blog touring some more

Kathleen Ernst, who writes historical fiction (including some of the American Girl books) and who used to do living history performances for a living, is hosting me on her blog:

http://sitesandstories.wordpress.com/2012/04/11/meet-meg-justus/

This one's about the Job Carr Cabin Museum and quilting in public [g].

it occurred to me today

That a curator update might be called for, since I haven't written one in a while.

Some of the more unusual items I have cataloged recently in my textile cataloging gig:

1)  A B-17 bomber pilot outfit, consisting of what made me think of nothing so much as a pair of ski bibs and jacket.  Except, of course, for being made of leather lined with sheepskin and weighing what seemed like 500 pounds.

2) A pennant from the U.S.S. Arizona, dated 1924, commemorating a cruise to the Caribbean and through the Panama Canal.

3) An assortment of souvenir hankies from the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in Seattle in 1909.

4) And today, a 1940 leather football helmet from the local high school, and the jersey that went with it -- both obviously well-worn and used.  The blue paint? dye? was peeling and cracking on the helmet, and the jersey was, among other things, missing a chunk at the back hem I estimate at about 5x7 inches.  Or a good handful [g]. 

I love this job.

Oh, and my other gig, the Lakewood Cityhood exhibit, will be opening in two weeks.  I have been creating graphics all week (well, taking the templates I created earlier and filling in the photos and text), and I'm just about ready to go to the printer tomorrow.  Hallelujah.

If you happen to be in Pierce County, Washington, on on Saturday, February 25th (or thereafter, until next February), come take a gander!  It's at the Lakewood History Museum.

Montana museums

On my next stop on my blog tour, Velda Brotherton has hosted my article about visiting museums and archives in Montana and in Yellowstone while researching Repeating History.

I have to say that museums are one of the best idea founts on the planet.  I hope you enjoy the article.

I love the Internet

Actually, what I love is the Open Library, which very politely digitized one of the early "no, we've never been there, but there's a big market for it" guides to the Klondike gold fields, published in 1897.  And made it free on the web. 

There's something just so incredibly civilized about being able to access an otherwise almost impossible to get hold of book by clicking a mouse a few times.

Also, I have written over 8000 words since November 1st.  We're still on the decrepit steamship, less than a day out of Skagway, and Our Heroine has already had more adventures (well, she is a long time ago and a fair distance away) than is good for her.

more redwoods and plenty of ocean

Our second-to-last day on the road began with a view of the ocean, because Eureka is where U.S. 101 first reaches the Pacific.

Beach just north of Arcata

After a few miles of this sort of gorgeousness, we ducked back into the wooded sort.

Things have changed north of Eureka since the last time I was there ten years ago.  They've built another new section of U.S. 101, and done another Avenue of the Giants thing with the old section, only the entire old section is within Redwood National Park, so there aren't any little towns along the way.  There is, however, a very nice visitor center.  And an elk refuge (we didn't see any, but after Yellowstone I'm kind of blasé about elk, anyway), and several nice walking trails. 

The elk refuge with redwoods in the background

Due to Mary's leg, we only walked one short trail, but we both enjoyed the drive very much. And the visitor center, which had a very nice bookstore where I bought a history of the redwood region, both natural and cultural.


The "Big Tree," from a distance because that's the only way to get anywhere near most of it into a photo.



And the sign on the fence that surrounds it.  Yeah, that's a pretty big tree, even if it isn't very creatively named.

After we got back up on 101, we drove past the Trees of Mystery, a tourist trap which basically consists of a bunch of warped trees and a very large gift shop (my ex insisted on visiting it when we'd been here on our honeymoon), and over the Klamath River bridge, decorated with two California golden bears on each end:

I love those bears, and I had completely forgotten about them.

Then it was on to Crescent City.

That's the Crescent City harbor.

Mary said that she kept doubletaking at the name of the town, because to her New Orleans is the crescent city.  We stopped at a park in town to take a photo or two of the town's lighthouse:

I don't know the real name of the lighthouse.  I know it isn't St. George Reef, which is near here but on a rock out in the ocean.

Then it was across the border into Oregon and up one of the most beautiful coastlines in the world, which is not just my humble opinion.  We stopped in Brookings for a quilt shop and lunch, and then enjoyed our way north.

Somewhere between the Oregon/California border and Coos Bay.

Ditto.

We finally stopped for the night in Coos Bay, Oregon, about halfway up the coast, first at a Fred Meyer for a few various and sundry things, then at two motels, the second of which met our criteria of a ventilation system that did not involve leaving our windows open onto a busy highway all night.

And that was our second-to-last day on the road.

On our way home again

Sunday morning we packed up and checked out of our lovely hotel room and went back to the con for one last morning of panels.  Mine were mostly on self-publishing and how to market one's books.  We met back at the car at one in the afternoon, then went to get lunch and do a little laundry and shopping (for things like ice for the cooler and milk) before we headed west out of Reno towards Lake Tahoe.

Lake Tahoe was gorgeous, but you'll just have to take my word for it.  There wasn't really any place to stop and take photos, and the one place I'd counted on to stop and walk along the lakeshore was crowded with a street fair, so we couldn't even find a place to park.  We drove on to somewhere I'd wanted to visit for a long time instead.

When I was a teenager, I had a rather morbid fascination with the Donner Party.  I read enough books about that horrible incident in California's history to give myself nightmares.  Even though that was thirty-five years ago, when I realized I was going to have the chance to stop by Donner Memorial State Park  and visit its museum, well, I couldn't resist.  Mary politely went along for the ride.

It was an interesting stop, I thought, even though the park was in the process of being renovated and there wasn't as much to see as I'd hoped.  We did see the monument itself.



The base of the monument is how deep the snow got the winter the Donner Party was marooned here.

 The museum was a bit antiquated (part of the renovation is that they're getting a new museum), but still interesting.  Here's an example of one of the exhibits, a wagon like the one the Donners and company would have traveled in:



Boy, am I glad I live here and now

 After we left the memorial, we headed west, first down I-80, then on U.S. 20.  We stopped at a viewpoint on U.S. 20, out over the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas.  We were back in the gold country.



Beautiful, rolling countryside.  It seemed as if we could see forever.



We also saw some gilia at the viewpoint.  We saw a lot of this particular flower on our trip.

 We gradually made our way down into the Central Valley again, but since we were headed for the coast we did not head up I-5 when we crossed it.  We spent the night in a little town called Williams, which was on I-5, though.  And when I say little, I mean little.  Three motels, a couple of gas stations, a few fast food places, and probably a grocery store somewhere.  And that was it.

big trees, Glacier Point, and more crowds, alas

Our first full day in Yosemite it was so cool and lovely first thing in the morning that we got an early start.  This had the advantage of allowing us to beat the crowds slightly as well.  The parking lot at Bridalveil Falls, completely full when we'd arrived the afternoon before, was all but empty at eight a.m.



Bridalveil Falls from the parking lot



And from the end of the short trail leading up to its base

 Next we headed out of the Valley altogether, to go visit the Mariposa Grove of Big Trees at the southern end of the park.  A viewpoint on the way called Tunnel View brought back some good memories for me -- it was there, as a high school student, that I got the idea to write an essay for my English class comparing Yosemite Valley to a cathedral.  Yeah, me and all the other John Muir imitators, although I didn't know who he was at the time [wry g].  The paper got me an A, at any rate.



The view from Tunnel View, El Capitan on the left, Bridalveil Falls on the right, Half Dome in the distance.

 From Tunnel View, the road traverses a tunnel (obviously) and then heads south towards Wawona, which is a hotel/visitor center/historic area complex in the south end of the park.  It was here that we had to catch the tram going to the grove of sequoias.  First, however, we strolled through the village of historic buildings from throughout the park that have been gathered here, and watched a stagecoach go past.



 Then we boarded the shuttle bus, which was, of course, very crowded.  The trees, what we saw of them, were worth it, though:



The main trail from the shuttle stop, with a Very Large Tree or three

 The problem with the Mariposa Grove was that my friend Mary was having a hard time walking for very far due to a pulled muscle in her leg, and so we didn't get to see as much as either of us would have liked to.  But the trees were still impressive.



This is a very famous fallen giant, made so by this image, which gives you a much better idea of exactly how big that puppy is

 After our abbreviated stroll through the giant sequoias, we rode the tram back down to Wawona, and ate lunch at the Wawona Hotel.  It was a very elegant lunch at a very reasonable price, once again proving that if they can do nothing else right, at least the concessioner at Yosemite does do food well.

On our way back to the Valley that afternoon, we drove up to Glacier Point.  The controlled burn was near the Glacier Point road, and we could see flames right alongside it.  I was surprised that they hadn't closed the road altogether, but they hadn't. 

We stopped first at Washburn Point, with its lovely view of Half Dome and Vernal and Nevada Falls:



The upper fall is Nevada, and the lower fall is Vernal.  Half Dome, of course, is to their left.

 Then we drove on to Glacier Point, where it took me two circuits through the parking area and almost half an hour to find us a parking space (there is no shuttle to Glacier Point, which I'd have taken in a heartbeat).  If I hadn't let Mary out at the walkway to the point to save her from having to walk so far, I'd probably have given up altogether.  But I did eventually find a spot, and walked back up to the point to take these pictures, among many others.



Half Dome, of course, and the upper valley



The actual point, made famous by this image, and Yosemite Falls across the valley



3200 feet straight down into the valley.  That's Camp, er, Curry Village down there with the swimming pool.

 It took us a while to make our way back down to the valley after that, and we were both pretty tired, Mary with her poor leg, and me from fighting traffic most of the day.

So we picnicked at our tent cabin and called it an early night, especially since I had some serious hiking plans for the crack of dawn the next morning.

I did say at one point that I would talk a bit more about the kind of people who visit Yosemite.  Yosemite, in my humble opinion, suffers from being too close to too many major population centers.  I ran up against the same issue in Great Smoky Mountains National Park on my long trip twelve years ago.  At the time I chalked it up to the fact that GSM is one of the few large parks in the national park system which doesn't charge admission, the theory being that people value what they pay for more than what they get for free, and I'm still quite convinced that's part of the issue there.  But Yosemite costs $20 per car to get in, and so I am forced to revise my assumptions.

With Yosemite I think it's a combination of too many rats in the maze, and too many people thinking of the Valley as their backyard as opposed to somewhere they should cherish (call me an old curmudgeon, but the kind of people who visit Yosemite on a summer weekend don't seem to know how to appreciate a national park), and the confining aspect of the Valley itself, which is only seven square miles with no place to go out but up.  All of which is exacerbated by being within a weekend trip of San Francisco, Los Angeles, Reno, Sacramento, Stockton, San Jose, and probably half a dozen other cities I've forgotten to list here.  

At any rate, it was saddening to see people treating the place, as someone on the shuttle bus said, like "Disneyland National Park."  I have wonderful memories of Yosemite from my childhood and early adulthood.  It's just too bad they were tainted by my experiences on this trip.

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]

Virtual Exhibits!

Today is the day that all that work cataloging photographs for the Tacoma Historical Society pays off.

Today, four virtual exhibits of historic photographs, one of postcards and photographs of early Tacoma schools, one of people, known and unknown, one of parks of Tacoma, and one of early Tacoma business and commerce, are available for public view on the Tacoma Historical Society's website.

Please go take a look, and tell me what you think!

a finished exhibit

Today I finished installing my first exhibit for pay, Clover Park:  How a school district helped build a community, for the Lakewood History Museum.  The grand opening, complete with ribbon cutting, will take place on Saturday, March 19th, at 1 pm.  The museum itself will be open from noon to six that day (the regular hours are 12-4, Wed.-Sat.).  If you will be in the Tacoma, Washington, area, on that day, we would be very happy to have you drop in!

If you can't, well, here are some photos I took this afternoon after I wiped the last fingerprints off of the display case covers [g]:

The introductory panel.  The graphic design, four large panels, and templates for the smaller panels were created by the inventive Chris Erlich.  I couldn't be more pleased with them.

The first display case.  The 1960-vintage Hudtloff Junior High School beanie is fun.  I mounted it on a styrofoam ball covered in polyethylene fleece.

One of the photo panel walls, including a timeline.

More photos, two small text panels, the acknowledgements panel, and another timeline panel.  Lakes High School has national award-winning choirs, as illustrated at the top of this photo.  The top left panel is about extremely recent history, since the Clover Park Warriors won the Washington state 2A basketball state title, and the Lakes Lancers won the Washington state 3A state basketball title, all in the same week last week.

The other display case, including a 1940-vintage high school diploma (Clover Park High School's first graduating class), and two annuals, a 1940 Clover Park Klahowya, and a 1964 Lakes High School Legend (Lakes' first graduating class).

This is a small sample of what's in the exhibit.  In case you're wondering about the colors, Clover Park High School's colors are kelly green and gold, and Lakes High School's colors are royal blue and orange.  They don't look bad together, do they?

Being a bad correspondent.

One year ago today I started this blog. 

It's sort of ironic that the reason I haven't posted much since I finished my Long Trip posts is because my museum work is going so well, and I've been incredibly busy during the month of December.  I am going to try to write more often in future in spite of it, because what I've been doing is so interesting.  At least it is to me, and I hope it will be to you.

For instance.  This week I just finished cataloging and properly storing two collections of about 100 glass plate negatives for the Tacoma Historical Society.  They're over 100 years old, but the images are still clear and sharp, which is amazing to me.  The subjects ranged from scenes of Old Tacoma to turn-of-the-last-century hiking trips to Mt. Rainier.  Miners and sawmills and steam locomotives, too. 

The second, as yet incomplete, volume of what I hope will someday become my Yellowstone trilogy features a photographer during the 1890s Yukon gold rush.  He's based on a real man named Eric Hegg (the University of Washington has a large collection of his photographs here), who hauled crates of fragile glass plates over the Chilkoot Pass and down the Yukon River to Dawson City and on to Nome, Alaska.  Handling the Society's collection of glass negatives really brought home what that would have been like.  I am shocked, honestly, that any of them survived intact.

Now it's on to the much less fragile paper photos.  I can't say I'm not glad.

For my other project, at the Lakewood Historical Society, I interviewed the almost 100-year-old daughter of the woman who was the driving force behind the creation of the Clover Park School District in Lakewood, Washington, for the exhibit I'm building on its history.  She's amazing.  I hope I keep my brains and memory as intact as she has when I'm 3/4 of her age.  I've discovered, too, that, in spite of my preconceptions (having moved 26 times in my lifetime, 14 times long distance), many people do still live in the same place (and sometimes the same house) all their lives. 

I also interviewed the former superintendent of the district in the 1950s, and a 1951 Clover Park High graduate, who very graciously lent the museum his letterman's sweater and hockey skates for the exhibit, and a 1960 graduate, who donated her junior high school banner and beanie and high school dance cards to the museum.  And visited the state archives, and the school district archives. 

Did I mention that I love research?  And who'd have thought that the history of a school district would be so interesting?

Lucky, lucky me.  I've never had work that has made me as happy as this work has. 

Do you love your work?  Have you ever been in a position where you look forward to your work every day?

Pineapple Express and NaNoWriMo

First off, it's been raining steadily since Saturday morning (it's now Sunday night).  Yes, I live near Seattle, and, yes, the rest of the world thinks this is normal for us.  Some people even seem to think that this is normal for us year-round -- never mind that we average less than an inch of rain for July, August, and September. 

But this is a bit more than normal -- this is a Pineapple Express.  If you look at the satellite pictures you'll see that the stream of moisture aimed at the Pacific Northwest like a firehose comes from the tropical Pacific Ocean, basically Hawaii.  Hence the moniker Pineapple Express.  Our high today was in the mid-fifties Fahrenheit, about ten degrees above normal.  The snow level was pushed up to 8000 feet (normally this time of year it ranges from sea level to about four thousand feet).  This sort of thing happens maybe once or twice a year.  And we're all prepared for floods (at sea level) and avalanches (in the mountains -- what happens when inches of rain saturate a snowpack). 

There are two choices about where to live in this part of the world -- on a floodplain or on an ancient glacial moraine.  You can float away, or you can dig rocks out of your garden every year.  I'll take the rocks, thanks...

Anyway.  NaNoWriMo was an interesting experience.  I had never done it before, never really seen the need for it.  But I'd had this idea in the back of my brain percolating ever since this dream I'd had a couple of months ago, about a highway patrolman chasing a little old lady speeding in an extremely old vehicle out in the middle of nowhere, when he rounds a corner and -- well, let's just say that the ghost town that should have been there wasn't a ghost town anymore.

The original dream took place in the Superstition Mountains in Arizona.  When I decided to write it as a novel, I changed the location because I wanted to set it somewhere where I could actually go see the landscape, a trip to Arizona not being in the cards this year.  So, the last weekend in October, I took an overnight trip to the Okanogan Country of north central Washington, and explored around and found an old gold mining country, a number of ghost towns, and stories (and places) that dovetailed so cleanly into the story that was percolating in my mind that I finally decided my sleeping mind must have just gotten confused. 

Item the first: 

Road to Conconully

Road to Molson

 Have you ever seen such beautiful isolation?  The whole Okanogan Highlands looks like this.  Interspersed with:

Golden larches

 Which turned out to be something of a story point in themselves -- larches are a highly unusual species.  They're deciduous conifers, and they turn into flaming torches in the fall.

Then there was the ghost town/outdoor museum in Molson (yes, it was named after the Canadian beer -- the Molson family helped bankroll the beginning of the town):

I suspect it's a bit more lively in the summertime, but in late October it was delightfully desolate.

And this pig, who lives in a Molson storefront and became another important bit of business:

Doesn't he make you wonder what the heck?

And then there was the town of Conconully.  Which has got to be one of the most fabulous names I can think of, even if, since it's not exactly a ghost town (it has a population of a couple hundred these days), I'm going to have to rename it in the rewrites:

Post office road, Conconully

The town that gave my story a history.

So that's the setting of Sojourn, which is about a young man who'd been uprooted from everything that mattered to him long before he found where he really belonged.

And what I wrote for NaNoWriMo this year. 

I am sorry

That I vanished for two weeks.  November was three months crammed into one for me, and real life took over.  To begin with, my first freelance museum gig -- I am researching, writing, and designing an exhibit for the Lakewood Historical Society -- swung into high gear.  Secondly, my second freelance museum gig (they're both part-time, adding up to 30 hours a week total) -- I am cataloging the photograph collection for the Tacoma Historical Society -- began in earnest.  And thirdly, I picked this year to do the National Novel Writing Month challenge.  I finished blogging my Long Trip, too.  Three months crammed into one, indeed.

Oh, and we had two windstorms and a snowstorm this month.

This was the view out my front door the Monday before Thanksgiving

The Lakewood job is researching and designing an exhibit, my first one for pay (I created a small exhibit as a volunteer project last summer).  It will recount the history of the Clover Park School District, which was and is a very large part of the identity of the community that finally incorporated as the city of Lakewood in the 1990s.  Clover Park is both a microcosm of how school districts were formed and grew in Washington state during the 20th century, and a unique-to-Washington example of how the extremely strong military presence in Pierce County could and did change and form how a school district develops, including the creation of a technical college begun to train soldiers during WWII that only moved from the school district to the community college system fifteen years ago.  It's been much more interesting research than I expected it to be.

The Tacoma job is helping bring order out of chaos, by cataloging the hundreds (perhaps over a thousand, I don't know yet) of historic photographs the Society has collected in its 20 years of existence.  Everything from 19th century glass plate negatives to digital images.  Through a grant, they were able to purchase PastPerfect, a museum cataloging software program, storage and preservation supplies, and my time for twenty hours a week for seven months.  This week I have set up PastPerfect, transferred what collection files they already possessed from Excel to the new software, and started cataloging, beginning with a collection of antique postcards of local scenes from the turn of the last century.  Some of which have writing on the back.  Talk about social history...

And then there was NaNoWriMo.  I think I'll wait and talk about that one next time.  Suffice to say for now that 50,000 words in thirty days is a faster breakneck speed than I've ever written at before, but I did it.  Which is pretty darned cool, in my humble opinion.

11 years ago today, Day 78

More desert.  Actually, much more interesting desert, in my not so humble opinion.  I got up and out fairly early, and headed west into Nevada, then north to the town of Searchlight, which has got to be one of the niftier place names I've ever run across.  Along the way I took this picture of a rock formation that struck my fancy:

Before I reached Las Vegas, I turned west on I-15 for a few miles, then off on a two-lane highway, crossing into California and on to the town of Baker, where I attempted to grocery shop (Baker's supermarket was nothing to write home about -- I'd have shopped in Kingman, except that I was expecting to have to go through a California agricultural inspection station, which the road I crossed the border on did not have).  Then I turned north, heading towards Death Valley National Park, and lost all my traffic, which was very nice. 

My next stop was the hamlet of Shoshone, where I bought gas at what seemed to me at the time an appalling $1.70 a gallon (for my non-U.S. readers, yesterday I paid $2.99 a gallon, which is fairly normal this year, but I'd been averaging somewhere around $1.35 on my Long Trip).  I thought about stopping for the night at the hostel there, but decided instead to call ahead and see if I could get a room at the Stovepipe Wells Inn in the park.  Which I did, and could.  So I ate lunch in a funky little restaurant which had one wall completely papered in foreign money, with notes written on the bills.  "Turns out some Chinese fellows left a note for some friends there, and sort of started a tradition."

"After lunch, I drove up into the park over a 3300 foot pass, which doesn't sound like much until you realize that most of the park (well, the most important part) is below sea level, and down, down, down into the valley."

 " I stopped at the place with the lowest elevation in the western hemisphere, 282 feet below sea level."

The sign says "Badwater" and the elevation.  And I'm not arguing about the description.

See that white dot a bit more than halfway up the hillside?  That's sea level.

"I drove through multicolored bluffs on a narrow one-lane road." 

The sign says "Artist's Palette," and tells about the minerals that create the colors

"I stopped at the visitor center at Furnace Creek, where the temperature was in the 80sF, and saw their exhibits and picked up a guidebook.  I walked a short trail out to an old borax works (still haven't figured out what makes borax so valuable)."  And then I came on up to Stovepipe Wells and settled in.

The last time I was in Death Valley I was about seven or eight, I think.  My parents and I drove up there from LA for a long weekend in February one year.  I have two really strong memories of the place.  One was of my dad pulling over at a rock formation called The Devil's Golf Course (they're big on Satanic names here), my mother opening her car door, putting a foot out, and yanking it right back in.  Turns out there was a rather large tarantula waiting to show her around. 

My other memory is of getting rained on.  Yes, in Death Valley, where the average annual rainfall is less than 2", we got rained on.  It wasn't enough to do more than stir the dust on the car, but still.  How many people can say they were rained on in Death Valley?

I sat out at a picnic table to eat my supper while darkness fell around me.  The stars were spectacular that night.  It's too bad I couldn't get any decent photos of them.

But I was awfully glad my motel room was air conditioned.  Even if it was the middle of November.

11 years ago today, Day 77

I made a rather late start eleven years ago today, after discovering that my milk had leaked into the melted ice in my cooler, and, worse, vice versa.  That was pretty much the most horrid-tasting milk I've ever tasted, which is saying quite a bit.

I spent the morning at the Heard Museum in Phoenix.  I was less than impressed by it, "mostly because I was expecting a museum of Southwest Native American history, and what I got was Southwest Native American art.  Which is all fine and dandy, but I'm not real enamored of art museums.  They did have a room full of kachina dolls, which was excellent, and a couple of examples of their housing (a hogan and an Apache brush shelter) and a few exhibits on the different tribes, but most of it was art." 

I will be the first to admit that I'm not a big fan of art museums for their own sake.  If I'm interested in the period and place the art was created, or if I'm interested in the people who created it or are depicted in it, then I last longer.  But as it was I only spent about an hour and a half there.

"Since it wasn't even noon yet, I decided to go on to Kingman, in the northwest corner of Arizona.  The road leading out of Phoenix took forever, stoplight after stoplight after stoplight, but I finally got back out to the desert. ...  I headed northwest, out across a vast plain of Joshua trees."  I hate to say this, but "they are so ugly.  They're all contorted, as if they're in pain, and they don't have enough foliage on them for a self-respecting carrot, let alone a twelve-foot tree.  Can you tell I'm getting tired of the desert?"

I arrived in Kingman fairly late in the afternoon.  "Kingman's a funny town.  It grew up along Route 66, the famous old highway that used to run from Chicago to LA, and that's still its claim to fame (one of the few parts of of the route not buried under I-40 is on either side of Kingman).  I stayed in the Route 66 Motel, next to the Route 66 Gift Shop.  It was kind of cool, in a kitschy sort of way."

And Kingman did provide me with one of the more glorious sunsets of the trip:

Sunset from the Route 66 Motel

11 years ago yesterday, Day 75

Life got a bit out of hand yesterday -- I'm also doing NaNoWriMo this year, and starting up a new business, and well...

Anyway.  Eleven years ago yesterday, I climbed into the car and headed west out of Silver City for forty miles, then when that highway turned north, I turned west again onto a smaller road.  The warning signs were a bit off-putting, "steep mountain grades, sharp curves, no commercial traffic," but the road itself was much better than what I'd been driving on for the last two days.  The worst was a couple of 15 mph switchbacks.  "And it was very scenic -- ponderosa pines, junipers, golden cottonwoods, wide grassy fields.  At one point it took me out on the end of this finger of land jutting out into a valley, then in gentle swooping curves down to it.

A nice desert view

"I was, however, having a hard time enjoying it this morning.  Something in the car (not the car itself) was rattling.  It sounded like someone crumpling a piece of paper over and over and over again.  It was about to drive me mad.  I must have pulled over to the side of the road half a dozen times and rearranged where I thought it was coming from, but the problem with that, of course, is that the noise stops when the car does, so I didn't have a prayer of pinpointing it.

"The strangest things can drive you bonkers when you've been traveling alone for a long time.  That sort of thing has been my bete noire off and on during this trip.  Car noises.  People snoring.  People acting like idiots on the road or in hostels.

"Anyway, the rattle mysteriously vanished when I stopped for lunch in a little town amidst the cotton fields called Safford."

I arrived in Globe, Arizona, about 2:30 in the afternoon.  I'd been having a craving for ice cream all day, so I hit a Dairy Queen for a butterscotch sundae, then went looking for a motel.  It was a good thing I didn't put that off any later.  There was a rodeo in town, and I got one of the very last rooms for the night. 

When I asked the desk clerk what there was that was interesting to do, she told me about an archaeological site on the edge of town, so I went there.  "Another group of Indians contemporary with the Anasazi except that these folks built pueblos rather than cliff dwellings."  They were called the Saludo, and the site was called Besh ba Gowah:

A view of the site

One of the exhibits

A closeup of one of the reconstructed buildings

After that I prowled the main street, bought some milk, and went back to my room to rest. 

I think the heat was beginning to get to me.  There's something just Wrong about 90dF+ temperatures in the middle of November.

11 years ago today, Day 74

Another day, another road that thought it was a Slinky. 

This one led north from Silver City to the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument.  Which is only about 45 miles from Silver City, but...  "I wound up and over ridges and down across valleys and around switchbacks so tight I thought I'd run into myself."  The drive took me about two hours.  That tells you how twisty the road was.  The views along the way were pretty, however:

You can see a long way from the ridgetops in southwest New Mexico

And the drive turned out to be worth it when I arrived at the monument, which was pretty tiny.  "The mile-long trail to the ruins led along a small canyon with views of the dwellings, then switchbacked up the hill so that it's possible to walk through some of them.  It was a small community, about 40-60 people, and they weren't Anasazi.  They were a related group called the Mogollon (muggy-on)."  The Anasazi are the folks who built Mesa Verde in southwest Colorado, and I'd mistakenly thought till that day that they'd built all the cliff dwellings in the region.

Here are some of the pictures I took on my walk:

Doesn't this formation look like a gigantic foot?

My first view of the cliff dwellings

Closer

And more dwellings

And really close

It's amazing how much cooler it is under those rock overhangs.  Natural air conditioning, circa 1000 CE.

After my walk, I ate my lunch at the monument's picnic area, in the company of rather a lot of Steller's jays, and some smaller gray birds with a chestnut patch on their backs that I'd never seen before.

Then I headed back to Silver City, by way of a longer road that wasn't quite so tightly corkscrewed, and got back in time to hit a used bookstore, where I got a cat fix from a little gray and white fur person named Rue.  Then I went looking for a library, and ended up at the University of Western New Mexico, which had Internet access for the public.

"I think I know which way I'm headed tomorrow.  Sort of.  Or at least I thought I did.  Either Show Low, Arizona, which is northwest of here, or Globe, which is southwest.  I guess I'll make up my mind when my hands hit the steering wheel in the morning.  I haven't been this indecisive on the entire trip."