CLUI: Day Twelve — Silver Island Mountains

John Hopkins 14::April::2010 18:58 → permalink

Neal makes it in from London after last weeks aborted attempt from having the flu.

A loop north around the Silver Island Mountains paralleling the Bonneville Salt Flats traces may textures of rock, sky, and the interface between. Numerous forays away from the truck into the landscape, looking at everything, smelling everything, hearing … nothing … or so. The space vehicle rumbles onward on the bad road. Bad road. All bad roads lead away from, further away from, Rome.

Leave the car, be here now. The desert commands that (or the fearful response, deny here now, and insulate the embodied self from any manifestation of here, get back to the car, now).

Turning to the west at the north end of the mountain fault-block, I am suddenly met by five huge white Maremma (or Great Pyrenees?) sheep dogs, each over 100 pounds, ready to shred whatever fleshly appendages might be protruding from the truck. They were guarding a sizable flock of sheep who were busy razing the already marginal winter foliage. gah, why they allow sheep farming up here, I’ll never know — the BLM’s “multi-use” philosophy destroying what land cover there is left in this place. The circuit continues across the playa from Pilot Peak and on to Leppy Pass and a human installation.

(Ed. note — have solved the image gallery as you can see. Seems to be relatively glitch-free and less work than my previous solutions. This is one image from a number — Pennsylvanian-Permian-aged lime/mud-stones, highly contorted. Do hope to get all of them up from this trip so far, sooner than later. But there is so much code to do for that — I still haven’t settled on a means to display images on this blog — there are several pre-packaged plug-ins for WordPress in this regard, but I haven’t decided. Not going to Flickr things nor use Facebook as the data management and control is passed off to those cloud services (not to mention the perverse End-User Licensing Agreement terms). The travelog blog means was good, but the file structure of WordPress does not lend itself to any automation if I use that older technique, and I desperately want to get out of the manual compilation work that I have been doing all along. It’s incredibly time consuming and easily bunged-up with (simple) code errors. Ach, as this site evolves into its 16th year, it remains something of a millstone, given the relative paucity of traffic (1 – 2,000 hits a day total).