Peace On The Road: POTR #34 Up Up And Away

PEACE ON THE ROAD
Up Up And Away
October 15, 2007

Someone quoted “Opportunity Knocks But Once.” It sounds like a reasonable thing to believe. I am convinced that this person had so little understanding about opportunity that they must have had help to even get the spelling right. Opportunity walks around your house blowing horns, clashing cymbals, beating drums, and pounding on the door trying to get your attention. Where opportunity is concerned you live in a round house with several hundred doors and opportunity is knocking on every door. Every day there are opportunities to learn, do, go, help, work, love, feel, etcetera. What do we do? We lock the door, nail it shut, brick it up or just ignore it. I am just as bad as anybody. Just recently I nearly passed up a golden opportunity, just because it was not a typical thing for me to do. A lady that I had worked with in Denver had her Mother’s car and her Mother’s dog and needed to get them home to Gulfport, Mississippi. After I finally decided that I had only excuses and no REASON to say no, I said that I would drive the car and dog to their home. The trip was a little over 1400 miles and took about two and a half days. I had a border collie as a companion that was a perfect lady in every respect. I had no problems with car, traffic, roads or anything, except maybe with cell phones. I will never like cell phones no matter how well they work. When I got to the end of the trip I had a very happy dog, a very happy and grateful eighty year old lady and I think in Denver there was a very relieved daughter. I could have passed up the opportunity and I would have missed a chance to do something that made me feel good about myself. And my wife and her mother coming to pick me up at the airport would have missed the opportunity to have flat tire out in the middle of nowhere and having to call for assistance on a cell phone. I may not like cell phones but they are wonderful to have when needed. So go open a door, you might just find a golden opportunity waiting for you

No matter how many times I visit the Garden Of The Gods in Colorado Springs I am amazed by the formations that have been left by the erosion of the landscape. This park actually started into existence about 295 million years ago with the deposition of the Fountain Formation sandstone conglomerate. Between then and August 1859 not much specific information is known. At that time two surveyors who were working to set up Colorado City, part of the current Colorado Springs, were exploring and discovered the area. One surveyor, M. S. Beach said it would be a “capitol place for a beer garden”, the other surveyor being very impressed said, “Beer Garden! Why it is a fit place for the Gods to assemble. We will call it the Garden of the Gods.” There has never been a beer garden there but the name stuck. There have been a lot of changes since 1859 to the present. In the 1890’s Paul Goerke and his son Curt purchased the formations known as steamboat rock and balanced rock and took photographs of tourists for twenty-five cents each. They even supplied burros for the tourist to sit on. When the personal camera became popular they built a fence around the formations and charged a twenty-five cent admission. In 1932 the Goerke property was purchased by Colorado Springs and the fence was torn down. It was added to an area that had been donated to the city in 1909 by the children of Charles Elliott Perkins. One of the stipulations of the gift was that there would never be admission charge to visit the park. At one time there were other businesses and displays built within the park. With the current park maintainance policy any thing that is not a natural part of the park will be removed as it succumbs to the natural decay of time. Among the items gone that I can remember are the 360 degree camera obscura, the three crosses, and the snack bar/museum, and the steps and railing that went up on the top of Steamboat Rock. The paved roads and trails that wind through the park are not natural but I guess you have to make some allowances for the visitors.

CATHEDERAL VALLEY IN THE GARDEN OF THE GODS

From Colorado Springs we went to the top of Raton Pass. We camped about three tenths of a mile south of the Colorado/New Mexico border. As has happened so many times we were at the right spot at just the right time. The next morning we had the privilege of seeing a cattle drive. There were eight cowboys and five cattle dogs that were moving over four hundred head of cattle from the summer pasture, past our camp, under Interstate 25 and to trucks that would haul them to winter pasture down in Texas. I have seen small cattle drives in the past, and when I was on the farm I drove a lot of cattle from pasture to pasture or from the neighbors property back to where they belonged on our property. I have never seen so many cattle moved as far as these were. While it was not quite like the trail drives of the old west it was fun to see.
New Mexico is so very different from any other place that we have visited. It is called a high desert for very good reason. The limited rainfall, warm days and cool nights, tends to limit the growth of vegetation. The vistas from the high hills are far reaching in nearly every direction and very impressive. The first European to put their influence on this territory was the Spanish. They came principally to find gold and to convert the Native American to their religion. Most of the original Padres came from Spain. They established Missions that combined the ritual of the Catholic Church in Spain with the customs of the Native American that they converted. Today there are many of the old missions still in use as religious centers and some have been turned over to the secular world. One of the most notable of the latter, at least to me, is the Loretto Chapel with its mysterious staircase. The legend says that in 1852 six sisters of the order of Loretto went to Santa Fe to establish a girls school. In 1872 they had a chapel built. When the architect was shot due to involvement with another mans wife the chapel was left without any access to the choir loft. It is believed that access was originally planned to be from a nearby building, but this is unproved. An ordinary stairway was thought to use too much space in the chapel. When no local carpenter could provide a solution, the sisters prayed a novena to the Master Carpenter himself, St. Joseph, who was the earthly father of Jesus. On the ninth and last day a workman came that said he could build a staircase that would meet their needs, and all he needed was a couple tubs in which to soak wood. In about six months the staircase was finished and the workman disappeared without collecting his wages and was never seen again. The staircase was built without a center support, nails, screws or glue and no railing. The railing was added to the stair by Phillip August Hesch ten years after the stair was built. It has been determined that the wood is one of fourteen species of spruce, of which none are indigenous to the area. It has been reported in a scientific article that the joints are very unusual for the time period, but that is still not officially recognized by the owners of the chapel. The staircase is a beautiful piece of workmanship that served the chapel till the mid 1970’s when it was closed to the public. The staircase and chapel are both beautiful and functional pieces of artwork, whether they were built by talented craftsmen or were built by St. Joseph himself, as the nuns claimed.

THE MYSTERIOUS SPIRAL STAIRCASE OF THE LORRETO CHAPEL IN SANTA FE

Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument just to the west of Santa Fe is one of the newest of the National Monuments having been established January 2001. Kasha-Katuwe means white cliffs in the native Keresan language of the pueblo. Like the Garden of the Gods it is an area that has been created by geological activity. Volcanic eruptions occurred six to seven million years ago and created deposits of pumice, ash, and tuff over a thousand feet thick. Hard boulder caps from pyroclastic eruptions sitting on top of the soft pumice and tuff have protected it from erosion and the characteristic tent shape columns have been created. The tent rock formations vary greatly in height and size. Some are as short as a few feet tall and some all the way up to ninety foot. There are some of the tents that have a cap that is barely larger than the top of the tent, while others have a cap that may be six to seven times larger than the top of the tent it is protecting. Many of the caps do not look like they can survive in their position much longer. As the cliff erodes away there will undoubtedly be many more tent rocks that appear. I would like to take a picture every hundred years and compare the images. About four to five miles up a high clearance vehicle road is an overlook that is dedicated to the American Veteran and chiefly the Pueblo de Cochiti Veterans. From the overlook several areas that are forming tents can be seen that are not within the monument. The area is both beautiful and amazing, a real treat.

HOO DOOS AT KASHA-KATUWE TENT ROCKS NATIONAL MONUMENT

To describe the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta is totally impossible for me to do. The emotion that I felt while watching the balloons flying around was “this is not real, it cannot really be happening,” but it was. Before dawn we were at one of the launch fields while seven balloons called the dawn patrol lifted off to test the winds before the mass ascension at dawn. The Albuquerque geology creates winds that are often very interesting and ideal for ballooning. They call them “box” winds. When the balloons took off they started to the south close to the ground, as they rose higher above the ground they changed direction and floated to the north. Then when they were a ways to the north of the launch field the pilots allowed them to descend into the breeze that was moving south. Thus they came back to the place that they had started. Just at dawn the mass ascension of perhaps five hundred balloons started. It took almost two hours to get all the balloons into the air. There were so many going up at any one time that it was impossible to follow the action. With so many in the air there were some that looked like tiny dots in the sky and others that were so close that they nearly blocked the view of the sky, but in a few moments they also were moving off. It was actually very strange to see so many balloons moving in multiple directions at different altitudes. Apparently near the directional wind interface there were some eddies of wind that was also moving to the east and to the west because some pilots were able to move in those directions. Most of the balloons were of a size that would be seventy foot high and have a volume of a hundred thousand cubic foot and could carry three or four people in their gondolas. We only saw a single one man balloon that is about thirty five thousand cubic foot. Some of the special shapes are a lot larger than the standard size and can carry more passengers. The Wells Fargo Stagecoach is ninety foot tall and one hundred foot in length, and it was smaller than a Creamland Holstein cow. The American Eagle must have been at least a hundred and twenty foot tall. The picture below shows Smokey Bear and I think the rest are of the standard shapes. We went to the special shape glow. There were nearly a hundred special shaped balloons that were kept on the ground and the burners were fired to light up the balloons like a light bulb. There were a hundred and sixty thousand people reported to be there. It was a record setting attendance, and there was still plenty of room for us.