Michael C. Goodwin's Blog, page 4

UFOs, UAPs and Other Odd Things (OOTs)

Yesterday there was a congressional hearing that you may or may not have heard about. Sad to say it was not about the record hot temperatures occurring in the U.S. and around the world. It was also not about the forest fires raging out of control from Canada to Greece, spewing out suffocating amounts of smoke. Nor was it about massive flooding events or deadly droughts happening in various spots around the world. Could it have been about other serious issues such as gun control, medical coverage for everybody, housing for the poor, or even military spending? No, I am very sorry to say that it wasn’t really about anything remotely having to do with anything important, (or even real). It was about UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects), or, if you prefer the more modern term, UAPs, (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena). (Or even my latest term for mysterious objects, OOTs, Other Odd Things).

I am also very much surprised that the hearing did not spill over into other related subjects such as Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, the Hollow Earth or even the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus. At least the last two have national holidays which we willingly celebrate. Perhaps if we were to roll UFOs into a national holiday such as the Fourth of July? It could work, there are lots of lights in the sky, explosions, picnics, drinking and such. It’s about time we monetized UFOs, why let only Roswell, New Mexico make money off of this stuff? So far only the military has had control over all this nonsense. And it’s truly amazing to me that a 100 million dollar jet fighter doesn’t have a good enough video camera to get some really decent shots of these things. I mean, my cheap, $150 dollar doorbell camera gets crystal clear images of the UPS guy dropping off packages on my doorstep.

So at the congressional hearing, these 3 ex-military guys testified that the government has bodily remains of aliens and crashed UFOs, and they aren’t sharing with the rest of us civilians. Okay, maybe, but consider. The nearest star system, Alpha Centuri is 5 trillion miles away. That’s 5 with 12 zeros behind it. So after driving 5 trillion miles, they crash into Earth as soon as they get here? Of course, that’s actually a pretty long drive so they probably had too much to drink and misjudged the landing. Has anyone actually bothered to check the alcohol levels of those recovered alien bodies? The witnesses also claimed that the military was reverse engineering those crashed vehicles. What? Those are not some foreign sports cars, (well, maybe) that can be easily striped down for parts and put together for our own warp drive. I mean even Scotty had problems with the Enterprise from time to time for goodness sake. Anyway, at least this is one issue that even the Democrats and Republicans can agree on, and that has to count for something, I guess.

(In this old painting of mine, even the Federation had trouble getting the right spare parts for their ships. Perhaps if they spent less time looking for alien life and concentrated on their supply chain, things like this wouldn’t happen.)

Steam

Since we have been on the subject of history lately, (ancient history actually), we are going to take a look at recent history. Well, a 154 years ago anyway, to one of the more famous happenings in our state. I am referring to the driving of the Golden Spike which occurred at Promontory Summit in Northern Utah. Since it is only about an hours drive on good roads, we often take our out-of-state visitors there. The only decent feature in that dry, barren, sagebrush covered landscape is a small visitors center and an amazing full-sized, working recreation of the two steam locomotives that met at that historic spot. Built on the original drawings and specifications of the time, these locomotives chug and puff their way to the site every day from their storage sheds to meet at the historic site and delight locals and tourists alike.

To quickly recap the history, the Union Pacific Railroad built their line across the plains west from Omaha, Nebraska and the Central Pacific Railroad built their part of the line east from Sacramento, California, and it was hoped that they would meet somewhere in the middle. Since the U.S. government was paying each railroad company by the mile in money and land, both wanted to finish as many miles as they could. When both companies got close to each other in Northern Utah they began to build and grade competing railroad beds past each other in order to claim more money from the extra miles. There are many spots in the Golden Spike National Historic Monument where you can see two old railroad beds side by side. On the way up to the Promontory Summit you can easily walk to a large fill by the Central Pacific and a site further down where the Union Pacific built a massive trestle, (no longer there, sadly).

For the more adventurous, or foolhardy, you can take a off-road vehicle into the west desert and travel on parts of the old Central Pacific Railroad. My brother and I did so back in 2014 and we had quite an adventure. The railroad bed is broken up by a dozen or so wooden trestles still standing that were built over dry riverbeds and watercourses. There are many desolate spots on the line that were water stops. (The steam locomotives of the time required a water refill every 15 to 20 miles to replenish their steam making abilities. Not easy in that exceptionally dry area north of the Great Salt Lake). There is also the very little remains of small town that serviced the line and locomotives there called Terrace. We almost became stranded on that very remote road and barely made it back to the monument, I recounted that story some time ago in an earlier blog so no need to replay it.

(During the summer, local reenactors play out the ceremony of the driving of the Golden Spike with the brightly colored locomotives behind, (it was the guilded Victorian age at the time). A remote 154 year-old trestle still standing in the dry desert of the area, one of many we found. The original Union Pacific railroad trestle on the way up to Promontory summit. It was said to be quite frightening to travel over the shaky bridge.)

Dragons in the Stone

Perhaps the most exciting thing about collecting fossils is the discovery of a dinosaur bone. No other creatures in the fossil record can be as exciting as these ancient giants. Utah, where I live, is especially abundant in dinosaur remains. Also, there are more then 20 major dinosaur attractions and museums in the state with tremendous displays of bones and reconstructed dinosaurs. There are also many other sites that can be visited where footprints and other indications of dinosaurs can be seen. One of the very best dinosaur bone displays is at Dinosaur National Monument in eastern Utah. A large building was built in 1958 over a cliff wall of some 1,500 dinosaur bones to protect them and facilitate visitors. It was closed in 2006 because of unstable ground and rebuilt and reopened in 2011. We were able to visit in the mid-90s and have not been back since to see the new building and displays.

In Utah, you can collect invertebrate and plant fossils, (in reasonable amounts if collection is for personal, non-commercial purposes on BLM, USFS, and state-administered Trust Lands). You can only keep dinosaur fossils if they are found on land that you own. Likewise there are a few places of privately owned land where you can pay to enter and collect bones, (mostly fragments), as whole bones are very valuable and sold to private collectors. I have collected fragments of bones, often no larger then a 50 cent piece on BLM land, which I suppose is somewhat illegal according to the letter of the law. They are quite abundant around the Moab area of southern Utah where we have visited many times.

The one time I actually got to collect dinosaur bones was on a trip sponsored by the Utah Museum of National History in the early 90s. We traveled to an area leased by the museum, somewhere east of the Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry, (a place that you can visit by dirt road to a small visitors center and covered excavation). It was called a catch and release trip, but since some of the bones and fragments I found were not associated with other bones and not part of a whole skeleton, I was allowed to keep them. Among the fragments I found on the surface, was what looked to be a small part of a rib, an end of a femur, and the best was a good-sized vertebra bone possibly from the tail of a dinosaur. That one is now in the dinosaur exhibit display at Treehouse Children’s Museum in Ogden. It was an exciting find and one of the very best days of my fossil collecting life.

(Part of the dinosaur bone wall at Dinosaur National Monument in the old building. Rob is looking at the display of a reconstructed cast of a juvenile Camarasaurus in the building.)

Memory of Life

After we moved to Utah, as a young child, I had a difficult time fitting in with the local religious culture of the area. On my own a lot, I started working at an earlier interest, drawing, and I began to develop into a decent artist. I also fell in love with the landscapes of the desert and canyons of Utah. My father got to know a geologist and we would visit his house and marvel at his large collections of rocks and fossils. We also began to travel with him around the state and he showed us little known sites where we could do our own collecting. I became enamored of fossils, ancient animals and plants turned into stone, that were often lying on the ground, just waiting to be discovered by an eager young searcher.

For a fossil to occur, some sort of sediment must cover the organism fairly quickly to protect the remains from scavenging animals, decay and erosion. Fossils normally include hard tissues like teeth, bones, shells, wood and other hard plant matter, since soft tissue don’t often preserve. Footprints and other marks left behind by animals can become fossilized as well. Under the tutelage of our friend geologist, I began to learn to read the signs marking ancient remains. It was a giant treasure hunt and I was all for that. I learned about the many types of fossil wood located around the state. Also about trilobites, which are a very common type of fossil to be found as well. Fossil fish can be extracted from soft rocks in nearby Wyoming and shells of all types of ancient sea creatures can be picked up lying on the ground in many places. And of course, dinosaur bones.

When I got older and married, I dragged Lynne out into the desert. She had not been aware of this mania before, and it came as quite a surprise to her, but eventually she got to tolerate it, with mostly good humor(?) Going to gem and mineral shows, I eased her concern of my mental state by buying her jewelry fashioned from other people’s collecting and artistry. Over the years I have long since pared down my collection, which eventually grew to be something of a mess. The better specimens I donated to Treehouse Children’s Museum where Lynne is the director, for their dinosaur exhibit. I have also kept some of the good stuff and I occasionally get it out to look at it. I love the textures and and beauty of the stone remains, it is nowhere close to the real parts of the animals and plants, but the mere memory of life that once was.

(A very old photo of me doing my best Indiana Jones imitation, sitting in a pile of slabs with hopefully, fossils embedded in them.)

Camping Out

One of the purest ways to experience the great outdoors is to go camping. Which is, to my way of thinking, in my advanced years, utter nonsense. And it appears to me, that a lot of other people appear to think exactly like that these days. Otherwise, why is there an incredible number of luxury trailers and huge mobile RVs clogging up the campgrounds in any state park or other recreational areas these days? It all starts out innocently enough, newly married, young and healthy, all we needed was a two man tent. It was a bit primitive, but isn’t that the way to get close to and explore the wilderness? A couple of years later I bought my fathers old Ford pickup and then I bought his truck camper to put on the back of it when he got a newer one. It was more comfortable with a running water sink, stove and burners, and real beds. All a bit cramped, but we liked it and we were better off then in a tent.

Well, let me tell you, it doesn’t stop there, it just gets worse. When Rob came along, we decided that we needed to get something with more room for the three of us. A tent trailer was the solution, it expanded out nicely into something quite large and had sleeping areas on each end with the food prep and such in the middle, it all collapsed quite nicely into a small towable package for our new four-wheel drive vehicle. We went to quite a few places but, the unpredictable weather, dust, rain and wind, along with climates of very hot and rather cold left us wanting just a little more for our safety and comfort, it was again, time to upscale. A hard-sided trailer was what we needed, so we started looking around.

It couldn’t be too big, my four-wheel drive vehicle was rather underpowered and could only pull something modest. New larger trailers were expensive and so we settled on a smaller, used 18-foot trailer with plenty of room and amenities, (for the three of us). We began to pull the thing around on a few short trips and it was pretty much as bad as you might expect. Towing something big and blocky as that relatively small trailer was not easy, it had a tendency to wander all over and not follow the truck peacefully. When there was a wind it really took on a life of its own, wanting to drift off the road. Going up a hill was a real treat as the truck labored to keep going, and Utah is just full of hills and mountains. The final straw came on a trip to Yellowstone. After securing a reservation in a vehicle campground we were startled by the number of mammoth 30-foot and plus RVs and massive towable luxury trailers surrounding us with slide-out rooms, entertainment centers with big-screen TVs, king sized beds and large kitchens. I am sure that they all thought that we were utter amateurs and shook their heads at our small, primitive accommodations. When I got home, I sold the thing to a hunter to use as his base camp. With the money we saved on trailer payments, we were able to stay at comfortable motels and eat at good restaurants anywhere we traveled thereafter.

(The evolution of camping, our first tent, then me in the shade of our truck camper. We advanced to the foldout tent trailer, which in retrospect, probably worked best for us. Lynne and Rob sitting in the shade of the campground next to our hard-side trailer at Bryce National Park.)

Water in the Desert

Utah has an average of 11 inches of precipitation per year, making it the second driest state. Nevada is the driest state, with 10.2 inches, being in the rain shadow of the Sierra Nevada mountains. There is more precipitation, usually snow during the winter months, in the higher mountains of Utah. This past winter has been remarkable with record-breaking amounts, and has given some relief to what has been a much drier series of recent years. Utah has 45 large reservoirs that hold water from 11 river basins statewide. 95% of Utah’s water supply comes from snowmelt that is stored in these reservoirs. In southern Utah, the average rainfall is to 6 to 8 inches per year. In this very arid landscape of rocky plateaus and canyons, the water is supplemented by a monsoonal flow of moisture from the Gulf of Mexico that can extend over the American Southwest in the summer months of July, August and September.

July and August can also be the hottest time of the year in southern Utah, and many people can be caught unawares without enough water. Even experienced hikers can fall prey to lapses in judgement. Once while Lynne was at a conference in Cedar City, I took a day hike in the Kolob Canyons area of Zion National Park. Taylor Creek Trail which leads to Double Arch Alcove is a short 5-mile round trip and I only took one canteen of water with me. The day was very hot and I quickly drank all of my water just getting to the end of the trail. The walk back was long and even the thin trickle of slimy water along the trail started to look good. Driving back to the Visitors Center, I bought and quickly drank an entire can of soda in record time.

One day as we visited Arches National Park, we were caught in a downpour. As we drove through the park we were amazed to see the water flowing off the cliffs and through worn channels of rock, flooding out into the flat. An hour after the rain, all the areas were completely dry and the only rain left was in small, rocky pools of water on the rock. Several times we have been caught by brief showers in Bryce National Park and learned to carry rain ponchos in our packs. In narrower canyons we have also learned to be careful of rain showers in case of sudden flooding. Driving through areas of the southwest we have been absolutely pummeled by heavy rain and hail on occasion and forced to pull off the road. When it rains in the desert, it does not fool around.

(The Colorado River from a vantage point along the Shafer Trail on our trip through the depths of Canyonlands National Park. The river is just about the only source of water for the entire area. In Snow Canyon pockets of water remain on the top of rock formations. Occasional they can last long enough for small ecosystems of tadpoles and insects to thrive for a short while.)

Rob, in the Wilderness

When I was seven, my mother took me and my two younger sisters on a bus trip from Illinois to Rhode Island. Since my father was working, she took us alone, and according to her, we were actually very well behaved. I was fascinated by the scenery, and enjoyed it very much. Even better, was meeting all of my cousins, who, oddly enough, talked in the same New England accent like my mother. We played for several weeks down at the ocean shore, had picnics, watched fireworks and played baseball. When I was eight and nine we took trips to Utah to visit my mom’s sister. My father drove us, and we had a wonderful time again, especially driving through the Rocky Mountains. We also got to play at SaltAir, a resort on the Great Salt Lake with all the usual carnival rides and got to float in the lake itself. (Not as fun as it sounds, being very salty). When I was 10, we moved to Utah, so my father could find work as a machinist.

When my son, Rob, began to grow up, we decided to take trips with him. Lynne and I had been travelers already, we had flown around the country attending science fiction conventions exhibiting our art and also drove all over, exploring the scenic wonders of Utah. And, being Utah, the central and southern portions of the state are mostly desert and canyonlands, not fun places if you prefer cool mountain lakes and streams. We started taking Rob to those science fiction conventions, so he probably got a sort of strange idea of travel. My passion was all of those amazing landscapes of rock and stone, I also enjoyed collecting rocks and fossils and made Lynne and Rob hike through those dry and dusty places with me, lugging out our finds.

Being quite young, Rob was willing to wander along with his pack on his back through those deep canyons, towering rock spires, vast expanses of rocky wildernesses and rough and tumble dirt roads. He never complained and always seemed to enjoy our wanderings. Though, to be fair we also traveled to places like Disneyland, Disneyworld and other amusement parks on our city convention trips. Museums were always a must wherever we found one and of course we ate very well in the cities, unlike picnicking out in the hot and dry deserts where we tried to travel in the spring and fall avoiding the summer heat and the tourists to make things more pleasant for us. When Rob was set to go to Japan for a year of studies, he sorted through all of our pictures to find some pleasant landscapes to take with him to show what life was like here in Utah. Sighing and bowing to the enviable, he said that he really did grow up in the desert and took those photos.

(Rob and me with our four-wheel drive truck, somewhere in the desert. Rob rafting down the Green River and exploring Indian ruins. Since we traveled in the off-season, snow was sometimes a problem in the high country. Rob at Monument Valley and at Angel Arch in Canyonlands National Park.)

Monsters in the Canyons

Most anywhere you go in the deserts and deep canyons of southern Utah, you will find ancient Indian carvings. More accurately you will find petroglyphs and pictographs. Petroglyphs are rock carvings, they are made when a darker surface has been chipped off the rock exposing the lighter rock underneath. Pictographs were painted on the rock directly. Most of these ancient carvings and paintings were made by the ancient Pueblo People, formerly known as the Anasazi. They lived in central and southern Utah from around 0 AD to about 1300 AD and were driven from the area by a megadrought, that according to tree-ring studies, began in 1276 and continued until 1299 AD.

Before the drought came, the carvings depict many kinds of animals, including deer, mountain goats, buffalo and antelope, there are humans who appear to be wearing costumes and jewelry, and unknown symbols of all kinds. The carvings most likely indicated to anyone traveling through the area, the abundance of game, directions to water and the best areas to find native foodstuffs. This was vital information to roving groups of hunter-gatherers that the native Indians were thought to be. There are, however, other rock carvings that show strange, distorted figures with odd and slightly inhuman characteristics. Others have strangely shaped heads with horns and antlers, six fingered hands, eyes that look insect-like and oversized feet. Some of the figures are massively tall compared to nearby human depictions.

What were these nightmarish carvings trying to show us? Were the natives trying to make sense of that unimaginable drought that dried up the rivers and lakes, driving away the game animals and killing off the native plants. Did they think that they were beset by monsters? Certainly the late cliff-side rock dwellings and storage bins that were built in places extremely difficult to reach were purely defensive. Were they refuges from others seeking to steal food to feed their own families? Did other desperate people disguise themselves in order to frighten away others from dwindling resources? The terror of starvation and predication by others of their people surely must have been the end of the world for them. Do the carvings say in plain, loud language, beware of monsters?

(Newspaper Rock in Canyonlands National Park with Lynne looking at the messages chipped in stone and Fremont Panel in Capitol Reef National Park from our trip there. These look more like creatures that you would not like to meet in person.)

Capitol Reef

One of the lesser known of Utah’s five national parks, the area encompassing the park includes the Waterpocket Fold, a north to south wrinkle in the earth’s crust. 60 miles long and on average just 6 miles wide, the land was set aside in 1937 as a national monument. Full park status was established in 1971. The monument was not opened to the public until 1950 and the first paved road was built through the park in 1962. The central area of the park remained almost impassable up until the paving of the Burr Trail in 1991, (only the second road into the park itself). This rocky barrier and others like it in Utah were called reefs by the early settlers. Other areas of the park are a jumble of canyons, domes of rock, arches, towers and cliffs. One massive white dome of sandstone resembles the U.S. capitol building and from that came the name of the park.

Anxious to try out our new 4-wheel drive we asked the park rangers what would be a good backcountry trip. They suggested the Strike Overlook. A remote viewpoint along the fold were you can look up and down the expanse of the long valley facing the edge of the Waterpocket Fold. To get there involved some traveling, but it was along the way to the Burr Trail which we also wanted to drive, so we started our trip early one morning. For 33 miles of dirt road from Highway 24 that goes through the park, we drove to the Burr Trail and then headed west and climbed up a narrow dirt road through the towering cliffs. We found a small sign pointing the way to Muley Twist Canyon and we turned into the rugged dirt road. It was easy going for a short while then the road eventually disappeared completely and we were left to follow a dry stream bed.

Having no choice but to continue on through the occasionally sandy and then rocky course of the stream, I had to stop often and push aside large rocks that looked to be too high for the clearance of our vehicle. Along the way were arches and towers and cliffs of rock, including one undercut ridge of sandstone which we were able to drive partially under. Fortunately, the road was not long and we reached the end of the trail where a short hike brought us to the overlook and we were rewarded with impressive views north and south along the Waterpocket Fold. I shutter to think what could have happened to us if we had an accident or got stuck in the sandy washes, in 1991 there were, of course, no cell phones and during the day’s travels we saw only two other cars on the better roads. Once out of the back country we stopped and had lunch in a rather primitive picnic area and then took the paved part of the Burr Trail back to Boulder and then to Torrey. At this point I was not able to garner too much indignation at the paving of a previously rugged part of that road. I simply could not imagine driving the 30 miles of the Burr Trail on rough dirt after our side trip to the overlook.

(Our vehicle in a sandy wash which undercut the native sandstone. A view of the Waterpocket Fold from the Strike Overlook north.)

The Burr Trail

After World War II and the use of atomic bombs to end it, uranium became much in demand as the U.S. began to build up a stock of nuclear weapons. One of the best places to find uranium was discovered to be in southern Utah, and a gold rush of sorts began there. The man who began that rush was geologist Charles Steen who, in 1952, through many trials and tribulations, discovered a huge deposit of high-grade uranium ore just southeast of Moab, Utah. It confirmed his theory that uranium deposits would be located in anticlinal structures similar to oil deposits. Utah has many such geologic structures throughout the south central part of the state. After Steens’ discovery, several roads began to be bulldozed into the deep canyon country where other discoveries were made.

Originally a route for cattle to be moved through the nearly impassable terrain, the Burr Trail, as it became to be known, connected the small town of Boulder through the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and Capitol Reef National Park to Bullfrog Resort on Lake Powell in the Glen Canyon National recreation Area, some 68 miles in all and it also served as a route for early uranium miners. Calls for the trail to be paved began in the 70’s and generated much opposition from environmental groups. Early attempts, beginning in 1983, for federal funding also failed and the proposed project languished. However in 1987, after a call for an environmental impact statement was rejected, work began on improving the road for paving. In December, 1987 four bulldozers were sabotaged, slowing construction. Events like this came to be called, monkey wrenching, from a term attributed to environmental writer Edward Abbey. By the beginning of 1991, paving from the town of Boulder to the edge of Capitol Reef National Park was nearing completion, some 30 miles in all. In 2019, paving began on the eastern side of Capitol Reef adding another 8 miles of road to the 20 miles of road to Bullfrog. The 9 miles in this narrow part of the Park remain unpaved, though local government officials have repeatedly pressured the park service to improve the road.

In 1991 we finally purchased a 4-wheel drive vehicle and that fall, one of the first places we chose to go was to Capitol Reef National Park and drive the Burr Trail along with other areas of the park, since it had been much in the news. Starting in Torrey, we drove 19 miles on Highway 24 to the eastern side of the park, (which is not very wide but quite long), and then south on unpaved roads along the Waterpocket Fold which is the main scenic feature of the park for 33 miles to where the Burr Trail goes east into the park. There we had to climb up the sheer wall of the Waterpocket Fold in the Park itself. We took a side trip up Muley Twist Canyon to the Strike Overlook, a scenic viewpoint on something not quite resembling a road at all, but that is another story. Then 30 newly paved miles east to Boulder and another 37 miles back on Highway 12 to Torrey. Highway 12 is perhaps the most scenic road in the southwest, certainly in Utah, running from Bryce Canyon through incredible landscapes all the way to Torrey. But again, that is another story.

(The approach to Capitol Reef on the west end of the Burr Trail is very daunting, and that part of the twisting dirt road that climbs up into the park over the Waterpocket Fold is downright frightening. Notice the vehicle on the road at the bottom.)