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Thursday, April 28, 2011 - Sewemup Mesa Canyon, Gateway CO

Boondocked, Sewemup Mesa, Gateway CO, April 28, 2011
Boondocked, Sewemup Mesa, Gateway CO, April 28, 2011

I'm Losing it

Broken Generator Mount, April 28, 2011
Broken Generator Mount, April 28, 2011

Hoo boy, this looks like trouble. I noticed a new creak as I went over a bump pulling into a roadside Point of Interest back in Uravan CO. The pan the generator mounts to cracked and is threatening to drop it on the road. Nineteen years and 130,000 miles have revealed a weak spot in design of the pan. Behind the break is a large rectangular hole for the cooler (that thing you see hanging below the pan to the left of the break) that extends almost to the turned up and now broken lip of the pan.

I can't see any reasonably simple way to stabilize this break out here in the boonies. I need a welding shop - or failing to find one, maybe with some hardware from a Home Depot or Lowes I can jury-rig a temporary fix. In the mean time I don't think a complete drop-the-generator-in-the-road failure is imminent. I hope not. It's 90 miles from Uravan to Grand Junction - with some luck I'll find a welding shop enroute.

Night camp

Boondocked - Sewemup Mesa Canyon, Gateway CO

Five Trillion Spiders

Spiders begin their hunting with a few handicaps. They're often smaller and weaker than their prey, and they have no wings to give chase in the air. Some species extend their legs by hydraulic pressure, using the same liquid that carries oxygen from their lungs, so they have a hard time running and breathing at the same time. Even their poison may be no match for their victim's: a crab spider's bite is to a honeybee's sting as "an air-gun compared with an elephant rifle," John Crompton wrote. Yet spiders kill at an astonishing pace. One Dutch researcher estimates that there are some five trillion spiders in the Netherlands alone, each of which consumes about a tenth of a gram of meat a day. Were their victims people instead of insects, they would need only three days to eat all sixteen and a half million Dutchmen.

From Spider Woman by Burkhard Bilger, The New Yorker magazine, March 5, 2007, page 69

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