Saturday, November 28, 2009 - Chickasha OK
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Hey Wally, what's with the windmill?, Rogers AR, November 28, 2009
Someday I'm going to have a travel day with no issues to think about. Really.
Another observation on tires and tire pressure
Today I ran west on I-40 toward Oklahoma City for a few miles. This section of I-40 is a horribly rough concrete road and now that my teeth are quite sufficiently loose in my jaw I think I'll try 75psi for a while. I like the stability I get at 80psi but my teeth hurt. Maybe 75psi will soften up the harshness a tad without sacrificing too much of the great stability I discussed here yesterday.
Once I got beyond the rough concrete section I had a chance to run about 70mph for the first time with the new tires and dang, wouldn't you know the old tire wheel hop is still there. I must be missing something. I've had a lot of front end work done in the past year and to think I still have an issue up there makes me twitch. Sheesh - will this nonsense never end?
Night camp
Wal-Mart Supercenter in Chickasha OK
Wal-Mart Supercenter Store #113, 2001 So. 1st St., Chickasha, OK 73018 - (405) 224-1867
- Good level parking
- Verizon cell phone service- Extended Network
- Verizon EVDO Broadband service - via Extended Network, signal varies
- Locate this Walmart on my Night Camps map
- Find other Wal-Marts in the area
- 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: