Sunday Scramble...Yellowman

That's the best thing about walking, the journey itself. It doesn't matter much whether you get where you're going or not. You'll get there anyway. Every good hike brings you eventually back home. -Edward Abbey

Oh Hell Yes !!!......Groo The Wanderer

found this while fumbling around the garage.....

In a fray or in a scrimmage, Groo projects a stupid image, People say he's in a cloud- (but do not say it very loud.) Groo they know form here to Sheba, Has the brains of an amoeba. In this world, They say you will find, No creature will a smaller mind. Is there one? We had to know- And so we studied high and low, Searched the mountains and the plains, For a soul devoid of brains. Finally we found last summer, One, It might be said, was dumber. It's a dog who courts disaster, Choosing Groo as his master.

Social Strife May Have Exiled Ancient Indians

"UNTIL very recently, the most perplexing mystery of Southwestern archeology -- what caused the collapse of the ancient empire of the Anasazi -- seemed all but solved. Careful scrutiny of tree-ring records seemed to establish that in the late 1200's a prolonged dry spell called the Great Drought drove these people, the ancestors of today's pueblo Indians, to abandon their magnificent stone villages at Mesa Verde and elsewhere on the Colorado Plateau, never to return again.

"But in the last few years, Southwestern archeology has been shaken with a quiet revolution. Textbooks are being rewritten as the common wisdom, taught to generations of students, is overturned. "Nobody is talking about great droughts anymore," said Dr. Linda Cordell, a professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado in Boulder and director of the natural history museum there. "The mystery of the Anasazi is an open book again."

"Groundbreaking climatological studies have convinced many archeologists that the "so-called Great Drought," as detractors now call it, simply was not bad enough to be the deciding factor in the sudden evacuation, in which tens of thousands of Anasazi... moved to the Hopi mesas in northeastern Arizona, to the Zuni lands in western New Mexico and to dozens of adobe villages in the watershed of the Rio Grande.

"'There are just too many little discrepancies,' said Dr. Eric Blinman of the Office of Archeological Studies of the Museum of New Mexico in Santa Fe. Recent studies have shown, for example, that the evacuation actually began before the dry spell set in. Even more telling is evidence that the Anasazi had weathered many severe droughts in the past. Why did the one in the late 13th century cause an entire population to abandon the settlements they had worked so hard to build?

"'The Great Drought may have been the last straw,' said Dr. John Ware, another archeologist at the Museum of New Mexico.'But in and of itself, it just wasn't enough.'

German beer-makers are concerned about the impact of fracking on beer quality

That's fucking it......Now I am pissed.....

German brewers have sent a letter to various officials in Berlin to voice their concern that shale gas exploitation via fracking could endanger the water supply on which they depend, and thus violate the venerable "Beer Purity Law" (Reinheitsgebot) of 1516, the world's first food purity law. They ask the German government for guarantees that their high-quality water supply will be protected, something that the government has not done so far, they say.

Treehugger

Many moons ago....a seed was planted......

On May 24, 1869, a group of ten men lead by John Wesley Powell set out from Green River Station in Wyoming down the Colorado River and through the Grand Canyon. Taking over three months, it became one of the most famous explorations in American history.

Following the twisting, tortuous rivers, negotiating the rough and dangerous waters, the whirlpools and rapids, Powell's expedition made its way down through the high plateaus of eastern Utah. They were carried through the heart of colossal, soaring rocks; they exploded through canyons and over falls, roaring down the cataracts, or when possible portaging around them.

Sometimes they glided around bends that revealed vistas stupendous and sublime; other times they drifted in the deep noontime shadow cast by towering canyon walls. They clambered up the cliffs, measuring and surveying.

They nearly ran out of rations, and a deep foreboding set in among them. As they entered the Grand Canyon part of Powell's team deserted him, but he pressed on while the walls ascended a mile high around him.

Three months and 900 miles later, Powell and his remaining men emerged from the mouth of the Grand Canyon. The trip would make him a national hero, and in 1875 he published Explorations of the Colorado River of the West and its Tributaries, ensuring that for posterity it would be the most dramatic chapter of his life.

Ignoranus: A person who's both stupid and an asshole.

I've encountered more than my fair share this week....so without further ado ......a ballad just for you....

An Illustrated History Of Gas Masks

The gas mask has a history that dates back thousands of years, though it wasn't until World War I that it became nightmare fodder for Doctor Who and countless other stories. Here is a sometimes terrifying history of the gas mask, from its beginnings through the present day.

io9

Looks like a nice day ahead....

..... but only 102 degrees ?.....

Activists Disrupt Unconventional Fuels Conference in SLC

Peaceful Uprising, Utah Tar Sands Resistance and Deep Green Resistance Great Basin May 7 stormed the Unconventional Fuels Conference in Salt Lake City, piercing fossil fuel lies by speaking truth to power. The Conference was put on by the University of Utah’s Institute for Dirty and Dangerous Energy, otherwise known by its double-speak Orwellian name, the Institute for Clean and Secure Energy. The conference this year placed special focus on tar sands development.

Article

Sunday traipse.....

Gopherus agassizii

Ran into one of these today....

The desert tortoises live approximately 30 to 50 years; they grow slowly and generally have low reproductive rates. They spend most of time in burrows, rock shelters, and pallets to regulate body temperature and reduce water loss. They are most active after seasonal rains and are inactive during most of the year. This inactivity helps reducing water loss during hot periods, whereas winter hibernation facilitates survival during freezing temperatures and low food availability. Desert tortoises can tolerate water, salt, and energy imbalances on a daily basis, which increases their lifespan

Johnson Farm.....

In February 2000, Sheldon Johnson discovered numerous dinosaur tracks preserved at the bottom of a 3-foot- thick sandstone layer overlying a mudstone layer on his farm within the St. George city limits. As reported in Survey Notes, v. 32, no. 3, because of Johnson’s public-mindedness, scien- tists from the Utah Geological Survey, University of Utah, and University of Colorado have been able to collect significant data from this important locality in the Whitmore Point Mem- ber of the Moenave Formation. Ongo- ing research has resulted in the identi- fication of a number of different track makers, fossil plants, invertebrates, fossil fish, and beautifully preserved sedimentary structures that record a shallow, saline lake and its margin during Early Jurassic time (about 200 million years ago) in southwestern Utah.

Dino Tracks

Don’t choose the corpses of murderers for your experiments.

You are performing an experiment. This means you don’t know what will happen. So, if you’re performing an experiment on a corpse, there is always a chance that what you’re doing could result in the corpse returning to life,possibly with super-powers.

Sure, maybe you’re just seeing what will happen when you feed an irradiated Mentos to a dead person and it seems super-unlikely that he’ll spring back to life,

but you don’t know for sure. But if they do happen to come back from the dead, they are going to murder you and everyone else in your lab, because they are murderers,

and that’s what they do. So rather than using the bodies of killers and other convicted criminals for your experiments,

why not use the bodies of nice old ladies?

That way, even if they happen to come back to life and are twisted and evil and are indestructible or something, at least you can probably outrun them.

Utah Tar Sands Action Camp July 21-28

The Canadian petroleum corporation US Oil Sands, Inc is targeting the remote state lands of eastern Utah to be the first tar sands project in the USA. Because political and regulatory objections are diminished in Utah, this project at PR Spring now has the green-light from the state to begin commercial operations.

Before it Starts

Canyon Country Rising Tide

Social Distortion - White Light, White Heat, White Trash 1996

For my beautiful wife..........

Tweet-Tweet you son-of a ........

The “Starving Time”

The harsh winter of 1609 in Virginia’s Jamestown Colony forced residents to do the unthinkable. A recent excavation at the historic site discovered the carcasses of dogs, cats and horses consumed during the season commonly called the “Starving Time.” But a few other newly discovered bones in particular, though, tell a far more gruesome story: the dismemberment and cannibalization of a 14-year-old English girl.....

Smithsonian

“The chops to the forehead are very tentative, very incomplete”

“I stand for what I stand on.”

“ May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you -- beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.” ― Edward Abbey

It's that time of year again......

Ironman