On the Road with Jan and George

Our home...but not just yet.

So it’s almost the end of October and I’m in the middle of teaching Medical Immunology to our first-year medical students.  Our tenants were still in the Flamingo Drive house when we arrived in our temporary quarters in Irvine over a month ago, but there was lots to be done before we could move back in.  Termites are a universal and continuous presence in southern California and we’d been advised a year and a half ago that we needed to have the house tented and fumigated.  But the tenants were not so eager to have it done, so we ended up waiting until they were gone.  The time had come…

Our turn for the circus tent.

Then we had most of the inside painted, the living room, dining room, kitchen and family room.  Then we were ready to take delivery of all our stuff that had been in storage in three different places, from Los Angeles (everything that had been moved out when I left for New York in 2006), from Costa Mesa (the stuff that got moved out when the new tenants in 2008 decided they didn’t want any of our furniture), and from New Jersey (everything that had been in our New York apartment).

Our stuff arrives from New Jersey...first of three deliveries.

The biggest load arrived from New Jersey.  Then we got our stuff from the storage facility here in Costa Mesa, and the truck from LA came the following week.  So everything’s now back in the house, although it will take us a while to unpack and figure out where it’s all supposed to go.  And we become more acutely aware of the fact that we’re going to have to figure out how to get rid of a lot of this stuff in the foreseeable future.

Home sweet home! (At least for now...)

But for we now get to eat at our own table, to sleep in our own bed, and to sit down on our own furniture to watch our new big-screen TV.  (It’s bigger than Richard McKenzie’s and Rob Milberg’s, that’s what’s important.)

Home Sweet Home!

On Sunday morning we’re off to Symphony Drive in the middle of what is otherwise the “spice” neighborhood of Prescott (Coriander Court, Cayenne Lane, Allspice Way…) to see John and Barbara Gross.  John is my second cousin, his grandmother Ida Gutmann was the sister of my father’s father Hermann.  His family survive the war living in Germany, and he and his siblings have shared some fascinating and frightening stories from that time.  All of them had lived in California for most of the past thirty years, but we’ve unfortunately managed to see them only sporadically until fairly recently, and he and Barbara have lived in Prescott for the past several years.  We find our way to their house, and that evening have the pleasure of meeting Barbara’s son Ted and his buddy Thomas who arrive for a visit in full leathers on their Harleys.

Thomas, Ted, Barbara & John

At Montezuma Castle

The next day John and Barbara take us to see more of the sights of the Prescott area, and we visit Montezuma Castle, a remarkable nine hundred-year old, 20-room apartment complex built into the limestone cliffs.  The name is a fantasy, this place was built and occupied by the Sinagua people a few  centuries before Montezuma’s time, and so far as anyone knows he never came anywhere near here.  The ancient stone walls ring a familiar bell in my mind, they’re not that much older than the walls which still stand at the perimeter of my home town, Domme, in the south of France.

Not far from here is Montezuma Well, a huge sinkhole filled by a continuous flow of water from two underground springs.  There are more cliff dwellings carved into the cliff faces above the lake, and this water continues to be used for irrigation, running through a man-made ditch which dates back a thousand years.

Montezuma Well

John has developed a serious interest and expertise in our family’s genealogy,  and I’m grateful to share in his extensive trove of information.  His proficiency in German made it possible for him to gather data on several of his visits to Bavaria which would have been impossible for me do.

It’s been a delightful and informative visit, but the next day we’re on the road again.

Saguaros (Cereus giganteus)

We head southwest on Route 60 then west on I-10, through the western range of the saguaro cactus, a universal presence in most old cowboy movies.   We enter California and stop for lunch as recommended by Barbara and John, at Chiriaco Summit, a cafe that’s been there since 1935.  We drive through towns which are sounding increasingly familiar, Indio, Palm Springs, Riverside.  Then we’re on Route 91 and 55, known sporadically as the Costa Mesa Freeway. We pick up the keys for our temporary digs in UCI’s Gabrielino apartments and after 12,500 miles our cross-country trip is over.

Chateau Williams

Randy and James’ home is nestled among boulders and  rocky outcroppings.  The day after we arrive they take us for a drive through the nearby mountains along Highway 89A, which offers some beautiful views.

Highway 89A

Our destination is the old mining town of Jerome.  I’m amazed when we first see it from the road, it looks like a mountain village in France or Italy.

Jerome

The mountainside on which it’s perched is a honeycomb of vertical and horizontal mine shafts which yielded millions of pounds per month of copper between the late 1800’s and 1953 when the last mine closed.

Wild West

It had a very colorful history, a true Wild West community, which has given way to a thriving artists’ colony.   Randy and James have bought some beautiful wood furniture here, and we find a lovely woven table runner for our dining room table.

Broken Arrow Trail

Pink Jeep on the Devil's Staircase

The next morning Randy and James take us for a Pink Jeeps tour on the Broken Arrow Trail in Sedona, it offers spectacular mountains and rock formations, and some pretty exciting rides in one of the Jeeps which have been custom-designed for this brutal terrain.

This is steep! (No, I didn't tilt the camera.)

We share our Jeep with a newlywed couple from the East Coast…this is what it looks like from the inside, heading down the Devil’s Staircase.

Tlaquepaque

Papilio rutulus - Western Tiger Swallowtail

After our ride we have lunch in the Tlaquepaque Village and enjoy wandering through shops and galleries offering a wide variety of paintings, sculptures and crafts.  This is another favorite spot of Randy and James’  where they’ve gotten a lot of the art work that decorates their home.  The swallowtail is beautiful and entertaining but has no price tag.

Our last day here is more leisurely, Jan and Randy walk into town for some shopping and we prepare to move on to a different Prescott neighborhood tomorrow.

Jan and I have never visited Bryce Canyon.  We drove through it with Dan and Elizabeth many years ago on our 3,000-mile camping tour of the West, we had spent a couple of nights tenting in Zion but then continued on our way to Dinosaur National Monument and points north.  So we’ve been looking forward to visiting Bryce for a long time.

After breakfast we drive into the park, walk along the rim overlooking the first of a series of magnificent “amphitheaters” and head down the hiking trail toward Queen’s Garden.   The woman at the hotel desk told us that we should do this hike in the morning, when the sun is low and lighting up the east-facing walls of the canyon.  And we learn the Bryce Canyon is not technically a “canyon”, since it wasn’t cut by a stream running down its length, but rather by small rivulets and ice melt running perpendicular to its walls.

Walking down the amphitheater in the morning sun.

But canyon or not, it’s astonishing, the beauty of this place is indescribable!  We’re stunned every time we turn a corner, or look up, or look back over our shoulder.

We pass dramatic stands of what appear to be alien sentinels, “hoodoos” (an African word), which bring to mind an odd recollection.

Hoodoos

After we arrived in Orange County from Australia in 1977 we often visited Disneyland, first with friends visiting from overseas, and later when our kids were little.  One of our favorite rides was Big Thunder Mountain, a train/roller coaster racing through a desert Southwestern landscape.  We only now  realize that Disney closely copied the dramatic rock formations on that ride from the hoodoos we’re seeing here!

Jan on the "other"Wall Street

We continue past Queen’s Garden, past the cutoff for the Navajo Loop trail, and turn back toward the rim through the narrow confines of Wall Street.   Hikers on this trail benefit from a fair bit of rock-cutting, shoring up and stair-building, much of the work was done not by the National Park Service, but by the the Civilian Conservation Corps.  We have a sentimental attachment to the CCC’s, Jan’s dad (“Roz”) was part of the Corps before WWII, and there’s an old CCC camp on Mud Creek Road that we pass on the way to our Lake Vermilion cabin.

When we get back to the car we drive down to the very southern end of the park and work our way back past a series of spectacular lookouts.

Is it raining? Well, yes and no...

We’ve had gorgeous weather for our morning hike, but it’s not so reliable now.  There’s only about ten-minute interval between the two photos above…

The Natural Bridge

…but we get a fine view of  the Natural Bridge.

Ho hum, more of the same...

It’s time to leave Bryce Canyon.  It almost seems redundant but I can’t resist throwing in one more landscape.

Goodbye to Bryce

The next morning we pack up our stuff, load it back into our trusty little Subaru and head out of the park.  Some of the locals are out to say goodbye.

A corner of Lake Powell

We head south on Route 89 through miles of dry scrub, then we see some water in the distance.  It’s our first view of Lake Powell.

Agave?

Not sure exactly what this is, but it clearly loves dry heat and it’s got beautiful seed pods.

Glen Canyon Dam

And here’s the famous (infamous?) Glen Canyon Dam with Lake Powell behind it.  There was considerable opposition to building this dam in the 1950’s, which ended up flooding a deep canyon of stunning beauty.  Lake Powell is very big,  it took 17 years to fill.

The mighty Colorado River

The river looks pretty harmless, but it was this little guy that created the Grand Canyon a few miles downstream over the past six million years or so.

Utah’s behind us and Flagstaff is ahead, we continue on to Prescott to find the beautiful home of our friends James and Randy Williams with whom we’re going to stay for a few days.  But one more adventure awaits us on the way.

I call James to let him know when we’re arriving, and he suggests an alternate and more scenic route from Highway 17 to Prescott than the normal one.  However, as the saying goes, “What we have here is a failure to communicate”.   James thinks he’s sending us on Cherry Road, but I think he’s telling us to drive through the town of Cherry, and we end up on W. Cherry Creek Rd. instead.   I should have known something was wrong when the map on Jan’s smart phone showed the town all right, but showed no road leading to or from it.   Here’s a satellite view of the route we end up taking:

The road through Cherry

We leave Highway 17 (at the upper right) and turn off onto a nice two-lane paved road, but after a while it turns to gravel then to dirt, then climbs steeply up a mountainside in a series of sharp switchbacks.  We spend an hour and a half driving along this 15-foot wide strip of dirt with a frighteningly steep drop-off on our left and no barrier.  At one point I ask Jan if I can stop to take some photos…but she tells me that if we stop she’ll have to get out of the car and she won’t get back in.  So no photos.  If the drop-off had been on her side instead of mine she would have been out of the car long ago.  We pass a couple of well-worn Jeeps coming the other way,  both drivers thoughtfully stop to ask if we’re all right – we obviously are completely out of place.  I ask one of them, “Cherry is up ahead, right?”.  His answer: “Yup…such as it is.”

We get to the top of the mountain and begin a gentle descent through the woods,  Jan starts breathing again, and we go through the town of Cherry which consists of a few houses by the side of the road.  We stop to let a young man lead a handful of longhorn cattle across the road.  The dueling banjo theme from “Deliverance” is running through my head.

But we get to the end of W. Cherry Creek Road and turn right onto Cherry Road, then make our way to Prescott on the route that James had actually recommended, only a couple of hours later than expected.  Our evening Manhattans have never been more welcome.

We leave Pocatello and head south on I-15, push into Utah past Salt Lake City and the Great Salt Lake then get off the interstate onto State Highway 28, which our trusty Rand & McNally road map shows as a scenic route.  Indeed it is, and we soon stop for a picnic lunch at Levan Town park.  We have our little shelter all to ourselves, although across the park there’s a big multigenerational family reunion going on.

And with the help of a few carrots I make friends with one of the locals right next door.

Mom's...I neglected to take a photo, this is from the web.

It’s not too far to the city of Salina (pronounced “Sal-eye-na”) where we stop for the night and have a great dinner at Mom’s Cafe (liver and onions, yeah!).  It’s actually at the corner of State and Main, and a local hot spot for over eighty years.

The next morning we continue south on Highway 24, an even smaller scenic road, and we get our first taste of the dramatic iron-laden rock formations that we’ll see a lot more of in Bryce Canyon.

Hay, look at that!

We turn off onto Highway 12 and enter the Escalante wilderness, past the towns of Lyman and Bicknell,  and into beautiful mountain aspen forests.

Aspen clones

The white trunks you see are aspens, each cluster is a clone of dozens or scores of genetically identical trees.

We’ve been climbing pretty steadily up Boulder Mountain, and at the top we’re warned of the pretty steep drop in elevation heading down to Boulder Town.

The edge of the world...that's a 3000 foot drop

I’d visited Boulder with a friend in 1969, it looks very different now with not so many abandoned homes and everything in much better repair, no doubt helped by the tourists who come through here in large numbers.  In 1969 the road wasn’t paved and we couldn’t have negotiated it at all without George Johnson’s four-wheel drive Nissan Patrol that he  had kindly let us borrow.

We drive past Boulder on the way to the town of Escalante and stop for lunch at Calf Creek campground.

It’s a gorgeous spot and a beautiful sunny day, but the water is quite chilly!

Brrrrr!

We go through Escalante and Tropic and cross into the northern end of Bryce Canyon National Park; we’ll leave it again before we get to our hotel which is just outside the park, but we follow a tempting signpost and turn off the road to get a preview of what’s in store for us.

This is not actually a natural river, it comes from the Tropic Ditch, a channel hand-carved by Mormon pioneers in the 1890s to bring irrigation water from the Sevier River some fifteen miles away.

We’ve been feeling sunset-deprived since leaving behind our Pine Island cocktail hour on the dock, but after we check into the Bryce View Lodge we’re treated to a pretty reasonable facsimile from our front porch.

One more sunset...

We wake up to a beautiful new day, have breakfast and head off to Craters of the Moon National Monument, a couple of hours’ drive, south on Route 75 and east on 20.  This fantastic landscape is of relatively recent origin, the result of volcanic eruptions just a couple of thousand years ago which produced massive lava flows.

The different kinds of lava flows are described by their Hawaiian names, “pahoehoe” flow producing wrinkles and curves…

and “a’a” flow being characterized by broken lumps with sharp edges.

My first reaction as we approach this place is that it resembles a construction site in hell.  An earlier visitor (a couple of hundred years ago) referred to it as “the Devil’s vomit”, a sentiment obviously intended to encourage tourism.

We wander through this lunar landscape in over 90 degree heat, which is intensified by the uninterrupted expanse of black rock and lack of shade.

As a lava flow slows down, its surface may harden while the underlying molten lava continues to move, and when it eventually runs out it can leave behind the network of tunnels and caves with which the Monument is riddled.  In some places the overlying crust collapses, providing access to the spaces below.

Watch that first step, it's a lulu.

The “Indian Cave” is one of these tunnels, and its roof has collapsed in several places, opening up beautiful skylights.

You can walk along Indian Cave for several hundred yards between openings, you go down a staircase leading into it at one end and scramble up a rockpile to get out at the other.  This is also one way to keep cool – the temperature drops more than twenty degrees as you descend the twenty five feet from the surface to the floor of the cave.

As we climb out of Indian Cave and make our way across the lava beds to the main footpath, Jan’s had enough of the heat and she heads back to the car for some shade.  I continue on to have a look at Beauty Cave and the Boy Scout Cave.

Each of these two tunnels has only a single entrance, and you can quickly leave any trace of daylight behind and wander through hundreds of yards of pitch blackness and fascinating formations.  Unfortunately I only have a tiny flashlight, so I’m pretty limited in how far I can go and what I can see.  And I realize that it’s probably not a great idea for me to be in these caves alone, there’s only the occasional other visitor who may enter them, and my cell phone gets no signal… so caution wins out and I head out to join Jan.

We leave Craters of the Moon behind, and after another couple of hours on the road we’re in Pocatello and find our room at the Best Western Cotton Tree Inn.  We wander across the road to The Sandpiper restaurant where we enjoy drinks and an excellent steak dinner.  The delicious steak is no surprise, we are, after all, in beef country, and we’ve been sampling steaks since entering North Dakota.  But we weren’t expecting to find ourselves having dinner on a narrow strip of sandy pseudo-beach, in the middle of this ski area!

Well, it is called the SANDpiper...

We’re up bright and early this Friday morning, Danny drives his loaded truck north to deliver his sculptures to their new home, and we take our Subaru south.  At Missoula we turn onto 93 and go through Hamilton and Darby…we’re in the beautiful Bitterroot Valley, following and crossing the river several times.  We’re also following part of the Lewis & Clark Trail, which takes us through the Lost Trail Pass at the Idaho border, and across the Continental Divide for the second and last time (our first crossing was on the way to Missoula on Tuesday).

On the way to Lost Trail Pass...

The Pass.

We left the Bitteroot behind shortly before going through the pass, but we don’t get very far before we pick up the Salmon River and follow it for a while before we stop for a picnic lunch..

Picnic spot on the Salmon.

Lower Salmon River canyon.

Our next stop is in the town of Salmon for a visit to the Sacagawea Interpretive Center.

Sacagawea

This is one of many memorials and monuments scattered through South Dakota and Idaho to the Shoshone woman who made Lewis and Clark’s exploration possible.  She was born very close to here, and the baby boy she’s carrying was born on the famous expedition.

We continue past Challis, then west onto 75 and into the spectacular Sawtooth Wilderness, which gets its name from the mountains that look like…well, I’ll let you guess.  We’ve  been following the Salmon river upstream through its increasingly steep and dramatic canyon…

Higher up in the Salmon River canyon

…until it’s finally reduced to a tiny creek the last couple of times we cross it, then disappears altogether.  We keep climbing to over 8,700 feet and cross one more mountain pass at Galena Summit, then descend to Ketchum just outside of Sun Valley (around 5,800 feet) where we find a hotel for the night.

Tuesday morning we’re off to Arlee, Montana, by way of Missoula, to spend a few days with Danny Kraus.  When my father escaped from Germany to Prague in early 1933, with the Nazis on his tail, he was befriended by a Czech dentist and became an adopted member of the family.  One of the dentist’s sons, Hans – who became “Jean” in France – came to the U.S. about the same time we did in 1947, and settled in Norwalk, Connecticut.  Jean and Jeannon and their three boys were family, we got together for weekends at their house or on Connecticut beaches, Thanksgivings in Manhattan and many other occasions.  Danny and his brothers were my brothers.  Danny’s been all over the world, he’s sailed on merchant ships in the Pacific, he was in Namibia for years rescuing and studying cheetahs, and for long time he’s been living in Arlee and producing wonderful massive sculptures.

We arrive Tuesday evening in time for dinner and a good chat with Danny.  He’s got a terrific rambling log house in the woods, the original much smaller structure has been added to over the years in several directions.

Big Cabin in the Big Woods

Jan & Danny on the stoop.

From the loft...

We get to admire some of Danny’s work, he’s going to dismantle a couple of pieces and on Friday he’ll truck them north to their new home, the front yard of the woman who’s recently bought them.

The next morning Danny’s our guide for a drive north along the eastern shore of Flathead Lake, ending up at Bigfork, at the far end of the lake, to visit the town and its art galleries.  On the way back we stop for lunch on the porch of the Sitting Duck, which has a gorgeous view of the lake.

Flathead Lake

And we’re entertained by a pair of barn swallows who are working non-stop trying to fill a row of huge, empty mouths.

A mother's work is never done...

Fresh cherries from one of the many roadside stands are a delicious highlight of the drive south.

We get back to Arlee and the Hangin’ Art Gallery and Coffee House for their farmer’s market and dinner/fund raiser.  When we told a friend in California last week that were going to Arlee to visit an artist she immediately consulted Mr. Google and asked us if he was connected with “Hangin’ Art”…we told her we didn’t know, but it turns out that Danny is the treasurer for the Killdeer Art Cooperative which is based at the gallery.

The Gallery

In addition to several of Danny’s work, there are other beautiful sculptures, photos, paintings and watercolors showing there.  The fund raiser is a great success, and they’re sold out of steak by the time we arrive.  It’s just as well that we had a late and ample lunch.  We eventually head back home to Danny’s for a light omelet supper.

Dismantle & lower...

Thursday morning I help Danny dismantle the two sculptures that will be installed at the buyer’s garden on Friday, and load it into his pickup.  It’s a job consisting of think… lift… cogitate… drag… think some more.. lift… rest… consider… lift… plan some more, and always WATCH YOUR FINGERS!!!

...drag..

...and roll.

The peanut gallery.

And we have an appreciative audience.

All done

After a couple of hours it’s all stashed in the back of the truck and secured with lots of ropes and padding, plus the tripod and all the tools Danny will need to install them at the site.  At least he hopes so.

This is our last night here, in the morning we’ll have to leave Danny and his cozy house in the woods filled with his spirit and his art.  And  not all his work is big and heavy.

We spend Thursday hanging out with Robin, meet her son Nicholas (I had seen him last as a child) and visit beautiful downtown Louisville.  The three-block area that used to be occupied by dive bars is now mostly cafes and wine bars, and the weather is perfect.

Beautiful downtown Louisville

Robin and I discover that we had been at Barnard and Columbia at the same time…good to know you can be long-time friends and still discover something new!  Of course we might have once known this and simply forgotten it over the years, but who wants to believe that?

Friday morning we’re off to Lyons, some fifteen miles north, to spend a couple of days with Arlene Brownell and Tom Bache-Wiig.  Arlene was part of a women’s consciousness-raising group with Jan when we first came to California in the mid-seventies, and they’ve now discovered all the ways their careers have moved in parallel over the years.  Connection Partners, Arlene and Tom’s consulting business, specializes in mediations, conflict resolution, coaching and facilitation. (Sound familiar??)

On Saturday they take us for a scenic drive north along the edge of the Rockies.

Tom & Arlene

Beautiful sunshiny day, with new and surprising sights around every bend in the road.

Saint Malo...but we're not in Britanny

The Saint Malo Retreat and Conference Center is almost painfully picturesque, certainly worthy of Walt Disney… and of a visit by Pope John Paul some twenty years ago.

We continue on and enjoy a leisurely walk around Lily Lake, home to one of the few remaining populations of Colorado’s state fish, the greenback cutthroat trout.  There are several very serious-looking fishermen on the shore, who, of course, will release any trout they catch.

Lily Lake

Then after a visit to Estes Park and lunch, home again.  It was wonderful to find that although years had passed, our connection to Arlene and Tom had not lessened.  We’ve resolved to keep in better touch, and hope to see them in California when they visit.

Sunday morning we leave Lyons and move on to our next destination, Bozeman, Montana, with an overnight stop in Sheridan, Wyoming.  We had actually visited Sheridan  some twenty years ago, with ten-year old Dan and eight-year old Elizabeth, when we all spent a week with the Johnsons at a dude ranch in the nearby Big Horn mountains.  The main street looks like a classic western town, very wide and open.

Sheridan

Jan remembered King’s Saddlery on the main street, which has been in business since the 1940’s.  It’s a famous place, Queen Elizabeth shopped here.  Well, so had Jan, but they probably won’t put up a plaque commemorating her visit, the ungrateful wretches…

Upstairs at King's...the museum.

Monday morning we’re heading north again through Billings, then west on to Bozeman.  We arrive in mid-afternoon in plenty of time for a quick visit the Museum of the Rockies,  which has an excellent exhibit on the Native Americans of the region.   The exposition of their histories and interactions with the U.S. government is fascinating and far more extensive and frank than it would have been a few decades ago.

The museum is also hosting a temporary exhibit on frogs of the world.

Ribbitt...

Despite the searing heat, we can’t resist going outside to visit the 1889 log farmhouse which has been restored, inside and out, as closely as possible to its original condition.  Several docents in period costumes are sitting in the kitchen ready to answer any questions we have.

Tinsley's Farmhouse

Log houses were considered poor folk’s lodgings at the time, but this two-story house includes four upstairs bedrooms and looks pretty comfortable and spacious.  William and Lucy Tinsley, the couple who built it, had eight children and moved here from a one-room cabin, they must have felt it was truly luxurious.

Adele, Sandy & Jan

Then we wend our way up to Erik Drive to see Sandy and Adele Pittendrigh.  It was Sandy’s sister Robin whom we had stayed with in Lousville, I’ve known all three of them for some forty years and attended Sandy and Adele’s wedding under the towering redwoods of Felton way back then.  Sandy has barbecued a salmon, and we enjoy our dinner and an evening of catching up on the news since our last visit here sixteen years ago.

The Guys, happy to see each other again.

After an early start for a long day we head off for a short visit to Mt. Rushmore.  We have our first views of the Presidents well before we actually get into the National Memorial, they’re pretty striking even at a distance.

Looking in the entrance.

Once inside the memorial we get the full effect of the monumental carvings and we hike along the “President’s Walk” which takes us under the heads and through the woods.  I was ready to be underwhelmed by the whole Mt. Rushmore “schtick”, but I’m  surprisingly impressed and can’t stop taking photographs from every new angle of the four heads that we’re exposed to along our walk.

The Guys...all that scrap is from the sculpting.

The trail leads to the studio of the monument’s sculptor, Gutzon Borglum.  It’s a fascinating museum about the monument and houses a large working model of the sculpture, machinery including a monstrous compressor that supplied air to the many jackhammers, and lots of old photographs and other artifacts.

Donald "Nick" Clifford

We visit the gift shop before we leave and get to chat with Donald “Nick” Clifford, a charming gentleman who had been one of the workers on the monument during the last three years of the project in 1939-42.  He’s there greeting visitors and signing copies of a book describing the construction.  It’s a real treat to meet and shake hands with him, there can’t be many of his colleagues still surviving.  We asked him to sign our book but neglected to get his photo – this one’s from the web.

He and his wife donated a plaque in the early ‘90s listing the names of all those who worked on the project.

The project generated lots of jobs...

We’re back on the road heading south, passing through the Black Hills, Custer and near the monumental sculpture of Chief Crazy Horse, begun in 1948 by Korczak Ziolkowski, who had assisted Borglum on Mt. Rushmore a decade earlier.  It’s slow work, being continued by Ziolkowski’s family since his death in 1982

Crazy Horse now...the inset is waht it will look like finished.

We continue south through Hot Springs and into Nebraska.  Nebraska looks like this:

Are we there yet?

We stop for gas in the town of Crawford, it turns out to have a nice city park complete with welcome shade to have our picnic lunch.  Signs telling us that swimming in the creek is forbidden are a bit puzzling, since it would be impossible to do much more than wet our feet in it.  Perhaps it’s more imposing in spring.

As we leave Crawford we admire a remarkable lawn ornament in front of  a house on Main Street…

We need one of these for Lake Vermilion.

…then head west into Wyoming to catch I-25 southbound into Colorado, where we’re able to travel a bit faster than we did through the Nebraska grasslands.

The miles roll by and we finally find our way to Louisville and Robin Pittendrigh’s lovely home.  While I was a graduate student at Stanford, Robin’s dad Colin was recruited from Princeton University and I became friendly with him and his wife Mikey. I also got to know Robin and her brother Sandy when they came to visit California.  Robin is a gifted artist and she recently retired as an art teacher at the Louisville high school.  We’re really glad to see her and her son Nick again, and meet her dog, Snowy.

Robin and Snowy.

And we don’t have to drive again for a few days!