Thursday, March 22, 2012 - City of Rocks State Park, Faywood NM
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Back at the Rocks, City of Rocks State Park, Faywood NM, March 22, 2012
Back at the rocks
It's good to be back. I really like this park, as do others; it's quite busy here.
A note on charging Apple iOS devices
There is an ars technica article today discussing their confirmation of what others have been finding; that Apple iOS devices will continue to charge up to an hour after the displays show a 100% charge and that if one lets them charge an extra hour or so the subsequent run time is extended.
Most people, I assume, leave their devices plugged into a charger overnight but I don't do that unless my rig is plugged into shore power. When I'm boondocking and running off my precious battery power at night I tend to shut everything down overnight to conserve the house batteries. Then I'll charge my devices during the day and disconnect the charger when they reach 100% charge on the indicator. I think I'll try leaving them charge longer and see if I notice a difference.
Arrg!
I keep a second Time Machine backup on an external hard drive. The partition it's on just failed during a backup. I just reformatted the partition and a new backup is under way but now I have no second copy of older Time Machine backups. Arrg!
Night camp
Site 2 Canes Venatici - City of Rocks State Park, Faywood NM
- Verizon cell phone service - fairly good signal - best on west side of the park
- Verizon EVDO service - faster than many places I've camped
- Go to City of Rocks State Park website
- Locate City of Rocks State Park on my Night Camps map
- Check the weather here
Wind on the Gangplank
There was almost no soil in that part of the range - just twelve miles' breadth of rough pink rock. "As you go from Chicago west, soil diminishes in thickness and fertility, and when you get to the gangplank and up here on top of the Laramie Range there is virtually none," Love said. "It's had ten million years to develop, and there's none. Why? Wind - that's why. The wind blows away everything smaller than gravel."
Standing in that wind was like standing in river rapids. It was a wind embellished with gusts, but, over all, it was primordially steady: a consistent southwest wind, which had been blowing that way not just through human history but in every age since the creation of the mountains - a record written clearly in wind - scored rock. Trees were widely scattered up there and, where they existed, appeared to be rooted in the rock itself. Their crowns looked like umbrellas that had been turned inside out and were streaming off the trunks downwind. "Wind erosion has tremendous significance in this part of the Rocky Mountain region," Love said, "Even down in Laramie, the trees are tilted. Old-timers used to say that a Wyoming wind gauge was an anvil on a length of chain. When the land was surveyed, the surveyors couldn't keep their tripods steady. They had to work by night or near sunrise. People went insane because of the wind." His mother, in her 1905 journal, said that Old Hanley, passing by the Twin Creek school, would disrupt lessons by making some excuse to step inside and light his pipe. She also described a man who was evidently losing to the wind his struggle to build a cabin: