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