August 04


Does your dog snore?
There is lots of dog talk over at the Bayfield Bunch tonight. No wonder, if they are looking for a new bunch-member they need to find the right one. I can just about feel their excitement. 
Well, there is some dog talk here as well. Cause I was wondering whether all dogs snore?  Molly sure does. And there is something funny about it. While I find it annoying to listen to Bea's snoring, (and she sure doesn't like me snoring) I can sleep like a baby when Molly snores. In the contrary, it is actually a soothing thing for me listening to my dog's snore. When Molly snores, I know she is content and about to sail off to dog dreams. Her dreaming is another thing I notice. Her paws start moving, slowly at first, then faster and faster. Now, she is in pursuit of something -- a rabbit most likely or wait...it could be a squirrel. Yes! Her panting is getting more excited, and she starts making noises, yammering noises, getting louder and louder, well THAT would wake me up right there.


And you know what? She even does that when we are going down the road at 60mph. How she can do that with all that noise from the engine and the wheels is anyone's guess.

........................................

Well, this has been just another day with lots of work on the porch, and I mean ON the porch, as I literally was working on top of the roof. See, I had to start scraping the paint off the house fascia board. 


Standing on top of a ladder way up where the air gets thin holding a heat gun in the left and a scraper in the right leaves you nothing to hold onto the ladder with. Whenever the sun peeked through the clouds it got hot and the hot air from the heat gun didn't improve the situation a bit.

August 03


Arches National Park

View across the Park with the Manti LaSalle Mountains building the backdrop

Utah! The State of Utah is one of my favorites in the U.S. From the very outset on I was amazed about the formations and colors. When ever I was bound for the great National Parks I went to the town of Moab.           

For any traveler to the Moab area an exploring visit to the Arches National Park should take priority over everything else. This National Park is showcasing the extreme variety of the Utah Red Rocks landscape. Sandstone formations like you never have seen them before and most important within the park should be a hike to DELICATE ARCH, a true Utah trademark as it also appears on a series of the State's license plates. WELCOME TO DELICATE ARCH!

We took the hike on a rather cool day. An almost icy wind blew out of the north into our face as we ascended the slope leading up the spectacular view across from a deep canyon.
Arches National Park preserves over 2,000 natural sandstone arches, like the world-famous Delicate Arch, as well as many other unusual rock formations. 

The extraordinary features of the park create a landscape of contrasting colors, landforms and textures that is unlike any other in the world. 
The forces of nature have acted in concert to create the landscape of Arches, which contains the greatest density of natural arches in the world. Throughout the park, rock layers reveal millions of years of deposition, erosion and other geologic events. These layers continue to shape life in Arches today, as their erosion influences elemental features like soil chemistry and where water flows when it rains.

Arches is located in a "high desert," with elevations ranging from 4,085 to 5,653 feet above sea level. The climate is one of very hot summers, cold winters and very little rainfall. Even on a daily basis, temperatures may fluctuate as much as 50 degrees (F).

The plants and animals in Arches have many adaptations that enable them to survive these conditions. Some species are found only in this area. The diversity of organisms reflects the variety of available habitat, which includes lush riparian areas, ephemeral pools, dry arroyos, mixed grasslands and large expanses of bare rock.

This formation is called: The Gossips

August 02

A Mountain explodes
In 2005 we were on our way south along the U.S. West Coast when we decided to pay a visit to Mt. St.Helens.
I had previously seen the mountain only 4 years after the explosion in 1984. Now I wanted to show the place to Bea and also see what changes had taken place over the last 20 years.
We were coming down I-5 and got into the Mt. Rainier/Mt. St.Helens neighbourhood. Looking for an RV-Park we chose a rather shabby RV/Mobile Home-Park south of Vader. Despite dark clouds coming up, we decided to see Mt. St.Helens the same day. So we took off on Hwy 504 west from Castle Rock. 

Park Entrance

The road led us more than 60 km's up into the mountains. In front of us the Cascade range appeared with its sharp and rocky peaks. Mt.St. Helens top was hidden in the clouds which lay draped like a blanket around. 

The Crater as it was left after the eruption

We stopped at various view-points, taking pictures of this volcano which erupted in may 1980 and blew off 1300ft of its top, with a devastating effect on its surroundings. Huge areas of old full grown forests were blasted away. Fires erupted everywhere and a huge mass of ash was spread over an incredible vast area. 

Mt.St.Helens prior to the eruption

With the fire and ashes came also a flood of water, as enormous masses of snow and ice melted from the mountain's top.
We drove all the way to Johnson Ridge where an observatory was build after the eruption. 

Tree blown down by the blast in 1980

Before we reached the edge of the view platform we were  hit by an unbelievable storm forcing us to turn the back to the view. The storm was so strong that it picked up particles off the ground and hurled them right into my face, which was rather hurting. Overlooking the entire valley below Mount St.Helens and the mountains open crater right ahead of us gives a mighty impression on how rough this area actually is. All over the slopes we can see gray colored old trees and trunks which were blown off their roots by the blast.
Very dark clouds appearing everywhere reminded us on our return. Before we reached I-5 the rain was pouring down.A nice warm trailer and a good meal let us forget about the bad weather coming up.

Facts about Mt.St.Helens
The eruption was preceded by a two-month series of earthquakes and steam-venting episodes, caused by an injection of magma at shallow depth below the volcano that created a huge bulge and a fracture system on Mount St. Helens' north slope.
USGS scientists convinced the authorities to close Mount St. Helens to the general public and to maintain the closure in spite of pressure to re-open it; their work saved thousands of lives.
An earthquake at 8:32:17 a.m. PDT on Sunday, May 18, 1980, caused the entire weakened north face to slide away, suddenly exposing the partly molten, gas- and steam-rich rock in the volcano to lower pressure. The rock responded by exploding a hot mix of lava and pulverized older rock toward Spirit Lake so fast that it overtook the avalanching north face.
An eruption column rose 80,000 feet (24,400 m) into the atmosphere and deposited ash in 11 U.S. states. At the same time, snow, ice and several entire glaciers on the volcano melted, forming a series of large lahars (volcanic mudslides) that reached as far as the Columbia River, nearly fifty miles (eighty kilometers) to the southwest. Less severe outbursts continued into the next day only to be followed by other large but not as destructive eruptions later in 1980.
Fifty-seven people (including innkeeper Harry R. Truman, photographer Reid Blackburn and geologist David A. Johnston) and thousands of animals were killed. Hundreds of square miles were reduced to wasteland, causing over a billion U.S. dollars in damage ($2.74 billion in 2007 dollars, and Mount St. Helens was left with a crater on its north side. At the time of the eruption, the summit of the volcano was owned by the Burlington Northern Railroad, but afterward the land passed to the United States Forest Service. The area was later preserved, as it was, in the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument.

August 01

Why I love my dog

I have a dog which I love dearly and which I have learned of a lot. 

When I look into her eyes I see complete innocence. And isn't that an attitude that all animals have? Sure, most of them need to kill prey as they need to eat. But that is not what I think of. Rather I think of the innocence of their mind and what it means to them and what it would mean to us.

An animal has never bad thoughts, does never plan an intrigue, a murder caused by jealousy, political hate or personal greed, Animals don’t think of yesterday nor tomorrow. Led by their instincts, they think of the moment they live in, and by that, their thinking is void of sorrows, worries and fears of the future. 

Most places I go, my dog goes as well. She loves to travel with us and shows a lot of devotion and love. 

Animals do not need a pension, nor any insurance. They do not have to pay bills, watch their net worth grow, apply for loans or fight the IRS. 

They don’t need to fight themselves through a divorce, they just go their way. 

Thousands of humans get killed every day in traffic as somebody doesn’t seem to have enough time to get where he or she is headed. My dog has time enough to live and enjoy life. I want that too. In fact that is what life is all about,

Animals will never seek out danger or start a war. They don’t sell weapons to eachother or talk behind eachothers back. Animals are peaceful and that is the most valuable thing we should learn from them. Mankind has had dogs for thousands of years, and yet has never learned to adjust his own mind the way they live.

Our brain is been considered our blessing, but isn’t it our doom as well? It is the fact which differentiates us from animals, that we can reach conclusions, develop tools and technical apparatus which can catapult us to the moon or make us throw a nuclear bomb onto our enemies.. But my dog would never do that, as she does not think about other countries, other tribes or political systems which rule the world. I can’t picture her seizing an airplane over New York City and directing the plane into the World Trade Center. Only humans are capable of a thing like that.

My dog lives under my protection because I need to protect her as the innocent creature she is.  We humans are not innocent, but guilty of all kind of bad thoughts and deeds.

That is the reason why I love my dog, and if you think about it, probably it is your reason too.