Fairfield 8: Eight? Really?

In early November 2013 I returned yet again to Fairfield, Iowa, for a meditation intensive (the Invincible America Assembly, or IAA), for 7 days of Ayurvedic treatments at The Raj, and to see friends and poke around. Not that there was an abundance of free time between the IAA and The Raj. If you've been following this blog, you may wonder what I'll have to write about this time that hasn't already been said. So do I! But don't worry, instead of Fairfield for Spring 2014 I will go someplace I have never been before.

My first photo will be my favorite one from this trip. It's first so that it will be the displayed photo under 'Recent Posts' or 'Popular Posts.' A cyclist rides away from the Men's Dome, after evening program, in front of the Maharishi Tower of Invincibility. I saw this alignment one night, and kept an eye and my camera out for any re-occurrence. I captured this image a couple of days later.

I roomed in a different place this time. I was north of the campus, in North Campus Village, instead of south. The building I was in contained several condos.

A short cut-through connects the North Campus Village with the Fairfield Loop Trail in several locations.

The new location changed my commute to and from the Golden Dome, which made it possible for me to notice the cyclist in front of the tower. When I arrived the trees in front of the Dome had changed color, but the leaves were still attached. This didn't last long.

The long driveway down to the Raj was brilliantly colored as well.

Here's a closeup.

For details about the Raj, I'll refer you to this post and this one. The staff was wonderful, as usual, and the treatments gave me a good "reset" of my physiology.

The store nearby to campus, Everybody's Whole Foods, was setting up a two-level railroad display for the holiday season.

The Sustainable Living Center on the MUM campus was now fully open for activities. Bob Argo, who came out to Fairfield with me, and our mutual friend in Fairfield, Cary Davis, and I took a walkthrough. Here is one of the classrooms.

The building is supported by intact tree trunks; these are stronger than sliced-up boards.

The circular glass you see above the doorway in the above photo, slightly higher than dead center, is a stained glass rosette.

One of the informative panels on the main hallway lists the certifications this building has earned -- not just one. Click to enlarge.

The south face is used for many different plantings.

Elsewhere on campus, the venerable bridge over a vanished stream has been closed off. It's falling apart. I suppose there's no point in maintaining a bridge over nothing, but I still find it melancholy to see it wither.

On one walk downtown Bob, Cary, and I had a brief but fascinating visit at the ICON (Iowa Contemporary Art) Gallery and Bill Teeple Studio, which share the same space.

One of Bill's special talents is the drawing of small nature scenes in pencil. I do mean small:

With extreme cropping, I can present an image that will give you can idea of what he does, although all the exquisite detail is lost in this photo.

Although Bill was busy switching exhibits in the ICON Gallery, he took several minutes to show us how he uses a pencil to create entrancing scenes.

Thank you, Bill!

The other big excursion was to the site where Steve Nolle was having a Sthapatya Ved house built. Steve is on the Computer Science Faculty at MUM; I met him at least a decade ago when we were both attending various week-long retreats at MUM. Back in the day, we discovered, we both worked for Bell Labs. I was in Columbus and he was in the Chicago area.

We approached the house, which is in a "four-square" style, where each side is the same length.

The sides have plenty of windows for admitting light. Here's a closeup of the south face.

The entrance faces east, in accordance with Sthapatya Vedic principles.

The builder is known for his post-and-beam construction, but Steve convinced him to try an experiment and use a robust but typical American balloon frame. The builder did include posts in the porch design, above.

The full basement was built with insulated, poured concrete forms.

It's easy to run a conduit to the electrical outlets -- just dig a small trench in the insulating form, as you can see above (click to enlarge).

Here Steve is explaining the passive radon-venting system built into the foundation.

The roof and ceiling beams are huge. This photo doesn't do them justice.

Steve pointed out the various rooms in the interior.

This is the view through the south windows.

This is the view to the north. Beyond the fence is cattle pasture, retained by the original owner of the land.

It was intriguing to see this style of house under construction. It's more solidly built than the average American home, and has many ecologically-minded features.

For my final photo from this trip, a sunset view from North Campus Village.

The next trip will be in an entirely different direction.

Mallard Inspection

Last week we underwent a mallard inspection. That is, a pair of mallard ducks were checking out potential nesting sites in our back yard. One day Joan spotted the female sitting on the deck railing for at least fifteen minutes. Two days later, to our surprise, we saw her perched atop the shrubbery next to our deck. Mallards are usually ground nesters.

She wasn't swallowed by the yew because it's draped in black-colored deer netting, which helps protect the bush from the ravages of deer chomping, especially in winter. Click on this closeup and perhaps you can make it out.

Such an inspection is a serious, time-consuming business. This female mallard stared forward, stared towards me,

and then flew down and waddled to the bottom of the yew. She gazed up into the interior for minutes at a time, as if trying to visualize how her nest might appear from a ground-based predator's point of view.

The drake stood a few feet away, patiently waiting. Clearly the choice of nesting site was her decision, not his.

We had a second visit from this pair the next day, so we made the semi-finals, but we haven't seen them since.

 

Lake O'Hara Zoomwalk, 2011-2013

Over three years, from 2011 to 2013, I eked out some time during our annual visits to Lake O'Hara to accumulate a series of photos that, assembled together, would provide a rapid video-walk, or "zoomwalk," around the lake. This blog post publishes the result of that effort.

Given the different days and months in which the constituent photos were taken, this video shows rapid appearance and disappearance of snow, and changes in lighting. It also bobs and weaves with the wriggling trail, but I hope you may nonetheless enjoy it or find it illuminating. I used 1,713 photos to create about three and a half minutes of video.

At 1:12 into the video there appears to be a stutter. It's actually my attempt to highlight a big change between two years; here is a photo from Sept. 15, 2011.

Note the bench hiding behind the short tree at left. Now look at this same scene on July 27, 2012. The bench has been moved in front of a large tree that fell over sometime in the previous ten months.

I interleaved and repeated some of the 2011 and 2012 frames at this spot to give the viewer a chance to compare the two years, but it didn't work as well as I hoped. Forewarned, perhaps you can catch it, starting at 1:12 in the video.



And so after three and a half years this video project is complete. Time to move on!

CR2013: Sulphur Mountain, Buffalo Nations Luxton Museum, and Home

Today, September 10th, Joan and I continued to substitute other activities for hiking, to ease the stress on her injured foot. We spent most of the day in Banff, starting with the gondola ride to the top of Sulphur Mountain.

In this photo we're watching gondolas arrive at the top of the mountain, having already gone up ourselves. It's good to arrive at the lower station to buy tickets no later than 10:30, as the tour buses begin to arrive then.

These gondolas hold four adults.

This photo covers the wide view from the gondola complex, starting with the old weather station on the prominence at the extreme left. Far below is the Banff townsite, on both sides of the Bow River, which winds around the prominent Tunnel Mountain. In the distance, at the foot of the far mountains right of center, is Lake Minnewonka.

Zooming in on the center of Banff.

On this side of the Bow sits the famous Fairmont Banff Springs resort.

There is a boardwalk to the old weather observatory, so it's easy to stroll over.

This sign describes how the tough Norman Sanson climbed this mountain for 43 years to collect weather information, starting in 1903. Click to enlarge.

A cosmic ray station was also based here between 1956 and 1978. It's gone now.

Looking back, Joan and I see that the gondola station has a UFO-like appearance. That's understandable, given that it was constructed in 1958-1959. It also underwent renovation in 1997-1998.

A view from the boardwalk down the Sundance Range.

Eventually Joan and I decided it was time to ride back down the mountain.

We then drove to the Buffalo Nations Luxton Museum. This museum is dedicated to the peoples and history of the First Nations tribes of western North America whose lives depended on the buffalo. Photography of the exhibits was not allowed, but I took this picture of the main sign. We enjoyed the museum, but don't need to make a return visit soon.

Afterwards Joan and I had a snack in downtown Banff and then visited the always-fascinating Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies. It's easy to invest an hour or two there. We wrapped up our visit to Banff by checking out the Canada House Gallery, which always has lovely paintings, sculpture, and sometimes fabric work. Handsome stuff. Expensive stuff, deservedly so.

Then we drove back to Kananaskis Country and the Delta Lodge, for our final dinner and evening there. In the morning we finished packing and drove towards Canmore, stopping at the pullover on Highway 40 for O'Shaughnessy Falls. The falls are named after John O'Shaughnessy, who was the chief engineer for the construction of Highway 40, which began in 1973.

The creek begins at a spring high up on the mountain, and this 'forever-flowing' spring was a sacred spring for the Stoney Indians. It was said that neither sickness or disease would afflict those who used its waters.

O'Shaughnessy had the waterfall constructed to control the stream, and then landscaped around the waterfall and built a wishing well. Good work, John! Not every engineer would do that.

We deferred the walk to the top of the waterfall for a later year, and drove on to Canmore. There we visited the historic section of the cemetery. Here are laid to rest many immigrant miners and their families; a study is underway to plan a renovation of this section. We also visited several of the downtown galleries, which is especially fun because they all strive to distinguish themselves from each other. Another downtown stop was our second visit this trip to the Café Bookstore, which offers wonderful browsing.

The most important part of our visit, however, was to Le Chocolatier. Joan and I have stopped here every year since our discovery of this chocolate-lover's paradise. We bought truffles and bonbons for ourselves and our neighbors, which was a challenge in that Le Chocolatier offers about two dozen flavors to choose from between those categories. We also enjoy some of their specialty items, such as the hedgehogs. For meals on the road or on the trail, however, you can't beat their bars. We gave a boost to Canmore's retail sector here! On our way out of Canmore we stopped at a roadside park and each had a bar for lunch.

Then we ran through the routine of driving to Calgary, filling the rental car with gas, and checking into the Delta hotel at the airport, just next to the rental car return. The rooms are quiet but not huge, the dining room is surprisingly good for an airport hotel, and the airport departure level is just across the drop-off traffic lanes.

After Joan and I returned to Ohio we soon discovered that Joan indeed had a stress fracture in a metatarsal bone, as we suspected. Fun fact: stress fractures typically do not show up in X-ray images until the healing process is well begun, and are diagnosed by symptoms instead. The podiatrist remarked on how slim Joan's metatarsals were -- which is not an advantage! We concluded that the combination of a short training period (after our Arctic cruise), an aggressive hiking schedule, and cross-country rock-hopping was to blame, and we'll take more care in the future.

But, as always, our visit to the Canadian Rockies was a great trip, and we'll be back in the summer of 2014.

CR2013: Yamnuska Wolfdogs and Highwood Pass Closure

For our first morning of not-hiking Joan and I visited the Yamnuska Wolfdog Sanctuary (YWS), subtitled Alberta Wolfdog Rescue and Adoption. In Canada it is illegal to own or keep a full-blooded wolf, but wolf-dog mixes are allowed under various restrictions and requirements. Sometimes these animals are rescued from the wild (as opposed to being shot), and sometimes they are rescued from unscrupulous breeders or overwhelmed owners.

The domesticated dog (Canis Lupus Familiaris) is a subspecies of the gray wolf (Canis Lupus), so a wolf-dog is considered a mix, not a hybrid. This leads to the terminology "high content,"  meaning an animal exhibiting more wolf traits than dog traits, and "low content." Also, many wolfdogs have parents that are themselves wolfdogs, further muddying their genetic heritage. As you would expect, the more dog heritage the more doggish the behavior, and so also with the wolf heritage. Many breeders claim a much higher percentage of wolf than the animal really has, or specify an absurdly precise percentage. Caveat emptor.

In this photo Georgina De Caigny, one of the founders of the YWS, is bonding with a low wolfdog. An animal that was more wolf than dog would have no part of this.

Georgina gave us some treats to toss to the wolfdogs. The high wolfdogs kept their distance; a few might walk up to a treat if you tossed it near them, but the low wolfdogs would come right up to you and nuzzle your hand if a treat was still there.

The wolfdog in repose on the table in the above photo is a high wolfdog, the alpha female of the pack, and nobody sits on her table except her. The wolf pack rules and hierarchies are always enforced. 

This is the alpha male, Zeus, also a high wolfdog. He would have nothing to do with us, and given that humans have driven the grey wolf to near extinction, that's understandable.

This beautiful wolfdog, called Nova, kept his distance, but was not as standoffish as the alphas. Still, he would not approach us for treats.

Once the novelty of our being inside their enclosure wore off, some of the wolfdogs took a snooze.

When a newly rescued wolfdog is taken by the YWS, it's a delicate time. Anything that is considered a threat to the order of the pack will be attacked, so the newcomer has to make nice, especially to the alphas. A frequent visitor to the pack is, unexpectedly, a Pomeranian named Duckie.

The low wolfdogs love to play with a tennis ball as much as Duckie. The high wolfdogs don't care enough to overcome their skittishness.

Joan and I enjoyed the hour with the wolfdogs, Georgina's stories and the questions and answers. After leaving a donation we then drove down Highway 40, the heart of Kananaskis Country, to the point where the road was still closed because of the June 2013 flooding. This was a kilometer or so beyond Highwood Pass, which had itself been closed when we first arrived in Canada.

The numbers for this storm make it a 500-year event.

Tons of flood material were carried across the highway wherever there was a small stream or gully.

The highway has been cleared by pushing the rubble back against the berm.

This washout comes within inches of undermining the pavement, but for now, it's OK to drive here ... the closure you saw earlier is a hundred yards further on.

We turned around and visited the Kananaskis Lakes on our way back. They had suffered too.

We ate our lunch near the dam separating the upper and lower lakes. It was just a moment's drive to get a view of the upper lake.

From this spot atop the dam I also took a photo looking down to the powerhouse and the lower Kananaskis Lake.

The most dramatic of my photos may be this one, of the "bridge to nowhere" at what used to be the Kananaskis Country Golf Course. The course of the creek has changed, and rubble is everywhere.

Upstream, a large but solitary backhoe was trying to undo Nature's wrath. It's going to take many weeks of work.

That evening Joan and I chose our non-hiking activity for tomorrow: Banff.