Air Show at Oshkosh

This is a very big air show. Lots of people. Lots of planes. Some funny looking planes.

On Thursday, they honored Burt Rutan, a designer of funny looking airplanes. The one in the video below is called the "Boomerang." It's a light twin engine plane that gets way better gas mileage than the similar sized commercial twins. This one has two fuselages, one of which holds people. It's asymmetric, but it flies very nicely.



This next funny looking plane, called a "Starship" even though it can't fly outside the atmosphere, also gets better gas mileage than similar sized twin piston engine business aircraft.

Mall of America

Minneapolis/St Paul

First, the skyline of Minneapolis, one of the Minneapolis/St. Paul twin cities.

The place we had brunch, a St. Paul landmark since 1939.

Corn Palace

The Corn Palace in Mitchell, SD is a multipurpose sports arena that's decorated, inside and out, with pictures made with corn.

Badlands National Park

The Badlands are pretty bad for homesteading, but they make a great park.

Wall Drug

Wall, South Dakota is a tiny town near one of the entrances to Badlands National Park. The guy who bought the drug store there, in 1931, thought he was going to go broke until his wife suggested that they put signs out along the highway advertising free ice water. Apparently, it pays to advertise. You can see signs for Wall Drug for hundreds of miles along the highway, and it's not just a little pharmacy anymore. It's an entire shopping mall.

Ellsworth AFB

In all the air museums that I've been to, I've never seen a B-1 bomber up close until I got to the air museum at Ellsworth Air Force Base just east of Rapid City, South Dakota. When I go to air museums, I always take lots of photos, and I did today, but I won't bother my readers with aircraft they've seen before. The B-1 is still in service. That's why there aren't many in museums. Apparently, three of them are not flyable. This is one of the three.

Here's another view for a size comparison with some people standing near it.

Crazy Horse Memorial South Dakota

In 1939, Henry Standing Bear, a Lakota Sioux elder, wrote to the sculptor Korczak Ziółkowski, saying in part, "My fellow chiefs and I would like the white man to know that the red man has great heroes, too." Ziółkowski, who had worked on Mt. Rushmore, met with a number of Sioux chiefs and decided to devote the rest of his life to carving an entire mountain into a statue of Chief Crazy Horse. He started blasting the mountain in 1948. Apparently, it takes a long time to change a mountain into a statue. Ziółkowski died in 1982. His wife and kids are continuing his work.

Carolyn and I viewed the mountain in 1969. You couldn't tell that it was going to be a person back then. We attempted to see the progress they'd made when we were in the black hills in 2009, forty years after our first viewing of the mountain, but the clouds were too low the day we passed through the black hills, and we couldn't see the top of the mountain.

I went back there today. You can see the face.

This is the way it's going to look when it's done. That might not be for another hundred years. This is the model they're working from as they sculpt the mountain.

Wind Cave National Park, South Dakota

There's over a hundred miles of cave in Wind Cave National Park, but there's only one little opening to the surface. So when the atmospheric pressure changes on the surface, it takes quite a while for the atmospheric pressure inside the cave to equilibrate with the pressure outside. When I went to this cave earlier today, the atmospheric pressure on the surface was lower than the pressure inside the cave, and there was a quite strong wind coming out of the little hole that leads into the cave. The ranger held up a ribbon. It was blowing strongly in the wind coming out of the cave. She estimated the wind at around 25 mph. The somewhat heart shaped hole in the center of the photo is the natural entrance to the cave. Most other caves in the world have lots of connections with the surface so the air doesn't have to move as fast in order to equilibrate with the changing surface air pressure.

There's beautiful countryside in the area of the cave. It's located where the great plains meet the black hills of South Dakota.

Here are a few photos from inside the cave.

Yellowstone National Park

Yellowstone National Park is just north of Grand Teton National Park. The first geyser I stopped at in Yellowstone was Old Faithful. Old Faithful erupts every hour to hour and a half, and it can be predicted to within about ten minutes. When I parked my car, there was a huge crowd surrounding the geyser so I figured it was about to go off, and it did. Here's a photo.

Apparently, before Old Faithful got to be a tourist attraction, it was used as a laundry.

"Old Faithful is sometimes degraded by being made a laundry. Garments placed in the crater during quiescence are ejected thoroughly washed when the eruption takes place. Gen. Sheridan's men, in 1882, found that linen and cotton fabrics were uninjured by the action of the water, but woolen clothes were torn to shreds.[*]"

* Winser, Henry J. (1883). The Yellowstone National Park-A Manual for Tourists. New York: G.P. Putnam Sons. p. 46

[Note: Although this looks like I was scholarly, in fact, I didn't consult the old Manual for Tourists. Instead, I got the quote and the footnote from Wikipedia so it's not necessarily a definitively sourced quote. It's just cute.]

There are lots of geothermal features in the park. Here are a few more photos.

One of the rangers mentioned that the clearer the water is, the hotter it is. So the above hot spring must be quite hot.

The next hot spring wasn't impressive as a photo, but the video says it's boiling water.



Here's a constant geyser.

Jackson Hole

Jackson Hole is a very large valley. It was named by a fur trapper, Michelangelo Franconi. He trapped the area for beaver in the early nineteenth century, and he named the valley after his partner, Davey Jackson. Originally, the valley was called Jackson's Hole. Apparently, when they were going down from the mountain pass into the valley, it appeared that the valley was entirely surrounded by mountains and that they were descending into a very large hole with a river in it. As it happens, it's a valley, not a hole, but the name stuck. Grand Teton National Park is in the valley, and it extends into the mountains to its west. Those mountains give the park its name.

It turns out that the chief landscape architect for the park, the guy who makes sure that the park looks as close to natural as they can get it while still ensuring that elderly chubby people like myself can still get there to appreciate it, is someone I kind of know. His name is John Christensen, and he's the brother of one of my daughter's friends. So he met with me and showed me some good sights to see while I was in the park.

He's the tall guy, and I'm the short guy. Normally, I don't give my camera to other people to take my picture unless the other person is either fatter or feebler than I am, or unless they have on their person, much more expensive camera equipment than I have. In this case, John knew the ranger who took the picture with my camera so I figured I'd get it back, and I did.

Here are some more park photos.

And here are some photos from downtown Jackson, Wyoming, the largest town in the Jackson Hole area.

Idaho

Today I drove across lower Idaho.

First I stopped at the Boise library to buy some audio books from the Friends of the Library bookstore. Then I took some pictures in rural Idaho.

I stopped for a few hours at CRATERS OF THE MOON NATIONAL MONUMENT. It's a lava field created by volcanic eruptions over 2000 years ago. It doesn't actually look like the moon, but it was named a long time ago, before anyone thought we'd actually get to the moon and take closeup photos of actual craters of the moon. At the Idaho Craters of the moon, we have stuff like lichens, bushes, trees and wild flowers. You won't see things like that on the actual moon.