A land without ruins is a land without memories – a land without memories is a land without history.
~ Abraham Joseph Ryan
A land without ruins is a land without memories – a land without memories is a land without history.
~ Abraham Joseph Ryan
This male Mountain Bluebird seemed to be admiring the setting sun as it dropped below the Great Sand Dunes in Colorado in mid-October. The mountain bluebird is one of three bluebird species in the United States–the other two are the Eastern Bluebird and the Western Bluebird–but the only one to be all blue instead of having a brownish underbelly. The females of all the species are more difficult to identify, as they lack the blue intensity of the male, and tend to be an overall grayish-blue.
The Mountain Bluebird is found throughout the western parts of the States, usually west of the Rockies. This guy was perched only a few hundred yards from the nearest peaks, the Sangre de Cristo Range.
Pretty little guy, isn’t he? He’s the first Mountain Bluebird I’ve ever seen.
On our recent travels to the Southwest, we spent two days driving west from Wisconsin to our first destination, and then two days driving east from our last destination back to the Midwest. We had much ground to cover–over 2200 miles–on those four days, and we were traveling on Interstates, something that neither of us particularly enjoy.
We didn’t want to squander four days of our two week vacation doing nothing but driving, so I researched our route before we left our home. Perhaps Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas don’t have a lot of well-known places to visit, but there is always something interesting to see if you are willing to look. And I found quite a few treasures that gave us an hour’s diversion from the monotony of the road.
Our first treasure literally was a jewel. We stopped at Grinnell, Iowa, which was just a few miles off I-80, to see the Merchant’s Bank, one in a series of architect Louis Sullivan’s Jewel Box Banks. Though Sullivan is most famously known as the “Father of skyscrapers”, he also left a legacy of these small banks, eight in all, dotting the Midwest.
Drat that car, but I wanted a photo of the front exterior showcasing the rose window medallion, and the car came with the exterior shot.
The window is designed with overlapping circles and squares that are in encased in terracotta ornamentation.
Griffins originally flanked both sides of the bank’s entrance, built vandals destroyed the East Griffin in 2006. The terracotta and stained glass were a significant part of Sullivan’s designs.
When the bank opened on January 1, 1915, the townspeople of Grinnell were nearly unanimous in their approval. One citizen observed, “It sure looks nothing like Grinnell.”
Although that’s not entirely true. Grinnell, a small farming community, has an astounding number of buildings designed by well-known architects.
I think the building is best summed up by a newspaper journalist who wrote for the Grinnell Herald and was allowed a sneak preview prior to the grand opening for his article. He wrote:
“Go back to the north end and turn around to the south. Raise the eyes above the partitions and brickwork and catch the massive simplicity of the long beams along the ceiling: study the windowed colored by Millet and its mosaic replica below which surrounds the clock with face of gold. Raise the eyes still higher to the skylight… If you are in just the right mood in time you can hear the dash of the waters over Niagara Falls, listen to the winds that sweep across the prairies of the West, see the blue that hovers over the land of the azure sky and understand something of what Sullivan meant when he talked about the genius of America.”
These scraggly trees are common on rocky ridges. Where there is a fracture in the rock, the roots of the trees will reach deep enough to access just enough water to survive. One-seed junipers have the capacity to speed up or slow down their growth depending on water availability. It is also common for part of a tree to die back, allowing the rest of the tree to survive. Though their growth is slow, sometimes only 4 to 6 inches in a decade, they may live for hundreds of years.
Native Americans used the juniper for medicine, gum, dye, food (the berries) and fuel. They also made shoes from the woody fibers. Herbalists still use the plant for a variety of remedies.
These trees are hanging off the rocky top of Walnut Canyon in northern Arizona.
Devil’s Garden Trail explores some of the Utah back country in Arches National Park. Your reward for scrambling over rocky surfaces, navigating the narrow tops of exposed sandstone fins, and then climbing up and down short, steep crevices is a view not many people see – eight spectacular arches, and back-country worthy of many oohs and ahs, and a few comments, such as “I can’t walk on that #%*& ledge!”
Though most cairns (markers that let you know – really – you are still on the trail) are rocks stacked up in a pile, a previous hiker took the time to re-arrange this cairn into replicas of two hikers. So by looking at this photo, you can see we are precisely where we are supposed to be, even though we are vaguely lost.
At this spot, our choices were to scramble over the dome in front of us, or deal with the tangle of dead wood around the side. We scrambled up the rock, which thankfully was not slippery, and then slid down the other side. No sweat! (Yeah, right!)
As was most evident to us, the trail was the worn path on the rocks. I kept my sights on the spectacular stand of fins ahead, and kept taking deep breaths. The trail marker at the beginning said the hike was not appropriate for people who suffer from extreme agoraphobia (fear of heights) – what about those of us who only have a minor case?
But I exaggerate! I loved this hike. We started at dawn and returned to the trailhead about 2 in the afternoon. I’ve seldom seen such magnificence. Worth all the bits of anxiety and lack of oxygen. (We were at a high elevation for Wisconsin folk!)
Then we went out for beer and pizza. It seemed the only reasonable thing to do.
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