Picto Diary - 14, 15 August 2018 - Fossil Butte National Monument

Above: Bishop and Carol. Wasatch Bagel. Park City, UT. 14 August 2018.

Carol Tucker stopped me in the Wasatch Bagel parking lot and apolagized for not calling Margaret and Mwah (sic) during her visit to Park City.

After Tom's passing two years ago she sold their American Flag subdivision home and bought a small, Deer Valley ski in/ski out condo.

She's been enjoying the visits of her two daughters' families, including three grandchildren.

Carol spends most of her time in Hilton Head, SC, where she co tunes as an active tennis competitor.

Carol and Tom were among the founding organizers of the Park Citi ski event held nine times from 2003 to 2011. We speculated about a last gasp revival of Park Citi, but mused that it was great while it lasted but most of us are skied out (too old!).

Above: John Devine, former CFO of both Ford and GM speaks to La Societe Deux Magots. 14 August 2018.

Hat tip: Cornucopia
Image credit: Peterbilt

Autonomous cars further off than commonly believed.

We'll see autonomous long haul trucks in not to far off future.

The auto business is full of out sized personalities.

Above: KAT. J.C. Penney. Kemmerer, WY. 15 August 2018.

Today KAT and Mwah (sic) motorcycled a two hundred fifty mile loop from Park City, UT, to Kemmer, WY, to Fossil Butte National Monument, Wyoming, to Evanston, Wyoming and back to Park City. Me: 2015 Ducati Multistrada. KAT: 2018 BMW K1200 RS.
KAT shops the Mother Store.

We visited J C Penny's birthplace home, now situated as a national historic place on the Kemmerer town square. A very nice, enthusiastic, woman of a certain age, docent was ready to keep us at the house the rest of the day to ensure that we became J.C. Penney experts. We politely told her we were time constrained. We put a few bucks into the contribution box and went on our way.
The woman was proud of her life in Kemmerer. She was, she said, head sales person at the local Ford dealer for 30 years before she retired. While we had to cut short our time with the amiable docent lady, she seemed emblematic of today's increasingly atavistic deplorables: hard working, happy, playing by the rules, helping ones fellow man, saving for a rainy day... all of the values that were once automatically incorporated into what we thought was the American way. Today's media focuses on and extols new American values... kneeling for the national anthem, bugging your boss, borrowing beyond your means yada yada.

J.C. Penney himself was an avatar of the "old values." He once lost a big customer because that customer expected Penney to gift him a bottle of whiskey every holiday period. Penney, a staunch Baptist, did it once, but, said he regretted it and stopped the practice. The customer left Penney and took his business elsewhere, which, for a time gave a world of hurt to Penney's business prospects. But, Penney stayed the course with his values... imbuing integrity into his employees and into the way J.C. Penney did business. A far cry from today's retailer values of "degendering" bathrooms (and watching their businesses shrink).
My Dad's memoirs talk of his meeting with J.C. Penney during his periodic visits to New York City.

Above: Bishop 'n KAT. Fossil Butte National Monument. US 30. SW Wyoming. 15 August 2018.

Life in Cenozoic... Last 65 million years.

Paleocene to Pleistocene. Rich source of fossils in layers of former lake beds, upheaved to form buttes like those seen in background of image. — at Fossil Butte National Monument.

In the last two years I have visited Hagerman Fossil Beds, National Monument in Idaho, John Day Fossil Beds National Monument in Oregon, and now, Fossil Butte National Monument, In Wyoming - all by motorcycle.

Geologic time is a hard concept to get your head around. There is a fence surrounding the Fossil Butte NM visitors center that attempts to conceptualize geologic time. You can walk along the fence, and at intervals of each 18 inches or so there is an indicator of an event or feature of the time frame relative to 'that far' around the fence, with the fence representing the extent of time since the Cambrian... 500 million years ago.

Its funny. Along the Fossil Butte visitor's center fence... the final six inches of the one hundred yard fence marks the advent of civilized mankind... on the earth only 10K years or so. The whole rest of the one hundred yards of fence represents history of the earth going back to the Cambrian.... and that's only 500 million years ago! The fence would have to be another four hundred yards long to represent the age of the earth! The age of the earth is 4.6 billion years!

This is one reason, by the way, I tend to be skeptical (skeptical... not in denial) about the extent to which mankind's behavior in modern days has a deleterious impact on earth's ability to sustain life as we know it. During the Cenozoic Era... our era... the most recent era... average global temperatures have been eight degrees Fahrenheit warmer and five degrees Fahrenheit cooler.... for extended periods of time... hundreds of thousands of years.... than today's average temperatures. Atmospheric CO2, now four hundred parts per million, has been as high as 2800 parts per million, with vegetation and animal life flourishing.

And, don't expect that the tectonic and volcanic cataclysms that shaped the earth during the early Cenozoic are finished. Because of our limited ability to conceptualize geologic time... as we look into the future, its hard for any of us to imagine beyond 1000 years... let alone the one or two hundred thousand years when, say, a new ice age will begin, or tectonic activity will accelerate and once again spur a spate of volcanic activity threatening or altering life on earth.

The three fossil bed monuments I have seen in the last two years cover periods of the current Era... the Cenozoic, which goes back some 65 million years. That's just a measly five million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs, during the Cretaceous Period of the Mesozoic Era. In the context of geologic time, five million years is a "measly little period of time."

Hagerman (ID) was exposed as the Snake River, over eons, eroded the Snake River plain. The erosion exposed relatively recent (Pliocene, three million years ago) fossil beds where most forms of life would be recognizable by us today. Evidence of wet meadows and of dry, open grassland environments has been found in the Pliocene. Horses and other hoofed mammals proliferated. Hagerman is known for abundant fossils of the "Hagerman Horse." The Hagerman horse (Equus simplicidens) is the oldest known representative of the modern horse genus Equus (which includes horses, donkeys, and zebras) and is believed to be more closely related to the living Grevy's zebra in Africa than our modern horse. There is a skeletal replica of the Hagerman Horse in the National Monument visitors center in Hagerman, ID. Original fossilized skeletons of the Hagerman Horse are in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C.

John Day (OR) exposes fossil beds containing fossils of plants and mammals that lived in the region between the late Eocene, about 45 million years ago and the late Miocene, about 5 million years ago.
Volcanic eruptions about 44 million years ago during the Eocene deposited lava accompanied by debris flows (lahars) atop the older rocks in the western part of the province. The remnants of these ancient flows comprise the rock formations exposed at John Day. Preserved in the flows are fossils of tropical and subtropical nuts, fruits, roots, branches and seeds. Eroded remnants of the John Day area stratovolcanoes, once the size of Mount Hood, are now eroded buttes, still visible near the monument.

Later in the Eocene and towards the beginning of the Oligocene, 34 million years ago, after the local volcanoes had subsided, new volcanoes, to the west, were formed, in the general vicinity of what would become the Cascade Range. These western volcanoes emitted large volumes of ash and dust, much of which settled in the John Day basin. As with the earlier debris flows, the rapid deposition of ash preserved the remains of plants and animals living in the region.

Fossils found in the later John Day strata include a wide variety of plants and more than 100 species of mammals, including dogs, cats, oreodonts, saber-toothed tigers, horses, camels, and rodents.

The John Day fossil beds were exposed by the relatively recent erosion caused by the John Day River, which flows northwesterly from the mountains of western Oregon into the Columbia River.

Fossil Butte (WY), which KAT and Mwah (sic) visited today, was the home of a great lake, 52 million years ago, near the start of the Eiocene Epoch. The lake's layered bed was raised by tectonic activity into the buttes we see today. The lake bed left behind a wealth of fossils in the lake sediments that turned into rock known as the Green River Formation. The Green River Formation is made up of laminated limestone, mudstone, and volcanic ash. The fossils are among the worlds most perfectly preserved remains of ancient plant and animal life.

There is a broad spectrum of species found at Fossil Butte. Plants, snails, crustaceans, spiders, millipedes, insects, reptiles, birds, mammals, and over 20 kinds of fish.

Fossil Lake, 60 miles long and 40 miles wide, nestled among mountains in a lush forest. Willows, beeches, oaks, palms, maples, and ferns grew on the lower slopes; forests of spruce and fir grew on the cool mountain-sides. In and around the warm waters of the lake, animal live was diverse and abundant. A variety of fish inhabited the tributaries, shallows, and deep water of the lake during its life of over two million years. Gars, paddlefish, bowfins, and stingrays survive today, as do herring, perch and mooneyes. The shores bustled with crocodiles; primates and dog sized horses inhabited the land. Birds and bats took to the air.

Above: Kat and his bike, BMW K1200 RS. Summit County Monument for Utah War, 1856. I-80 frontage road, Echo Canyon, UT. 15 August 2018.

Summit County Monument for Echo Canyon breastworks, used by Mormon Militia, opposed to US troops, during 1856 Utah War.

My Great Great Grandfather, Andrew Hunter Scott, Mormon Militia member, helped build the Echo breastworks when he was a 15 year old boy.

Bishop informed KAT that his were not the only people to undergo persecution at the hand of a venal government. (No moral equivalency intended).

A train passed about the time of taking this image. I gave a visible wave to the engineer and he gave me a wave and a toot back. — in Echo Canyon Utah.

You don't have to be a motorcyclist to enjoy the benefits of travel. But, for me, perhaps without credible explanation as to why, riding the bike makes the sites and the people I see while traveling closer and more vivid.

During my recent motorcycle travels around Utah, Wyoming and Montana I have sensed an atmosphere of good feeling and contentment among the people I encounter: the friendly wave and toot, today, from the UP engineer... the eager, happy J.C. Penney house docent in Kemmerer. And a few weeks ago in Cody... the overworked but happy cell tower guys from Dallas, eager to get home to their families... the ROMEO deplorable at Granny's Restaurant, who hearing Markco was from California, laughed and said, "hey, those guys (Californians) are going to start a revolution. But, I'm not worried, we've got the guns!" And then there was the Sheridan, WY restaurant, Chops and Ribs, its outside lot filled with two ton pick-ups, and its inside, chock full of reveling, happy cowboys and cowgirls. Motorcycle riding has led me to quite a few vividly experienced happy places and people of late. Good times. Its fun, today, being out on the Duc again!

Above: Military equipment train. Union Pacific. Echo Canyon, UT. 15 August 2018.

Echo Canyon. Transcontinental Railroad. Union Pacific train, 115 cars, transporting what looked like an entire US Army Divison's accoutrements.

My first reaction seeing this train was, "don't f... with the United States." — in Echo, Utah.

Addendum:

Good shooting. Scope? How many grains?

The Archbishop,
Ashville, NC

The plus 1000 yard shot was done by the expert who gave us the tutorial on bullet ballistics the day before. He was shooting his Remington 700 Magnum rifle, with suppressor, he uses for elk hunting.

My longest distance shot was 500 yards with a scoped AR15.

I don't mean to simplify this, but adjusting the scope is everything.... lining up the scope with the target, and then, pulling the trigger is pretty easy... at least in relative terms.

Proper sighting of the scope (science) needs to take into account so many factors... the Coriolis effect, barometric pressure, altitude, outdoor temperature, type of projectile, type of powder, caliber, depth of the bullet into the casing yada. Sometimes even then, Kentucky windage (art) is required, to adjust for wind or "je ne sais quoi."

Choosing the right weapon, setting the scope, the art of targeting, retrieving and dressing the animal... i.e. harvesting properly.... are all part of this discipline. Few get to this point... of being able to do it at 1000 yards plus.

Interestingly, on the day before our shooting experience, the news reported a record sniper kill in Afghanistan by an SAS (British special forces sniper). 2000 yards, about one and one half miles... that's twice the distance we were shooting today.

Also, shooting at these long distances requires a good spotter and spotter scope... long distance shooting is a two person activity.

Its a most impressive skill set to be able to do this.... and I'm really glad I'm friends with a guy (MIT grad and F16 pilot) who knows how to do it. When the shit hits the fan, I hope he's nearby and has time for me.