From September 27 to October 9, I spent six days in the San Francisco area, and then another six days in Colorado. I have family in both locations, so I was able to stay in a nice cozy bed for free, and get folks to buy me expensive dinners and stuff, and they were even good enough to take their vacation days to play tour guide for my vacation! I have such great relatives. :)
But it wasn't all fun and games. I worked really hard to take about 400 or so pictures with my new digital camera. I ended up keeping about 150 of them, and I deleted the rest. What I have below are just some of the more interesting shots that represent different things that I did in those two weeks.
This page was last modified on October 22, 1999.
... found some really weird looking seaweed...
...walked up on the cliffs...
... found a herd of elk hanging out and soaking up some late afternoon rays...
... and got to the light house too late to walk down the 1/4 mile 30% grade to go inside. (Oh, darn!)
Schramsburg, on the other hand, gave us a great tour of their sparkling wine production facility. By the way, this is California, so they don't call it champagne, which is sparkling wine that is produced in one specific region in France. I won't get into the debate about California wines versus French wines right now. Suffice it to say that it seems that Schramsburg is doing the job right.
This first picture is their company logo. My current employer used to have a frog as their company logo, too, so I just put this shot in here to bug my coworkers. We hate frogs. :)
Here's what it looks like inside. They have lots of wine...
It will just age in the bottle, until they're ready to throw a label on it and ship it out.
These next few shots are somewhat interesting, because this is where
the wine is turned. Every few weeks, a guy comes around a rotates each
bottle in these racks just a few degrees in order to get the yeast to float
on down to the bottom. When all of the yeast settles in the neck of the
bottle -- see the last picture of this sequence -- they dip the bottle
in liquid nitrogen, freezing the yeast and a small portion of the wine
into a plug that can be easily removed by uncapping the bottle. That raises
another point -- you'll also notice in that last image that this really
expensive sparkling wine has a bottle cap on it, just like those jumbo
bottles of Miller beer that your sleazy neighbor buys. That's because the
pressure in this bottle at this point is much higher than could be contained
by the cork that the final product is shipped out with. We're talking about
90 psi -- that's enough to launch that frozen yeast and wine plug right
through your eye and bury it in your brain somewhere. Pretty cool, huh?
Fisherman's wharf has some other interesting attractions. There's a group of piers that tend to attract Harbor Seals from all around. They'll just sun themselves and sleep all afternoon on these piers, lying on top of each other and getting on each others nerves for hogging space:
Another really funny thing at the wharf is "The Bush Man." Apparently, these two homeless guys have found the ultimate day job. One of them will sit next to the sidewalk, hiding behind a bunch of branches that they picked and assembled into an artificial bush. Then, when someone walks by, he jumps out and scares the living daylights out of the unsuspecting victim. His partner is busy soliciting "donations" from anyone who got a laugh out of it or took a picture of the prank in progress. Usually, it seems that everyone gets a laugh out of it, and they probably split about $50 to $100 an hour.
And that was just the first week! After that, I went to
Another notable couple that I know in Denver is my little buddy Fletch, and his girlfriend Bailey. Fletch is Jennifer and Jimmy's pug, and Bailey was sleeping over for a few days while her mommy was away on business:
Dad and I had a few hours to blow off, so my first stop was...
Not everything was big and scary, though. This little guy walked right up to me, expecting a hand-out. So I fed him a grape.
Check out the Devil Cat of the Denver Zoo:
Then there are lemurs...
birds...
and a "dik-dik." (Yes, that's really what they're called.) This little guy walked right up to the fence that I was shooting through. He was apparently expecting something more than a photo-op.
The gorillas were pretty entertaining. The first one, on the left, just sat there, looking across the field at the guy on the right. It was obvious who the boss was in that cage. The little guy in the middle was oblivious to it all, just playing all day long.
My sister decided she needed to try rolling down the dunes, just like she was a little kid playing in the snow. She was picking sand out of her hair and ears for days!
Then we went to...
The Alluvial Fan was another interesting part of Estes Park. The pictures below show a stream bed that runs through the mountains down to a valley. Just about in the middle of the picture on the left, there used to be a dam in the stream, several miles up the mountain. One fateful day in 1982, the dam broke. One fortunate camper, who got out of his tent in the middle of the night to "use the facilities" described it. I'll paraphrase: "I had my back to the stream, and all of the sudden, I hear this noise that sounded like a freight train going by." It was a wall of water that resulted in a flood of the entire valley. Several people lost their lives in that flood, including that camper's tent mate.
The pictures were taken from an adjacent mountain, at about 12,000 ft. For perspective, the arrow on the close up on the right points to a car. All of the other little speck next to the car are boulders.
From there, we went to...
In the panoramic picture below, you can see the city to the right, and some inactive mining operations to the left.
Right next to Central City is...
And one of the most interesting mining areas around Central City is...
The problem is that if you have thirty or so of these mines all intertwined right on top of one another, you're not doing much for the integrity of the mining shafts that you're digging. The miners of the area around The Glory Hole found that out on one Sunday morning around the turn of the century, when all of the mines collapsed upon one another. Amazingly, no one got hurt -- they were all in church! Hallelujah!
Their next problem was "what to do with their claims?" Rather than try to figure out who should get new claims, who should retain old claims, they decided to pool their efforts into one big mining operation, and strip mine the area. The resulting ditch became known as The Glory Hole.
This lengthwise look at the hole doesn't really give you a good feel for how big this ditch is. Think of a football field turned on it's side (300 x 100 feet). That's about how long and deep this ditch is.
If you look at the left wall of the ditch, you can see patches of black rock. That's most likely gold ore. Unlike what you usually see in the movies, most gold isn't found in nuggets. It's found in a dissolved state, among sedimentary rock and quartz and all of the other minerals that are so abundant in this soil.
Just a little side note about the method that was used to extract the gold from the ore: they used to mine the ore, pulverize it, and pile it up in big heaps. From there, they would pour mercury all over the heap. Gold dissolves in mercury, so the mercury would seep through the pile of ore, taking the gold with it, until it eventually all pooled at the bottom of the heap. Then they would collect the gold-rich mercury and separate it from there. Eventually, they caught on to the dangers of working with mercury near your source of drinking water, so they moved to something a little safer -- potassium cyanide! The heap in the picture below is typical of the byproducts of the extraction process:
Now, back to the glory hole. The first image below is another shot of that left side wall that you saw above. If you look at the floor of the ditch, near the bottom of the wall, about a quarter of the way from the right edge of the picture, you can see a section of dirt that collapsed over a mine shaft. My father was a little surprised to see this hole, because he had just been showing this area to a few friends of his within the last few months, and he "must have walked over that very spot about a dozen times." Apparently, recent rains were enough to erode the soil above the shaft, and the shaft collapsed. The new hole is about 8 or 10 feet deep. Note how close Dad gets to the edge in the second picture. :)
Here are a couple more shots of the side of the ditch showing the gold ore veins and some shafts that survived the original Glory Hole collapse.
Here's "Jim-Bob standin' by a shaft, along with his trusty coyote-dog."
"Cody," one of my dad's dogs, really is part coyote. Obviously, we don't have any papers to prove it, but his appearance and behavior have us all convinced.
Collapsed mining shafts are a pretty easy to find in these parts. As we were wandering through the trails surrounding the Glory Hole, my father and I came across this shack that apparently covered over another collapsed shaft. We took a look inside, but considering what we saw in the Glory Hole, we didn't get too close.
This chute, at the end of a track bed for ore carts, was just another one of the remnants of mining operations from days gone by.
Well, that about wraps it up. Did I take enough pictures? I have about 100 more, so if you really want, I can send you a CD with them all. (I didn't think so.)
But thanks for dropping by.