After stopping over in Portland to visit Glenn and Michele and make a couple of repairs (as well as visit Outside Van), we finally turned east to truly head for Wisconsin. Two of the few tourist stops we made along the way was the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana and the Devils Tower National Monument in Wyoming. The Museum of the Rockies has a few rotating exhibits but its showcase is its dinosaur collection which includes “some thirty-five thousand specimens, including the world’s largest collection of Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops, along with America’s largest collection of dinosaur eggs, embryos, and babies”.
Continuing on but before we came upon Devils Tower, I had to sit Darlene down the night before our arrival to watch “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”. We arrived early the next morning (before 7 am) to beat the crowds. (Apparently it gets crazy busy there everyday from 10 am to late in the afternoon.) Darlene slept in on the early morning drive and awoke to this view out the campervan window:
We made a bit of detour starting our road trip out to Wisconsin by swinging up through Oregon, but I finally got to visit Crater Lake after having passed nearby so many times over the years. We stayed a couple of nights, did a little bit of hiking (Darlene’s still recovering from an injury) while circumnavigating the lake and we took one of the ranger-led boat tours around the lake. Very nice!
I haven’t been skiing at Mammoth since the early nineties, after college, but it’s where I learned to ski in high school from nearby Bishop. And I had forgotten what a great big and diverse ski mountain it is – though I’m sure I also wasn’t skiing as much of any mountain’s terrain back then either. Anyway, driving to Mammoth from Santa Cruz/San Jose in the winter isn’t very convenient (given all the Sierra passes are closed) and you have to essentially drive by many other great ski resorts to do it. However, with an extended stay at our new place in Tahoe last week, it was easy to hop down to Mammoth for a couple of days (just a three hour drive) and make use of our Mountain Collective passes.
We got some nice, typical spring skiing conditions: overnight frozen snow, following the sun as the slopes softened up from east to west to north. Plus Mammoth is so high (peaking at 11,000 ft), it was easy to avoid any sticky slush that would develop lower down.
On Tuesday, February 6th, SpaceX successfully launched their Falcon Heavy rocket on its inaugural flight, sending Elon Musk’s original Tesla Roadster and “StarMan” on a far reaching orbit around the sun as a test payload. Happily, I was able to fly out to Florida and experience the launch firsthand from the Kennedy Space Center’s closest available viewing location for the general public – just 3.9 miles away from the launch platform! (It’s just too bad they haven’t removed the historic-but-no-longer-needed launch tower at LC-39A, as it was sitting between us and the Falcon Heavy.) Still, it was quite the show with essentially three of their Falcon 9’s strapped together and all twenty-seven engines firing simultaneously! Not to mention the amazing, never-seen-before, simultaneous return of the two outer boosters back to the nearby landing zone!
I’ve made a video of what it was like to watch (and hear) from our vantage point:
The Falcon Heavy launch as experienced from the closest public viewing area
This viewing location is part of Kennedy Space Center’s “Feel the Heat” ticket package which takes you to the Apollo/Saturn V Center to view a launch and includes a buffet, some commemorative items, and return entrance to the Kennedy Space Center on a later date to enjoy the rest of the exhibits.
You’re given an assigned arrival time some 5-6 hours before the launch to catch your bus (and told not to come earlier) but for this historic event, there were so many people that it took hours to get through the security gates, boarded on a bus (really? loading the buses serially??) and delivered to the viewing area. By the time we unloaded from the buses at the viewing area, there was slim-pickings for anywhere on the grounds to set up a tripod with a good, unobstructed view because apparently many folks had shown up an hour or more earlier. Anyway, I staked out a spot between others some three hours before the scheduled launch but had to skip the buffet to keep watch over all my gear.
The launch ended up being delayed several times due to high altitude wind shear and we were all getting a little nervous that they’d miss their launch window for the day (1:30 pm – 4 pm) as they rescheduled all the way up to 3:45 pm. But then, about an hour before that, they made the call to go ahead and start fueling the liquid oxygen – meaning a go for launch! Hurrah!
And then 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, …. and great clouds of steam erupted with 27 engines firing – quite the sight! We couldn’t see the rocket until it cleared that annoying (and unneeded!) tower, but afterwards the light intensity of the exhaust was incredible as it climbed into the sky. You hardly notice the absence of sound from the rocket with the cheers of the crowd around you, but a few seconds later it starts to come across – and it’s an amazing, stuttering roar.
Then you get to watch it climb and roll and, higher up, begin to build a beautiful column of vapor – which it eventually disappeared into. After a bit, it reappeared further east as a faint set of exhaust plumes still coursing away. On the monitor, we could watch and hear announcements of each successful milestone and cheers would erupt each time – like with the separation of the side boosters and their retro-firing to return to Cape Canaveral.
Minutes later the two side boosters appeared in our sky coming down at incredible speed. We all lost track of them though when they cut their engines again and unfortunately many of us weren’t in a position to see them again when they reignited for their final deceleration over their landing targets. We could of course see the video feed on the monitors, perfectly landing themselves (vertically!), like something out of science fiction – but it wasn’t until after they had landed that their twin sonic booms reached us. We all of course learned later that the center core didn’t fare so well because two of the three needed engines were unable to restart (not enough ignition fuel) and it crashed into the ocean close enough and hard enough to damage the autonomous drone ship that was waiting for it. But hey, this was a test flight!
The Falcon Heavy is now the most powerful rocket in the world, with the most lifting capability – though it will soon be surpassed by NASA’s upcoming “SLS” rocket as well as SpaceX’s own future “BFR”.
Meanwhile, “Starman” continues his/her epic journey in space:
Darlene and I enjoyed a weeklong trip to New York City over Christmas this year just doing a lot of sightseeing. It wasn’t a first visit for either of us but there was still plenty to go see and do. We started off with a midnight visit to the top of the Empire State Building – and discovered that’s the way to entirely avoid any lines or crowds.
We enjoyed thoroughly exploring the lower half of Central Park and we walked around mid-town a lot, taking in the Christmas shops at Bryant Park, visiting the gorgeous Grand Central Station as well as the New York Public Library – home to specters from the movie Ghostbusters, which kicked off a hunt to seek the other filming locations including the Ghostbusters firehouse HQ, the “spook central” apartment building on Central Park West, the Tavern on the Green, Lincoln Center, etc.
Of course we visited Rockefeller Center to see the Christmas displays there and along Fifth Ave. We also saw two musicals on Broadway over our visit: The Lion King, which was just completely fantastic and amazing, as well as a repeat of Cats which happened to be the first musical each of us had ever seen. I found I didn’t care for Cats at all this time though – I guess my tastes have changed a bit in 30 years!
We did the VIP tour (tip: not worth the extra) at One World Observatory and stayed for dinner after sunset. The ride up the “time traveling” elevator was very cool (see YouTube video) but over too quickly to enjoy all the detail! We saw the 9/11 memorial that night as well – really well done.
We walked the High Line (an elevated rail line converted to a green space) and walked around the financial district and down to Battery Park where we discovered and rode the wonderful Seaglass Carousel. We slipped in a visit to the art collection at the Frick museum and we finished off with a lovely trip on the Staten Island ferry on our last crisp cold day.
Darlene and I went down to Pinnacles National Park for dark skies to watch the Geminids meteor shower Wednesday night:
Time-lapse of Geminids meteor shower
That’s a 20-second time-lapse I made looking south towards Orion about midnight, covering about 90 minutes that didn’t include any light trails from passing airplanes. And here’s a still shot.
I made a number of additional miscellaneous stops on my October road trip with Pan and Hera in the Traveling Cat Adventure Vehicle, including along a section of historic Route 66 in the Mojave Desert, on the road in northern Arizona and southern Utah, mountain biking outside of Zion National Park, and taking the tour of Hoover Dam. This was over the course of two weeks (October 4th-19th, 2017).
Mojave Desert outside of Baker, CALooking down Hoover Dam
And here’s a video montage of my drone flights over the trip, including my last flight where I lost control, crashed and was forced to leave it behind:
What happens when the Mavic Pro doesn’t have GPS lock and you’re too high for the down-facing optical sensors to work is that the Mavic becomes unable to hold its position and it starts drifting all over the place. I was trying to compensate and keep it away from the walls but I was not at all successful. It almost crashed into one wall but halted itself when it’s forward-facing sensors detected the wall. As it started drifting towards the opposite wall, I had just decided to try to get it up and out of the shadow of the canyon entirely to hopefully gain GPS lock and regain control but it was too late – and this time it wasn’t facing the wall and didn’t detect it. It crashed and fell to a point immediately below me. While it was only like 35 feet down, it was a sheer drop with only a couple of narrow soft ledges. Without rope and climbing gear, I would have been risking my neck to try to retrieve it. Yeah, very sad to have to leave it behind, though it looked pretty busted up anyway.
The Vermilion Cliffs / Paria Canyon National Monument in northern Arizona and southern Utah includes a huge area of amazing rock and sandstone formations, including what may be the longest slot canyon in the world, Buckskin Gulch (15 miles!). During my October road trip, I got to experience a little taste of the canyon from the Wire Pass trailhead but it would take an overnight trip and gear to do the whole thing. (Here’s some details on what it involves.) I would definitely like to come back and do that as well as try to get a permit to go visit “The Wave” (restricted to 20 people per day via a lottery system) and some of the other formations in the Coyote Buttes area. I tried to get out to the White Pocket formations but the road turned out to be too sandy for mountain bike access, too far for day hiking and certainly too much for the current incarnation of the Traveling Cat Adventure Vehicle. Some serious 4WD required.
Another cool multi-day adventure trip in the area is backpacking all the way through Buckskin Gulch and following the Paria River Canyon out to Lees Ferry and the Colorado River over 4-5 days. This whole wide area is a really cool region to explore and there’s plenty to come back and see.
Click through for the full gallery, including hiking a canyon wash above Soap Creek (and losing my drone!), visiting Lees Ferry and the start of the Grand Canyon at Marble Canyon, checking out Horseshoe Bend and Glen Canyon Dam and a couple of little detours into Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
