Occupation of Independence

Contrast is probably the quality that most people value highest in a landscape, since prettiness per se is insipid. Badlands, eroded from Mancos shale, are quite a contrast from the volcanic extrusions in the San Juan mountains. I get to admire both from my campsite on a mesa outside Montrose CO. Sigh, I really don't look forward to flowing downriver this Friday.  

Somebody needs to come up with an old saying analogous to 'you can't see the forest for the trees' about mountains. It's hard to appreciate what is happening to a mountain range if you are right in the middle of one and your view is blocked by a mountain. On my little mesa near Montrose CO, I am 25 miles from the edge of the San Juan mountains, so I can appreciate the big picture. During storms the entire mountain range disappears in minutes. The tiny bright speck in the center is the morning sun reflecting off a building.

How many times have you smiled at a school bus? But I did yesterday. It was labelled as "Gunnison Watershed Something-or-Other". It's rare to see something labelled as XYZ Watershed, but in a state like Colorado it should be common. To finally see "justice" done was a delightful surprise. I smiled myself into a nostalgic fit over it. So many American rivers start here, although the Colorado River, ironically, isn't one of them. But we needn't rehash the sorry history of that bit of political chicanery, perpetrated in 1922; you can read on it at Wikipedia. When RVing in Colorado for the first time, many years ago, it was difficult to memorize the names and locations of individual mountain peaks; there are too many of them and the names are not always interesting. So the brain aims at unifying this clutter of details: it groups them into mountain ranges , or studies up on the geology and orogeny of the area, seeking order from the chaos of individual

When a person starts off on round two of their traveling life, they need to stay open-minded and flexible so they can do a better job than in round one, not that round one really needed much improvement. But without improvement and progress, what are we to do with ourselves? It's easy to become bored and jaded with the progress in gadgets: thinner, lighter, more gigabytes, etc. How about some progress in some other field? In the traveling biz there has been remarkable progress, back around 2000, when Honda brought out that remarkable line of alternator/ inverter-based generators. Quiet and fuel-sipping. Of course a chain is no stronger than its weakest link: I'm not sure whether the RV industry has modernized their converter/chargers; they used to just put out 13.6 volts, which can not fully or quickly charge a battery. But there has been remarkable progress in bringing the cost down of real, three stage, battery chargers that put out 14.X volts DC, and twiddle the "