Sunday, February 10, 2008 - Pancho Villa State Park, Columbus NM
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LD's new bathroom curtain rod, February 12, 2008
My new bathroom curtain rod
Today I'm going to take a break from the series of images of my walk up the Dog Canyon Trail at Oliver Lee Memorial State Park to show you a picture of the new bathroom curtain rod I made for this old Lazy Daze RV. Big deal eh - a silly little curtain rod? Such is the scale of life around here these days.
This is the latest in the series of curtain rods I've installed in LD. The first and most important were the ones in the dinette and livingroom I put up in place of the light robbing and ugly valances and dilapidated roller shades that came with this old buggy. Those just had to go before I set out on this trip but the mini blinds Lazy Daze used on the kitchen and bath windows I felt I could suffer along with for a while. At least until I found the time and inclination to do something. Kate Klein finally got my inclination up by asking me to make her some curtain rods for the bath and kitchen of their rig, Cholula Red. We needed to get hold of some aluminum rods for her project so I ordered a couple of extra rods for mine.
Like on my other rods, I made leather hangers for the them but in this case I'm using towels for curtains, an idea I borrowed from Andy Baird. Thanks Andy. Extending the rod into the shower gives me more towel bar to which I attached some of those little plastic spring clips that came on some coat hangers I found at Wal-Mart. These are the greatest little clips. Throw away the silly hangers - it's the clips we're after here. Not only do they fit my new rods but they work great as bag seals in the kitchen as well.
Now to find some nice new towels...
Night camp
Site 29 - Pancho Villa State Park, Columbus NM
- Verizon cell phone service - good signal
- Verizon EVDO service - good signal
- Go to the Pancho Villa State Park website
- Locate Pancho Villa 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: