Moominmama's Adventures

In which Moominmama stands at the top of the world and appreciates geological time... Arches National Park has some unusual cliffs and stones even apart from the arches for which it is famous. In some cases, the sandstone looks like lumps of clay dropped on top of one another, a lumpy, goopy kind of landscape. In other cases, the long-ago presence of sea salt broke the red rock sandstone into giant fins since worn smooth by the years. Like a kindly elephant stretching out its trunk, some of the rocks bow down and allow you to climb to the top as I did above. From there you can see all the way to the La Sal Mountains in spots. The trick is not to get too distracted by the views since a misstep could lead to a precipitous drop!  But it's not unpleasant to look down either. The patterns in the sandstone can look like swirls of water or the grain of wood. And I arrived at a time when the prickly pear were opening up their beautiful buds.  There was nowhere to look without feasting...

Wherein Moominmama learns more about archeoastronomy, spends time at Mesa Verde and enjoys the company of a dear friend... The trail above is called Knife's Edge in Mesa Verde National Park. Believe it or not, this was the first route into the park for automobiles, a few of which apparently slid off the edge. There's a historic photo of a Model T at an undrivable tilt and two puzzled men standing at a safe distance. Now, even as a hiking trail, it reaches its end in a rockslide, and there's no way forward but back! The views, however, are glorious! The drive to Mesa Verde took Moominmama and her friend Liz up at least a thousand feet, sometimes higher depending on where we were exploring. We were fortunate to be able to visit Step House, the only cliff dwelling we could enter without special arrangements.  But it was spectacular even if it's difficult to show how the overhanging rock ceiling creates this protected niche high above the canyon floor. It makes one feel ver...

  Wherein Moominmama visits the home of Earthship Biotecture to see some creative, sustainable homes and admires the surprising flora and fauna of New Mexico... It was an unexpected blessing of the internet that Moominmama learned she was not far away from a fascinating experiment in sustainable construction near Taos. Having seen a video about the work of this community and its founder, Michael Reynolds,  I jumped on the chance to drive up for a tour. Reynolds came out to Taos shortly after graduating from college in 1969 and built himself a beer-can house, baling the then-steel cans together to make bricks. It was the first of many experiments in using garbage to build sustainably, and over the years he's refined his approach while also continuing to experiment with new iterations -- like the building above, under construction, that will provide five "apartments" with a shared kitchen and bathrooms. The fundamental principles of an Earthship home were clearly explained ...

  In which Moominmama visits Los Alamos to learn about the Manhattan Project, a contrast with an earlier journey to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park.... In 1932, we have the first recorded, successful splitting of an atom (a lithium atom). Less than a year later, Adolf Hitler became head of the German government. By 1939, the Germans forbid the sale of uranium from a mine in Czechoslovakia. There were good reasons to fear that Germany knew about the potential of fission and was exploring the development of an atom bomb. This was the background that led to Project Y, also known as the Manhattan Project, America's bid to build the most powerful weapons in the world and to get them first. Ironically, the war with Germany would end before the American effort was successful. Instead, the two slightly different atom bombs were used on Japan. Hiroshima was the first, and for its people, there was absolutely no warning.  If you recognize the picture above, you'll know it's not New...

Wherein Moominmama visits the cliffside Pueblo ruins in Bandelier National Monument and gets uncomfortably close to wildfires.... Moominmama is in New Mexico, camping near Cochiti Lake, east of the Jemez Mountains. That puts me maybe 10 miles from Bandelier National Monument, except that no roads run directly here to there. To visit the archeological sites, I had to drive counterclockwise about 70 miles to enter the park from the other side. It was well worth it! The Swiss cheese rock formations are not like the ones I saw in eastern Montana, which were left behind in compressed sandstone from a prior oceanic age. This rock is called "tuff" and it is volcanic, spewed into this region from an ancient volcano in what's now the Valles Caldera National Preserve. The compacted volcanic ash can be carved with harder stone, like basalt and obsidian which also came from the volcano. These cliffside dwellings inside Frijoles Canyon were created by the ancestral Pueblo peoples by g...