ex absolutely refused to wait through its four-hour eruption window thirteen years before.  I've talked about Grand Geyser here before, how it's the tallest predictable geyser on the planet, and how it was part of the inspiration for my novel Repeating History, and just generally how amazing it is.  So I won't go on and on and on, even though I could, quite easily.  But I will tell you that my first-ever eruption of the Grand was a five burst eruption, which is quite rare, although I didn't realize it at the time.  I do remember the gazers with their walkie-talkies going practically ballistic, though.  Anyway, here's one of the first photos I ever took of Charley's geyser:

Isn't it Grand? (sorry)

After that, well, everything else, while wonderful, was something of an anticlimax.  Still, I also saw Giant Geyser's crater, which looks like an enormous hollow tree stump:

Giant is not a regular eruptor, and while I saw an eruption on a later trip, it was not cooperating today.

I saw Sawmill Geyser, which erupts much of the time.  It's one of my favorite smaller geysers, mostly because of its sheer exuberance.  But I could say that about most geysers -- I've never seen an eruption where the geyser in question didn't look like it was having one heck of a good time.

Sawmill in the distance.  Grand's pool is just in front of the hillside to the left.

And Castle Geyser, which is, of course, named after its cone, which from many angles does look kind of like a ruined castle.

This is Castle's steam phase, which is incredibly noisy.

All in all, my best, if most footsore, day in the park.  Not least because of my epiphany while gazing raptly at Grand, when I suddenly thought, wow!  Wouldn't that make a terrific time travel device!

11 years ago, Day 8 -- geysers and mudpots and history, oh, my

It's hard for me to think about Yellowstone as anywhere but one of my favorite places on earth anymore, but on my first full day in the park on my Long Trip, it was just somewhere I'd always wanted to come back and spend more time after one visit I wasn't old enough to remember, one day when I was nineteen, and two days with my ex who wouldn't sit around and wait for anything to erupt.

That was the one thing I wanted to do more than anything.  Spend an entire day in the geyser basins waiting for things to erupt. 

It was cold that morning.  I had to scrape frost off Owl's windshield -- I never did explain Owl's name, did I?  My first car was a 1966 Ford Falcon, painted the green equivalent of navy blue.  I inherited it from my father when it was fourteen years old.  I'd owned three vehicles between that one and the 1998 Chevy Cavalier I drove eleven years ago, but the Chevy was the first green (my favorite color) car since the Falcon.  I toyed with the idea of calling it Falcon II (doesn't everyone name their cars?) but that was a bit pretentious.  So, I thought, what other birds of prey are out there?  And that's how Owl got his name.

So.  Where was I?  Oh, yes.  Scraping frost in my heavy coat.  In early September.  Anyway, I headed into the park and promptly saw a pair of sandhill cranes along the Madison River, who flew away before I had a chance to take their picture, then headed north towards Norris and Mammoth Hot Springs.  On the way, I stopped to walk the trail to Artist Paintpots, which I remembered from the "ex" visit as being these beautiful pools plopping in the trees, but which had been hit by the 1988 fires, and now were in an open meadow with dead snags scattered about.  The paintpots themselves were still beautiful, though.

My goal for the day was Mammoth Hot Springs, and Fort Yellowstone:

Old and new terraces at Mammoth

The red-roofed buildings are old Fort Yellowstone, and the others to their left are the Mammoth village.  This is taken from the road that goes up above the springs.

Fort Yellowstone has an interesting history.  Yellowstone, as everyone knows, was the first national park in the world.  But when Congress set the land aside back in 1871, it didn't provide any money to take care of it, or even to protect it from poachers and vandals.  The first civilian superintendents were alternately severely hampered in their work or incredibly incompetent, and by the 1880s, things were in such a mess that the Army had to be called in to take up the slack, temporarily, or so they thought at the time.  Fort Yellowstone's beautiful stone buildings:

Elk grazing on the lawn at Fort Yellowstone

Are the legacy of the Army's thirty-year tenure in the park, which ended with the creation of the National Park Service in 1917.

After lunch at the hot springs village, I headed back south, stopping to drive the little byway that goes above the springs, and to see

Cthulhu, otherwise known as Orange Mound Spring [g]

My last stop for the day was the Norris Geyser Basin, named after Philetus Norris, the second civilian superintendent of the park who during his tenure back in the late 1870s, had a penchant for naming everything he saw after himself, and was otherwise quite the character. 

I was there, as I said before, to watch for something to erupt, and I was lucky enough to see Echinus Geyser. 

It's a lot more impressive in person -- the boardwalk viewing area is actually on the hillside above the geyser, and the water you're seeing there is about 40 feet tall.

When the ex and I had been here in 1985, Echinus was erupting regularly enough to be predicted.  This was no longer the case in 1999, so I was extremely fortunate to see it again.  But not fortunate enough to witness the most memorable part of what we saw in 85, which was just after the eruption, when the water drained, sounding just like a bathtub emptying.  It was still pretty darned cool, though, and a great way to end my first full day in Yellowstone.

11 years ago today, Day 7

Eleven years ago today, I began a love affair that hasn't ended yet. 

But I'll get to that in a bit.  My first stop that morning was in Virginia City.  Now, I know of at least two Virginia Cities that started out as mining camps and ended up as tourist traps, which may be a bit more derogative a term than I intend.  I liked Virginia City, Montana.  Most of the town is on the National Register of Historic Places, and many of the buildings date from the 1860s, when gold was discovered nearby, including the Wells Fargo office:

And the courthouse:

After Virginia City, I kept going east, and soon enough was back on familiar ground.  I'm told that my first visit to Yellowstone was when I was four.  I don't remember it, unfortunately.  When I was 19, in 1978, my parents and I came to this part of the world to camp and go trout fishing.  When I was 26, in 1985, my ex and I visited Yellowstone on our way from Oregon to Colorado to visit his parents and fought the whole way, which was par for the course at the time since it was less than a year before we got divorced. 

Anyway, my parents and I had stopped at the Forest Service Visitor Center that tells about the Hebgen Lake earthquake, the largest earthquake that ever occurred in the state of Montana, and, at the time, the third largest earthquake ever felt in the lower 48 states.  I didn't realize when I revisited the site on this trip that it was going to become fodder for my fiction, but I'll get back to that later.

It was far too windy to picnic at the visitor center, so I went on down to a forest service campground, where I was about the only person there, and watched over my shoulder for bears while I ate my lunch.

I didn't stay long, and not just because of supposed bears, but because I was eager to go on to what has since become one of my favorite places on the planet, Yellowstone National Park.  I arrived in West Yellowstone, a small tourist town on the western border of the park, about mid-afternoon, and found myself a hostel, which was in an old log hotel that was one of the first buildings in West, back around the turn of the last century, across from the then brand-new railroad depot.  Movie stars like Gable and Lombard once stayed in that hotel.  As I found out a few years later on another visit, it's also haunted.  But that's a story for another time.

I couldn't wait to go in the park, so as soon as I had my bed paid for I headed out again.

One of the first things I saw on my way in was a herd of elk, bedding down for the night:

They look rather like tree stumps, don't they?

I got as far as Old Faithful that late afternoon, but the only other pictures I took were at Biscuit and Black Sand Basins. 

This is Biscuit Basin.

And this is Black Sand Basin.  I'm almost positive that the geyser off in the distance is Cliff Geyser.

These pictures were taken 11 years after the Yellowstone fires of 1988, and the evidence of them is clear, in all the dead trees looking like snaggletoothed combs on the ridgetops and marching down the hillsides.  But there were literally millions of new young trees springing up around them, at the time all just about my height.  It really was a most encouraging sight.

And now, here at the end of this entry, I must make a confession.  I spent the next five days in Yellowstone, and took more pictures of steam than I'm willing to discuss even here.  I will try, very hard, not to inflict any upon you where you can't actually see what I was photographing through that steam.  I promise.

today

Is the 51st anniversary of a day that changed my life.  Although it didn't actually do the changing until eleven years ago...

The Hebgen Lake earthquake was the largest earthquake ever to hit Montana.  It struck just west of Yellowstone National Park, and changed the landscape of the park forever.

It also was part of the inspiration for a trilogy of books I've been writing on ever since.  I don't know why I combined it with Grand Geyser to make a time travel device, but that's the way my brain works.

I don't mean to trivialize the devastation this quake caused -- it killed 28 people and caused over $11 million in damage in 1959 dollars, which was a terrible thing.

But my fictional hero learned to bless it for the changes it caused in his life.  And I have to say I appreciate the inspiration it has provided in mine.

geyser gazing

It has occurred to me that some people might not know what a geyser gazer is (see my profile, at left).  If you've ever been to Yellowstone, to the Upper Geyser Basin in particular, you may see some folks walking around, or sitting around in strategic places, with walkie talkies and the occasional notepad.  You might even hear one of the walkie talkies go off, with a staticky, "Daisy, 1114, ie," or "Riverside, 1420."  IE, by the way, means "in eruption," meaning that the gazer who saw it did not see the beginning of the eruption.

Geyser gazers are the people who make geyser eruption time prediction possible.  They are volunteers, most of whom belong to GOSA, the Geyser Observation and Study Association.  Many of them also subscribe to a mailing list, which is associated with GOSA but not part of it.  Some are professionals, but most are enthusiastic amateurs.  All of them are passionately interested in geysers, and spend as much time as possible in Yellowstone observing, communicating, and recording geyser activity, in conjunction with the park rangers and the visitor center staff.

Since most geyser prediction is predicated on average intervals, lengths of eruptions, and other, more complicated algorithms, knowing when and for how long a geyser erupted is crucial to being able to predict what it will do next.  Making a good educated guess (geysers are not faucets) as to what a geyser will do next makes it possible for more people to see it. 

I don't lay claim to being anything more than a very beginning apprentice gazer, and I can't spend nearly as much time in Yellowstone learning more as I'd like.  But I do have a walkie-talkie (gifted to me by a very good friend), and I have had the excitement of being the first to call in an eruption. 

I called this eruption of Daisy Geyser

It's all terribly addictive [g].

So the next time you see someone walking around the Upper Geyser Basin with a walkie talkie and a notepad, be glad, because that next eruption of Grand?  Just may have been predicted with their help!

Obligatory Grand Geyser photo (it's my favorite)