Tag Archives: Iceberg

Short Days

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As Director of the World Famous Institute I was surprised and somewhat dismayed at the fact that the days here in the immediate area of the Institute’s holdings are getting noticeably shorter. It was just a moment ago and it was light until nearly 10:00 pm. You could work late. Get things done. Now just a low belch after supper it was getting dark. I mean, like, Geeze. We have things to do yet that require long periods of light. Places to go, pictures to take, stuff to look at. Check out the picture above. That’s what happens when it gets dark early. Well I immediately called a meeting.

Gathering the heads of the various departments that are responsible for handling these types of events I demanded answers. “WTF is going on?” was one of my first queries. Looking around to see who I could pin down for some straight answers my gaze swept over the my elite team of specialists. We have cast offs from NOAA, The WMO: World Meteorological Service, The National Weather Service, the one run by the government, even CoCoRaHS or the Community Collaborative Rain Hail & Snow Network, none of them would look me in the eye. We even have that goofy intern wunderkind that has The WeatherBug widget on his computer at the table, as it seems most of these other supposed experts ask him daily for the forecast. No one ventured an answer.

“This shall not stand!” I roared in my best dictatorial voice “These days shall not get shorter until we get all the crap done we’re supposed to and If heads have to roll, then I advise you to get steel collars on your wife beaters, because they will.” The room got quiet, even the WeatherBug kid snuffed out his joint. They knew I was serious. We’ve had purges here before and for a lot less reason. I reminded them if they had any chance in hell of getting that back pay I was holding just for circumstances like this, they had better get things straightened out and I mean now. Yeah that got the sweat rolling down their faces.

 Amazonian Rosewood table, imported before the moratorium on wasting irreplaceable timber resources went into effect, that went from the sublime to the ridiculous. “Let’s pull an iceberg down and plant it off the coast of California and reflect sunlight back this way. That’ll get us a couple more hours.” This was from the NOAA guy. Every other word out of his mouth was iceberg  this and iceberg that. I remembered they punched his ticket for spending too much time out on the icebergs until he was just too loopy to find his butt with both hands behind him. He may not have been our best pick of the litter.

Someone asked the guy from the WMO, the ex-World Meteorological Service person, for a suggestion but no one could get him to answer until we provided him with a mike and a whiteboard. He’s turned out to be useless. They wouldn’t even send his dossier over, said it was classified. That’s probably why we got him so cheap.

The suggestions flew around the table, each one more preposterous than the next until a quiet voice was heard back at the end of the table. “How much more time do you need each day? How many hours?” The room went deathly still. You could have heard a pin drop. It was the stoner kid, the intern we took in after they towed the 79 Pontiac he was living in. We hired him because he was able to get Outlook to work again and we could get our email. He’s now the head of our IT department and will make big, I mean big bucks, if we ever pay him. I thought for  a minute and said “About 4 hours.” “What time is it now” he asked. I looked at my steel-cased, waterproof to 600 meters Rolex chronometer and said “11:15”. “Set your clocks back 4 hours.” he said.

Set your clocks back 4 hours! Set your clocks back? That would make it like 7:15 in the morning. We had the whole day ahead of us. “Eureka!!!” someone yelled, I think it was that woman from CoCoRaHS and pandemonium broke loose. What an absolute perfect solution and it didn’t cost anything, other than hiring that crazy guy to climb the tower and change that clock up there, but that was nothing compared to the productivity we’d get with the days made 4 hours longer. Who would have thought that little 420 burner, I think his name is Billy Haze, would have the answer. My aide, in a quiet aside, said I should reward him somehow, do something nice for him. So I told him that he could move from his tent into one of the dorm rooms in the intern barracks. He quickly asked if it could be one of the heated ones. I nearly balked but thinking of all the time he saved us I said yes, and he immediately split to move his stuff before I changed my mind.

Right now everyone is in feverish hyperactivity determined to wring every second out of those new 4 hours. Quarterly reviews are coming up and since their pay, or lack of it, is dependent on their scores everyone wants to look like a hero. We’ll see. Personally I’m soon off to an important shoot and can’t wait until I get to pack those 4 hours with pictures from my latest adventure. If I run out of light, I may set my watch back another hour. Genius that kid, absolute genius.

Vermilion Peak And The Snow Gods

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Lizard Head Pass is one of the famous passes in Colorado. Passes are a big deal in this part of the country if you want to go from one side of the mountains to the other, and most of them have an aura about them from the many stories told about getting to them, crossing over them, and being affected by them. They also have names that reflect their the experiences and feelings travelers have had with them.

Trail ridge, Independence, Cumberland, Iceberg, Slumgullion, Old Monarch, Cordova, Juniper, Red Mountain, Molas, Rabbit Ears and my personal favorite, Wolf creek pass, just to name a few. Wolf Creek is one of the lower passes at only 10,850′ of the batch named above and Trail ridge is the highest at 12,183′.

Many people worry about the dangers of crossing passes. They have a fear of falling off the road and hurtling to their deaths thousands of feet below. That’s usually an unreasonable fear. On most of these passes the most you can fall is a few hundred feet. I’ve always been curious about this and finally talked to one of the road maintenance crew about it. I asked “What are the risks of falling off the road?” His reply was “None, if you stay between the lines.” This is something that I have endeavored to do ever since that conversation. After all here’s a guy that drives these roads every day of the year in every type of weather. I figure he knows what he’s talking about.

Of course what makes a pass a pass is the mountains on either side of the it. On Lizard Head Pass they have some spectacular mountains. The image above is of Vermilion peak which is but one of the many mountains that the state has provided for the weary traveler to look at. There are others but they didn’t fit in the lens during this picture so they will have to be displayed separately at another time. Yellow mountain, Vermilion Peak (shown), Sheep mountain and of course Lizard Head itself are a few.

Vermilion is one of the more impressive mountains to look at, and as it can be seen from dozens of miles away if not more, and people spend a good deal of time looking at it. Consequently it has developed a routine to add to the shock and awe of its presence. One of the things it will do at the drop of a hat is interfere with the passing storm clouds that go by as regularly as the number 14 bus downtown. Here you see it scraping the bottom of a passing snow filled cloud. When this happens it tears open the cloud allowing all the snow it has to fall on it steep sides, kind of like a lucky hit on a piñata. This is enjoyable to watch as long as the snow stays up on the mountainside. When the cloud has more snow than can safely fit on the mountain it swirls down to where the highway is and dumps it there. This can be bad.

Instead of being a neat parlor trick for the tourists now things can get serious. Too much snow and of course you can’t see where you’re going, in fact you can’t see the road and this is where those bad things happen. See the paragraph above referring to “Staying between the lines.” This situation usually occurs more towards the dead of winter but can happen any month of the year depending on how capricious the snow gods are. Today they were just kind of messing around but it is always a good idea to move away from the area whenever they show up.

If you have an overriding desire to see passes and the mountains they live with I highly recommend visiting Lizard Head Pass. Simply go to Cortez, Co. on Hwy 160 and turn right onto Hwy 145, head up the hill and as you pass through the towns of Delores, Rico, Sawpit, Placerville, Norwood and Redvale to where it abruptly ends at Naturita, Co., you will have seen some exciting sights and driven right through Lizard Head pass. That’s assuming you have stayed between the lines of course. Good luck.