Before school started, we visited Grandma Joan and Grampa Ed in Somers for a weekend
As usual we caught many fish in the pond, but we also grabbed a baby snapping turtle
Back at home Erin passed her driver's test
and a Hurricane named Erin riled the seas in North Carolina. We hope that our Erin won't churn up any trouble on the roads.
Tessie started 7th grade at Jonas Clarke Middle School
Erin started 11th grade at LHS
and the girls cross-country team was selected as pre-season #1 in the state
We enjoyed our last days with Caroline. This is the (not-so) classic card game Dragonmaster.
First and only trip to the ocean this year at Hampton Beach, NH
Last run on the town trails
Heather raised monarch butterflies again and quickly fell into the vicious cycle of needing to find clean milkweed leaves to feed the caterpillars, but also finding newly laid eggs on the milkweed, which led to more caterpillars, more leaves, more eggs...
By the end of the season we had raised over 50 and tagged 45 butterflies for tracking by Monarch Watch to see if any reach the mountains of Mexico for overwintering
Dropping Caroline off at Dartmouth was easy-peasy. Her stuff filled my car for the 2-hour drive.
Her dorm, Little Hall, is in a complex called the Choates that have seen better days
Her 1st floor room has lots of natural light, as the real estate agent would say. It also has spartan furniture and 67 years of white paint coating the cinder block walls. Caroline's roommate is from Brazil and she was all set up when we arrived.
Thanks to Heather's planning, we didn't have to do any last-minute shopping for Caroline's set up except to order a dresser that would fit under her bed
The Dartmouth campus is great for outdoorsy people. Just across the street from Caroline's dorm is Occam Pond, which leads into nature trails for walking and jogging
By afternoon we said goodbye and headed home
Then for the next 10 days Caroline partook in onboarding festivities for the class of 2029
Dartmouth has a house system borrowed from English schools like Hogwarts. There are 6 Dartmouth Houses and the sorting hat landed Caroline in School House, possibly because of the fish mascot. Three freshman dorms feed into School House, and then in later years they have access to 3 upper-classmen dorms
Here on Instagram we caught a glimpse of her. We'll see how well she communicates with us.
Our final outing in Moab was to a swimming hole that required a short hike along a creek
Although they tried to dissuade us
The kids couldn't resist trying cliff jumping (see videos)
Katy headed back home a few days before us. On our last day in Moab we ran at dawn along the Colorado River
Dinosaur National Monument straddles the Colorado-Utah border and is famous for its concentration of 150 million year-old dino bones. Stegosaurus is found here, and the other common ones are shown at scale alongside human park rangers for proportion.
The Quarry Visitor Center encloses a partially excavated hillside called the Wall of Bones
There, 1500 bones can be seen
and they even let you touch them!
Heading north on the Utah-Wyoming border we stopped to view the Flaming Gorge, where the Green River cuts its way through the Uinta Mountains. Named by one-armed explorer John Wesley Powell during his 1869 expedition into the Grand Canyon, it is magnificent. Even though it is a National Recreation Area, it is under control of the US Bureau of Reclamation, and therefore not an official NPS site (yet).
When you're on the road and looking for things to do, don't pass up a county fair. In Rock Springs WY we found Sweetwater County Wyoming's Big Show. Did our resortwear look a little out of place among the buckled and booted local fairgoers? Yes. Did it matter a lick? No it didn't.
The fair had the usual livestock exhibits. On those goat by-products, I've used the blocking reagent in lab work, but I have never worn kid gloves
The petting zoo was insane! Baby sheep, goats, cows, ponies, donkeys, and pigs were whirling around followed by a guy on continuous pooper-scooper duty
There was an acrobat troupe from Tanzania. This guy reminded me of an episode from back in college...
And then there was the carny food. Charlie claimed to never have eaten corn dog. Problem solved!
Fossil Butte National Monument in Wyoming will probably be our last fossil-focused Park site. There are many of these out West and they cover a lot of ground: Agate Fossil Beds (NE), Badlands (SD), Dinosaur (CO-UT), Florissant Fossil Beds (CO), Hagerman Fossil Beds (ID), John Day Fossil Beds (OR), Petrified Forest (AZ), Theodore Roosevelt (ND), Tule Springs Fossil Beds (NV), Waco Mammoth (TX).
Remember that the Cretaceous-Paleogene Extinction Event, aka the death of the dinosaurs, occurred 66 million years ago. The Fossil Butte fossils are 52 MYO, from an epoch called the Eocene. By then the great inland sea that created all that wonderful sandstone of Utah had closed, leaving a series of lakes.
A giant lake with freshwater at the top and saltwater at the bottom? I'm no stranger to muck and ooze from the pond at my parents' house, but that is nothing compared to what "microbial mat" at the bottom of Fossil Lake must have been.
but wow, the fossils were incredibly intact - um I mean articulated
and it's not just aquatic life, there were birds
and then on the wall of the bathrooms, there was a huge exhibit on coprolites. This is the only Park exhibit that I have ever seen in the bathrooms!
There are quite a few park sites that commemorate a single day in history when something bad happened: 9/11, the Johnstown Flood, Lincoln's assassination. Golden Spike NHP in Promontory Utah celebrates a momentous day when something positive happened: on May 10, 1869 the transcontinental railroad was completed.
The Union Pacific came in from the west and the Central Pacific came in from the east
The VC had a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure exhibit. From it I learned the importance of having an accurate watch during the early railroad age. Until then, the hours of the day were set based upon when the sun reached its highest point in the sky, which defined noontime. Of course as one moves east-west the apparent solar noon drifts following the sun, and even though cities and towns would maintain local time, it was understood that noon in New York was a few minutes later than noon in Boston. All of these local time settings required railroads to maintain complex timetables for travelers. Eventually the railroads had enough and on November 18,1883 the 4 continental US time zones took effect.
The original transcontinental route shown in black skirted the Great Salt Lake. In 1904 the railroad companies finished a shortcut that crossed the lake on causeways. This was great for rail travel but not so much for the ecology of the lake, whose northern ends couldn't circulate as well, and have now almost entirely disappeared.
We spent a night in Salt Lake City and as first-timers we visited the LDS Temple downtown and then decided to hit the #2 attraction, the Great Salt Lake. I have swum in the Laurentian Great Freshwater Lakes, and now I was ready for a Great Salt Lake. Curiously, most guidebooks don't tell you how to swim in the lake, but we did find one description.
We drove out to Antelope Island State Park, where the lakeshore was unforgettable, shall we say. Due to the lake's recession, we walked about a half a mile from the beach facilities to reach the shoreline. It smelled funky due to the billions of brine flies that form a mat at the water's edge (check out the videos). The water was absolutely dead calm and extremely shallow.
On Antelope Island the water mains were being worked on and as a result the cleansing showers were nonfunctional. I was not going to subject myself to salt encrusting without a rinse and so my salty swim dream remains unfulfilled.
If current trends continue, the Great Salt Lake may dry up completely
Antelope Island has a bison herd and Lyla and Charlie were able to see their first wild one
Our last night together we partied like Mormons by having a nightcap at a Dirty Soda shop. You can create your own concoction or choose among their selections
Despite researching the popular combos, Caroline's creamy orange Dr. Pepper wasn't a hit
Our final stop was Timpanogos Cave, located in the mountains just east of Salt Lake. This completes the tour of NPS cave sites: Carlsbad (NM), Jewel (SD), Mammoth (KY), Oregon (OR), Russell (AL), and Wind (SD). The entrance to Timpanogos is at 6730 feet
but the trail starts 1092 feet below and requires strong calves to ascend the 1.5 mile trail
That didn't deter the large numbers of families that we saw on the trail, many with ginger-headed little kids. We encountered fewer gawky kids, thoughtless women, and hardboiled men.
From our ranger guide we learned that the temperatures of caves are set by the average annual temperature of their entrances. Timpanogos is up in the mountains and that sets its thermostat to a chilly 45 degrees.
This cave is famous for these straw-like formations called helictites
With this trip completed, our National Parks era draws to a close on the eve of Caroline heading to college. Depending on how you count, I've visited 400-413 of the current 433 official sites. We've earned Junior Ranger badges at 383 of the 386 that offer them and if the remaining ones allow mail-in submissions (I'm talking to you Little Bighorn, Guam, and American Samoa) then we should complete that collection this year. Which sites are my favorites? They all are. Seriously, why make unnecessary comparative judgments? All the parks are great. Go plan a daytrip to visit one near you that you haven't been to before. Watch the movie, do the Junior Ranger booklet, chat up the Ranger, tour the area. As time passes the nacre around that experience will harden and to me, these pearls of memory are my most treasured possessions.
