Occupation of Independence

It must have been a slow news day today. The BBC featured a story that really was more Yahoo style: the Swiss court has upheld a canton's law against naked hiking. The BBC's Imogen Foulkes in Geneva says naked hiking is an increasingly popular pastime in Switzerland. However, Appenzell is a deeply devout and conservative canton - it only granted women the right to vote in 1990 - and the influx of naked hikers has offended many local people, she adds. The new ruling applies to the entire country. Naked hikers may now have to look for another country which offers them a warmer welcome, our correspondent says. Come to the American Southwest, I say, to all the oppressed perambulating naturalists. We offer you the freedom to live in harmony with nature as well as the opportunity to develop deep tans.          

Surely there are some famous scenes from movies in which a statue becomes a living, moving human being. The idea is simply too cinematic to have been overlooked. But for some reason, a classic example of that doesn't come to mind. When you walk through a desert arroyo (dry wash) you have the rare opportunity to see the normally slow process of erosion work on a human time scale. In that sense the landscape becomes alive for you. The topography of the Southwest is dominated by differential erosion, but it is too slow to watch "live". In an arroyo you can see how foot-deep water has undercut a bank, probably during a flash flood in the late summer. This can produce an undercut several feet deep. Eventually the overhanging bank above the undercut collapses, producing a rather vertical wall. Back on the job walking arroyos, near Socorro NM, it was fun to see the best examples of freshly fractured overhangs that I've ever seen.   Now imagine no more flash floods

...meaning its worst. It's always a little surprising to read about the "visual pollution" of windmills or solar panel installations and the locals' objections to them. I think they look "cool". But maybe the novelty would wear off soon and I would want to go back to looking at the landscape proper. (Then again, nobody uses that argument for getting rid of highways, suburban sprawl, or power lines.) This installation is near Deming in southern New Mexico. The first thought was, "Oh how pretty." The second thought was, "Aren't they supposed to move or something?" Apparently a 10 or 15 mph breeze just doesn't do it. There was a wry irony to it. Here they were -- the great Green dream machines -- producing diddly squat in one of the windiest states in the USA. Wouldn't it have been delicious and naughty if a Prius had been parked at the nearby store, with all the canonical and stereotypical bumper stickers, and I had engage

Lower Rio Grande valley, New Mexico. Why is it that we know so little about how the vaunted gadgets and machines of our Age work? Perhaps that says something of our educational system; or maybe it is just inherently difficult to approach science and technology in layman's terms. Some people probably think technical subjects are uninteresting since there is nothing personal or emotional about them. But there must be some explanation for stopping dead in my tracks when I saw this shadow on a shale rock on some BLM land recently. My goodness, it looked identical to the fossilized leaves on a shale rock that belonged to an impressive rock-collection that my father "inherited" from a retired school teacher, back when I was a kid. One of my siblings turned out to be the real rockhound, but I was interested in them too. At first the sheer size and color of the quartz crystals and geodes made the biggest impression. (Think of the razzle-dazzle that you find on the tables a

BLM land near Soccoro, NM. It's hard to believe that I was hiking at San Juan mountain altitudes less than a month ago, near Ouray CO. How could an outing along the Rio Grande possibly stack up well compared to hiking several thousand feet above a boutique mountain town that is visited by people from all over the world? Fortunately outdoor pleasure is not influenced all that much by sheer size. Also, this blog is dedicated to promoting a tacto-centric hedonic ethos of the outdoors versus the opto-centric obsessions of the mass tourist. Here it is chilly most of the time, but I liked it except for the first day, when the cold wind was a bit unpleasant. (But hey, it's winter in New Mexico.) Besides, the unpleasantness just made our reunion with the arroyos of the desert more delicious. I really appreciated one reader's comments about the under-rated outdoor pleasure of experiencing warm sun and cold air against the skin, simultaneously . That was even more the case on

When winter really hits, there's nothing subtle about it, and I was running for my life now. As feared I hit snow near 7000 foot altitude around Monticello UT; in fact the Utah state highway snowplows were already working the road there. Let's face it: pulling a trailer in the snow is a fool's mission. I was relieved to get out of the snow by the time I was down to 6500 feet. At Bluff UT, on the San Juan river, I was at the fork in the road: migrate from southwestern UT, using the Virgin and Colorado rivers, or use the Rio Grande in New Mexico. I chose the latter because I hadn't done it for years and I wanted to postpone going to the usual, hackneyed, warm spots in Arizona for as long as possible. As always I looked forward to seeing ShipRock. It's a rival of Monument Valley, but not as popular. Monument Valley has been a photo cliche since John Ford's westerns of the 1940's. Why do people even go there and photograph it? But ShipRock has no park built

When I was visiting Mark and Bobbie, of Box Canyon Blog fame, in Moab UT, I was surprised to learn how far back their familiarity with the region went. They were here when Edward Abbey was. They liked the area better than I did, so I tried to let their attitude rub off on me. But it wasn't easy. I had to pass through the town of Moab on my way south, hoping to beat the snow in Monticello UT; maybe I should stop in Moab to do laundry? In tourist towns it's always wise to get one block off the main drag. A traveler always goes into a laundromat with some trepidation; it really is my least favorite part of traveling. But this place seemed good for some reason. Management was new, the machines were in good repair, and -- most astonishingly -- they weren't charging tourist prices. A bicycle touring blog expressed it this way after visiting Yellowstone or Grand Teton national parks and the towns that service them: he felt like a chicken going through a modern poultry proc

Act fast if any of this pertains to you. November 12 is the last day! How nice it was to be shopping for a new laptop when the old one isn't quite dead. What an energy hog the old laptop was, consuming 4 amps DC during normal operation. And I use it many hours per day! It's hard to find power consumption data on the internet or on the boxes at the stores since nobody really cares except a traveler who is running down his coach batteries. Fortunately I got some good numbers from tdhoch of RV Sabbatical, who has a Kill a Watt device for measuring power consumption in watts. (I use a resistor-based DC current sensor in the line between RV frame ground and the negative post of the battery.) Going through a Target recently (blush) I noticed a superb deal on an 11.6 inch netbook by Acer, model Aspire One AO722-0473. You can't get it online at Target since they are using it as a loss-leader to drive the consuming masses wild and bring them into the store. It would have been an

It's hard to predict what a mesa is like when you see it from only one angle, say, from your campsite, or when you blast by it in a car. So the second day at our Moab campsite, we headed off to circum-ambulate the neighborhood mesa. It did not disappoint. I hope I never outgrow the discomfort that comes from slot canyons, mine shafts, caves, and canyons, since it was this very discomfort that gets most of the credit for the effect that this canyon had on me, besides the usual credit that goes to the very act of walking. There are far more famous photo icons of Moab (Monument Valley, etc.) than what was here, but it's always more fun to personally discover an un-famous area. It surprised me how smooth the sandstone cliff faces were. They were 200-300 feet tall and quite vertical; but looked at from above, the cliff formed a circular reflector that made it easy to hear each car pass on a highway about a mile away. When Coffee Girl and I retreated from the mouth of the

A big part of the art of camping is stepping away from the 'looked over', and wandering amongst the 'overlooked'. The best way to do this is to camp where the scenery is subtle or mediocre in the immediate foreground, but more promising in the distance. Naturally that provides the incentive to go for a walk, right from the RV's door. But you still go with low expectations. You have to try to be interested in what there is to see, and you have to look for ways to experience it beyond mere 'looking'. Usually, the surprises are on the positive side. In that spirit Coffee Girl and I took off on a day that was supposed to be dreadful, but in fact, was delicious: what a luxury it is to leave the wide-brimmed sombrero at home, and welcome the sun's warmth onto my face, while enjoying the bracing chill. We encountered the thinnest lamellas of sandstone that I've ever seen. They were fragile and nearly exfoliated.

As my travel-blog friends took off this morning I had plenty to exult over. If they hadn't been here in Moab, which they had a lot of experience with, I might have blown through town without even stopping. The area is best for tourists and vacationers, not full time travelers. A camper would have to love crowds, fees, and restrictions to feel comfortable here. It is also over-rated as a mountain biking mecca. There is too much loose sand in much of Utah. So I deferred to Mark and Bobbie, resulting in superb locations and hikes. OK, I admit it: the scenery was 'breathtakingly beautiful,' but more for the topography than the "red" color. It isn't "red"; it's red-brown, terra-cotta, the same color as a cheap clay pot. Why do people make such a big deal of the color? Off they went to southwestern Utah to warm up, while leaving me here, wondering about how to dignify my autumn migration by heading downriver, some river, any river. It's not