dawn, charlotte airport

When I flew to Norfolk, Virginia for the LADEE launch last month, I took a redeye flight with an early morning layover at Charlotte, NC's Douglas Airport, because it was US Airways and basically all of their flights connect through Charlotte. Taking the jump of 3 time zones into account, this meant that I was navigating an unfamiliar airport at about 3am my time, after a few fitful hours of trying to sleep on the plane.

The sun was just starting to come up as I waited for my connecting flight from CLT to ORF, and since the airport's due west of downtown Charlotte, there was a nice view of the downtown skyline with a multicolored pre-dawn sky behind it. I will freely admit that these are almost certainly not the best sunrise-in-Charlotte photos ever taken. I'm just pleased (and kind of surprised) that groggy 3am me thought to take photos at all. So here they are.

Updated: I just realized I accidentally took a short video clip, too, so I've added it to the post. It's not any worse than the photos, I'll say that for it.

The other thing I should point out is that most of the tall buildings in downtown Charlotte are headquarters of horrible megabanks, companies that bear a big chunk of the responsibility for detonating the global economy in 2008. Nobody's been held accountable; in fact they've gotten even bigger after getting bailed out at taxpayer expense. Grr.

Tri-Cities BNSF Bridge

When I stopped briefly in the Tri-Cities to snap some photos of the famous Cable Bridge, there was a BNSF railroad bridge in the background and I ended up taking a few photos of it too. It looks like your average utilitarian railroad bridge, with a bunch of truss segments and a lift span, but it turns out this one is quite old (by Northwest standards) and historically significant. Its HistoryLink page explains that it was built way back in 1888, completing a key missing link in the Northern Pacific transcontinental railroad between Minnesota and Puget Sound, and the towns of Kennewick and Pasco were founded here on opposite banks of the Columbia River, thanks in large part to the railroad.

Before the bridge was completed, a steamboat railcar ferry served here for several years. Trains would be demated and the railcars slowly barged across the river. Once reassembled on the opposite bank, the train would continue on its way. This sounds kind of crazy but it does actually work, so long as you don't care too much about speed or the cost of manpower. A similar arrangement once operated near Portland until the Vancouver Railroad Bridge went in.

Eastern Washington was still part of the wild west in the bridge's early years, and the Kennewick side of the bridge was the scene of a big outlaw shootout in 1906. It's a proper Western tale, with posses, horse thieves, an improbable jailbreak, and an unsolved mystery. I don't keep up on Tri-Cities news that closely but I assume the area isn't quite so rough-n-tumble anymore. Still, in 2011 the city of Kennewick managed to get the bridge designated as a "potential terror target", netting a cool $250k in Homeland Security pork cash.

I did come across a couple of good photos of the bridge to pass along: one of the bridge at sunrise, and another taken on the railroad tracks looking across the bridge.

Cable Bridge

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A few photos of the Cable Bridge, which crosses the Columbia River between Kennewick & Pasco, Washington. It's a cable-stayed bridge, as the name suggests; it picked up the name because it was one of the first cable-stayed bridges in the United States, and it was kind of a novelty at the time. Many sources insist it was the first, but I was poking through a book on inspection & maintenance of cable-stayed bridges, and it points out that the Sitka Harbor Bridge in Alaska dates to 1971, making it a good 7 years older than the Cable Bridge.

I remember visiting my grandmother in Kennewick, not long after the bridge opened, and being amazed by it. I mean, I think I was amazed most of the time at that age, but still. I probably picked up on the local civic pride about the thing. The older Pasco-Kennewick Bridge sat right next to the Cable Bridge at the time, although it had been abandoned in place when the new bridge opened. My grandmother went on and on about how the new bridge was modern and forward-looking and something to be proud of, while the old bridge was an eyesore that needed to be torn out. That finally happened in 1990, after twelve years of legal battles.

This type of bridge still isn't common in the Northwest. Right now the only cable-stayed bridge I know of in Portland is the big skybridge at OHSU, and it'll remain the only one until the new TriMet MAX bridge opens in 2015.

Ft. George Garden, Astoria

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I was rummaging through an old iPhoto library a while back and noticed I had a few photos of of the Ft. George Garden in Astoria, an overgrown rose garden surrounded by an ornate iron fence, on Exchange St. behind the Fort George Brewery. These photos were taken several years ago, shortly before the brewery opened. Apparently they've employed a gardener to look after the place, so it may not be as overgrown as it was the last time I was there.

The garden sits next to a small city park marking the site of Fort Astoria, a fur trading post founded in 1811, which happened to be the first American settlement on the Pacific coast. After only two years in business, the fort was sorta-captured by the British during the War of 1812, and spent the next 33 years as Fort George (as in King George the 3rd), an outpost of the Hudson's Bay Company. The post was later abandoned as the Hudson's Bay Company moved its main operations inland to Fort Vancouver. I don't know whether the garden itself has any particular historical significance. Based on the fencing I'm going to guess the garden (or at least the fence) dates to the late 19th or early 20th century, or later if someone was aiming for a retro look.

River Shift

Here are a few photos of River Shift, the public art installation at the south end of Waterfront Park, near the Marquam Bridge. The RACC page about it includes an extended artist's statement:

The idea for this piece had its source in the rough concrete piers and reinforcements that were being excavated from the old waterfront site when I first saw it. I made a progression using local basalt stone and the existing wrecked concrete.

At the top of the berm there is a grouping of saw-cut vertical basalt, and some irregular, displaced foundations. As the basalt pieces progress from berm to river, they tip over, so that the concrete below becomes exposed and the basalt becomes submerged and eventually disappears.

At the river path there are various configurations of concrete and stone, including inlays and pieces that can function as seating. Concrete is cut in various places to expose the river rock aggregate inside as well as the old embedded wood piers, and some heavy steel reinforcement emerges in various plant-like and root-like ways.

The work is meant to be a quiet narrative that is derived and retained from the site, rather than a thing that was brought in.

The artist's website has a photoset about River Shift, including a few shots looking down on the area from an adjacent building, which gives a better idea of how the various parts of the piece are laid out.

The idea of turning construction debris into art isn't a new one. You could probably travel the world and put together a big coffee table book of other examples from all over, and maybe write a thesis about the genre and what it all means. This does make me feel kind of bad for construction workers: They tear down a building, filling dump truck after dump truck with broken concrete and twisted rebar, having no clue about all the expensive capital-A art they've just created. They could probably all retire after the first couple of buildings and live off the proceeds, if only they knew. It's a real shame. In any case, River Shift is a well-executed example of the genre, and paths down to the river are obviously a popular feature since river-level access near downtown is pretty rare. People actually fish there, and when the weather's nice a few people will even try to lie on the sorta-beach and work on their sorta-tans. Californians, probably.

Dry Falls

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Here's a slideshow from Eastern Washington's Dry Falls, where the Ice Age Missoula Floods once formed an enormous waterfall, 400 feet high and 3.5 miles wide. I discussed the unusual local geology in an earlier post about the Sun Lakes area just "downstream" of here, so I"m not going to recap that at length; this post is mostly just for oohing and aahing over the scenery. Assuming you like rugged desert scenery, and maybe you don't for some reason.

The building perched on the canyon rim in a few of the photos is the state park visitors center. I wasn't in the mood for a visitors center at the time and didn't go in, but I'm told it has some groovy 1960s-era exhibits and a gift shop. In retrospect I probably should have gone in just to chat up the park rangers. In this part of the state, most of their visitors are going to be Tea Party loons in RVs who think Dry Falls somehow proves the literal truth of Noah's Ark, & the commie pinko tofu-eating gay Satanic Soviet Mexi-Kenyan state government (represented by the poor local park rangers) is covering it up as part of an evil plot to ban freedom forever. The rangers might enjoy talking to someone a bit less hostile and more sane for a change, so feel free to go in and say hello. Unless you're one of the aforementioned loons, I mean. I don't get a lot of loons here, and they don't stay long, but every few months someone leaves a hysterical, incoherent all-caps rant, and I have to waste up to 30 seconds deleting it. So don't be That Guy, ok?

In the Shadow of the Elm

In Portland's South Park Blocks, between Market & Clay, the outline of a tree appears on the ground, like something the Ent police would draw at a crime scene. This is In the Shadow of the Elm, described as depicting "the shadow of an Elm tree that used to stand at the site. It is made of 169 individually cut pieces of “Sierra White” granite." The city's South Park Blocks page cautiously states "installed in 1984, depicts the shadow of a tree that may have once existed within the grid of trees in the block". A press release from Marylhurst University (where the sculptor taught for many years) gets a bit melodramatic: "Paul Sutinen's public art piece "In the Shadow of the Elm" (in the Park Blocks between the Art Museum and PSU) is one of the treasures of Portland. Simultaneously subtle and magnificent, it is a stone shadow of a great elm tree that is no longer there."

This possibly-hypothetical tree could have died of any number of causes, assuming it existed, but the big threat to the Park Blocks' remaining American elm trees is Dutch elm disease, a fungal plague that arrived here in the 1970s and has been slowly killing off the city's elm trees. There are official city programs, and volunteer efforts, and public awareness campaigns around trying to stop or slow down the disease, but it's possible all the elms in the Park Blocks are living on borrowed time. It's worth pointing out here that elm trees are not a native tree species in this part of the world, but it would still be sad to lose them all.

A few resistant strains of elm tree have been located or developed, and in 1995 a maybe-replacement tree was planted just south of the "stump marker". It turns out the new tree was planted as a memorial to the Oklahoma City bombing, and was planted just weeks after the event.

In any case, the sculpture project was approved in 1983 as part of an effort to revitalize the South Park Blocks between Market and Jefferson. The idea that the Park Blocks would need revitalizing seems bizarre today, but apparently it was deemed necessary at the time. The project was funded with $50,000 from the National Park Service, via the "Emergency Jobs Act of 1983" (an economic stimulus bill which was generally seen as unsuccessful.)

The most surprising thing about In the Shadow of the Elm is that it's three decades old, and was not invented as part of a Portlandia sketch. I mean, an elaborate civic memorial to a tree? A tree that may not have even existed? That's a bit beyond "put a bird on it" or even "we can pickle that", if you ask me.

In the Shadow of the Elm recently acquired a cheery tropical sibling: In the Shadow of the Palm was created in December 2012 during an artistic residency at the Robert Rauschenberg estate in Captiva, Florida. I think I actually like the sibling better, just because it involves sunshine and palm trees.

From Within, Shalom

From Within, Shalom sits outside the St. James Lutheran Church on the South Park Blocks. This is the smaller companion piece to Peace Chant in the middle of the adjacent Park Block, a block the city's officially dubbed "Peace Plaza". A small metal sign on the side of the adjacent church day care center features a melodramatic poem by the guy who donated the sculpture. The sign includes a brief explanation at the bottom:

Peace Plaza includes "Peace Chant" out in the Park Block (sic) and this piece, “From Within, Shalom” which belongs to St. James Lutheran Church. It was dedicated by Rabbi Joshua Stampher of Congregation Neveh Shalom. In memory of Cora Lee Beard Whiteneck, it calls all generations to the pursuit of peace.

This is a relatively small and inconspicuous piece by public art standards, and I haven't come across a lot of items to pass along concerning it. Here's what we've got:

• The same Portland Public Art post that snarked about Peace Chant mentions it a bit, though the larger piece draws most of the fire.
• The only mention of From Within, Shalom in the Oregonian seems to be a "gallery" notice about its unveiling, in the November 30th, 1984 paper, so it would have been unveiled on December 2nd of that year.
• The downtown walking tour in the November 1985 issue of Oregon Geology mentions it very briefly, by an alternate (or incorrect) name:

  Note also the hornblende-biotite granite sculpture, "Within Reach," by Eugene, Oregon, sculptor Steve Gillman. The stone used in this sculpture came from near Sacramento, California.

Peace Chant

Today's stop in our ongoing public art meander takes us back to the South Park Blocks, between Jefferson & Columbia, home to a jumble of rough stone blocks titled Peace Chant:

Steve Gillman’s “Peace Chant” is the first known peace memorial in Oregon. Gillman designed the sculpture to create a space where people could sit and have quiet time. In his work, he uses the nature of the stone to create a feeling of space and time, juxtaposing natural, manmade, and architectural elements to remind of us of man’s place in nature.

The city designated this Park Block as "Peace Plaza" in May 1985, shortly after Peace Chant was installed, thanks to a petition by local religious groups. The Oregonian article states that no public funds were to be spent as a result, and quotes a local rabbi who stated "The Peace Plaza in itself will solve no problems and will offer no solutions". The article also notes in passing that "[Mayor] Clark said the plaza used to contain a sign with names of persons killed in World War II", but doesn't explain how long ago that was. A more recent whim of the city council sited a Portland Loo in the same block, displeasing the local neighborhood association and others who saw it as sort of desecrating the local peace monument.

A snarky article in the November 24th, 1985 Oregonian included it in a rogue's gallery of the worst public art in town, saying "A Pile of Rubble" would be a more appropriate title. A June 1985 profile of Gillman explained that this was his preferred style; something about respecting the "integrity of the stone".

Portland Public Art snarked about Peace Chant, saying of it (and a small companion piece across the street)

Both are granite pomo obelisks, cracked and scarred, very Artforum hip, circa 1980. The artist is Steve Gilman, who made a few more sculptures like this and then found more useful work to pursue.

The larger section of sculpture, Peace Chant, lying akimbo to walking traffic in the midst of the Park Block, is another excellent reason for revisioning public art placements. What can you say about it? Like Shelley Duvall in her heartbreaking performance as Olive Oyl, “He’s Large!”

It’s large, and kids from the daycare like to jump off it. That’s about all one needs say about it.

The aforementioned "a few more sculptures" includes at least one other Portland-area example, in Troutdale's Blue Lake Park, titled Wind Plane.

A few years ago the PSU Vanguard scratched its head about Peace Chant and directed readers to the Portland Public Art post. Peace Chant has also showed up on this humble blog once before, in a post about walking through the park blocks, and I linked to the Portland Public Art post too. At the time I had no idea I'd be doing a public art project of my own a few years down the road. To be honest, I probably wouldn't be doing this project at all if PPA hadn't gone on maybe-permanent hiatus a few years ago.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, Peace Chant drew the ire of a local conservative author several years ago, in a Portland Tribune editorial ranting about the evils of modern abstract art. He merely described it as "three sprawling, nondescript slabs of broken stone", but saw it as a symptom of a wider societal sickness. Apparently the purpose of art is to uplift the public while indoctrinating them with traditional values, something abstract art pretty much completely fails to do. As I said earlier, you'd think he'd be delighted that a sculpture dedicated to world peace is so utterly ineffective at getting its point across. But there's just no pleasing some people, I guess.

A more unusual take on Peace Chant comes in the November 1985 issue of Oregon Geology, the monthly magazine of the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries. It's one stop in a walking tour of the South Park Blocks & vicinity (pp 127-134), pointing out interesting rocks and minerals used in the construction of different structures. Peace Chant gets a brief mention:

Of more recent vintage than the bronze statues is the group of large, white granite blocks forming the sculpture named "Peace Chant" (g) that adorns the Peace Plaza in the Park Block between Columbia and Jefferson Streets. This 1984 sculpture is also by Eugene sculptor Steve Gillman. The stone came from near Fresno in southern California, and the upright piece weighs approximately 20,000 pounds. The long, thin grooves visible in the blocks are from the wire saw used to saw the blocks directly from the ground.

sunset, ala wai marina

A few more vacation Instagram photos from last week. Yeah, it's another Hawaiian sunset. Let me know down in the comments if you're getting tired of these.

I did take the "real" camera along too, btw. I just haven't gotten around to uploading photos yet. What would really be ideal here would be an Android-based DSLR with at least WiFi and maybe a 4G connection, and a somewhat more reliable Flickr app. A stretch goal would be an app that fetches HTML for your Flickr uploads, adds them to a new Blogger post, generates an embedded Google map based on your GPS location, saves it as a draft, and generally does everything except for the actual writing part. That would be ok. And yes, I have looked into the various web service APIs I'd need to use to write this myself. But that's as far as I've taken it. So apparently I haven't needed this app quite badly enough for me to take the time and write it. Still, it would be nice to have. The workflow involved in doing the average blog post here is clunky and hasn't changed in years, and it's starting to feel like stone-axes and bearskins technology. Relatively speaking, I mean.

lyon arboretum (social media edition)

manoa falls (social media edition)

foster botanical garden (instagram)

sunset, kahanamoku beach

Nepali Window

I was walking along SW Alder a while back and noticed this mysterious object on the side of the Central Plaza parking garage, between 3rd & 4th. It looked sort of art-like, somehow, but there wasn't a sign anywhere giving a title or artist, so I filed it away as a mystery. Then I was looking at the 2007 downtown public art map I've mentioned a few times here, putting together a list of things that I haven't posted about yet (and it was a surprisingly short list). One of the unblogged items was something called Nepali Window, which I realized was in the right general area as the mysterious parking garage object. Which does sort of look like a window if you squint just right, come to think of it. So I googled the title and artist, found a few photos, and realized I had a winner, and thus a blog post was born. So that's the exciting internet search saga behind what you're reading now.

Nepali Window is a 1989 piece by the late Bonnie Bronson, who was married to Lee Kelly of Leland 1 fame. (She created the orange metal side panels on Leland One, which are the best part of the thing.) Apparently this piece was part of a larger series inspired by travels in Nepal; OHSU has a companion piece in its vast art collection, slthough the photo seems to indicate it's tucked away in a conference room or something. I also ran across a Bronson sculpture on eBay that references the OHSU Nepali Window and gives a bit more background about it.

So the name got me wondering: Is this anything like what an actual window in Nepal looks like? I mean, obviously it's abstract art and whatnot, and it's a bit déclassé asking what it "looks like" or what it's "about". But, y'know, I was curious. I actually thought about asking a Nepali coworker and maybe doing the very first interview this humble blog's ever had. But I quickly realized he'd just tell me to google it and stop asking stupid questions. So I did. Short answer: Actual windows in Nepal look nothing like this, except for being square-ish most of the time. But they're interesting in their own right, and possibly I ought to be crowdfunded to go investigate further, maybe.

Before I knew the name or had any info about Nepali Window, I was thinking I'd do a post about the "mystery artwork" anyway, and then mostly talk about the parking garage since I didn't know anything about the sculpture itself. So I dug around in the Oregonian archives a bit and found a few articles about the garage. One of the articles had a cool retro under-construction photo of it, so that and the rest of the history stuff ended up in a post over on pdx tales, this humble blog's equally humble history sibling.

Memorial Inscription

A slideshow about Memorial Inscription, a public art piece outside Portland State's Epler Hall student housing tower. As the name suggests, it memorializes Stephen Epler, who in 1946 founded what evolved into PSU. A cluster of low benches have inscriptions briefly describing Epler's work, and behind them a set of stainless steel panels are etched in what looks like an unknown language.

To understand what's going on here, here's a quote from Margot Voorhies Thompson's artist bio at the US State Department's Art in Embassies program:

"Over my career, my interest in calligraphy has led me to create my own vernacular alphabets that reference elements of historical letterforms. My intention is to combine both archaic and futuristic elements while encoding beneath the surface poetry, literature and song. The invention of language and writing systems is a uniquely human phenomenon. Similar to nature, linguistics has the ability to reinvent itself and adapt over time, or run to extinction. This loss of diversity echoes the fate of our plant and animal kingdoms. By creating my own alphabets, the meaning and impact of the language is changed. The components are abstracted into indecipherable line and shape as I incorporate them into my paintings and prints. I am interested in deconstructing and recreating the language using repeated characters, line spacing and other patterns related to writing, books and scrolls. The meaning of this abstraction is to question what is being communicated. I want the viewer to interpret and wonder anew what they see, much like an archaeological find where an artifact inscribed with a mysterious form transcends symbolism, turning into something more elemental. In my work as a calligrapher, printmaker and painter, tools and surfaces determine the character of the writing and inscription."

Her website shows Memorial Inscription and several other examples of this style. I think it's beautiful. I have to draw a comparison here with another imaginary-alphabet inscription, on the fish-alien fake monument Mimir, which I think has more of a whimsical intent than Memorial Inscription does. A bona-fide art critic (which I've never, ever claimed to be) would likely dismiss this superficial, which is probably accurate. Especially since I don't actually have an interesting compare-n-contrast point to make here; I suppose I'm just pointing out that someone else made art with an invented alphabet and I have photos of that too. So if you'd like a refund of every cent you paid to read this, feel free to leave a comment below or something.

Memorial Inscription is actually a bit tough to find. SW Montgomery is pedestrian-only through much of the PSU campus, including here. Epler Hall shares a block with a much older apartment building, with a narrow alley between them, and the art's down at the far end of the alley. Did I say "alley"? Epler is a LEED-certified green building, so this not-an-alley is supposed to be a sort of educational eco-plaza that does magic things with stormwater. Kind of like the one Portland Community College has over on the eastside. Oh, there I go comparing and contrasting again. Like I said, feel free to request your refund down in the comments section.

Cobbletale

A few photos of Cobbletale, on the Portland State campus at 11th & Mill St. The artist statement, via the UO Library's One Percent for Art digital collection:

Cobbletale metamorphises the West Hall courtyard into a topographic landscape and kinesthetic artwork. It is meant to be experienced by touching (feet, hands, posterior) as well as by sight. Cobbletale examines and appreciates, both geologically and in the more recent historical sense, Portland's cobblestones. In a subtler way, Cobbetale is a site-specific metaphor for history's layers and transformations. Either way, it constradicts and expands the notion of the courtyard. Through its materials, shape and scale, Cobbletale empowers the site's surrounding architectural forms and landscape paintings. The idea for Cobbletale came from the design team's discovery that cobblestones were unearthed during preparation for West Hall's construction. Sometime around the turn of the [19th] century, they had been laid along a streetcar route on Southwest 11th. Their location was at the edge of the present artwork. Some of these original cobblestones are now a part of Cobbletale. During the sixteen-month period of creating Cobbletale, the artist gained assistance from eleven different state and local agencies and bureaus, as well as three museaums and numerous private individuals. In order to gather an appropriate ""pallet"" of materials, the artist hand cleaned over 6,000 cobblestones with a hammer and scrub brush, eventually using approximately 4,000 and returning the remainder to the city's storage (Mayer, 1992).

The fun thing about Cobbletale is that it was created in 1992, nearly a decade before today's Portland Streetcar began operating. Streetcars were strictly an object of romantic nostalgia at that point, and there was every reason to believe they were gone for good. The present-day streetcar has a stop just two blocks west of here, and another two blocks north. Still, cobblestones haven't really come back into vogue yet, so there's that.

The bottom photo in this post was actually taken way back in 2006. I knew I had an old Flickr photo of it, but I couldn't recall writing anything about it, so I figured it must've shown up in one of those "miscellaneous random photos" posts I used to do. But I checked all of those & didn't see it, and neither Blogger search nor Google were any help. I had a multi-megabyte full-blog-export XML file lying around from the last time I updated the Cyclotram Map, so I was able to track it down that way (although TextEdit bogged down on the big file & I had to use Emacs instead).

Another sort of blog post I used to do was a bullet point list of unrelated news items and tidbits from around the interwebs. Which seemed like a great idea back then because Twitter didn't exist yet. In a post of that sort from almost exactly 7 years ago, I tacked an item on the end linking to (but not inlining) a few photos I hadn't used yet. I needed to do that because I didn't yet have a Flickr Pro account, and until recently free Flickr accounts only let you browse your 200 most recent photos. You could still access them if you had a direct link, but you couldn't browse through your photos with the 'next' button and see them. So I posted links just so I'd continue to have access to those photos. But I didn't even bother explaining what they were photos of, so it's entirely possible -- probable, even -- that nobody has ever clicked those links in all this time.

I'm thinking maybe I'll go back and edit the old post & inline those photos. Just on the general principle of trying to do things the right way, even if nobody ever sees it. I don't get search hits on 2006 posts too often. People might find it from the post you're reading now, assuming anyone stumbles across it. Which they might now, but in another 7 years? I mean, nobody's going to want to look at plain old photos in the year 2020. Either a.) You'll need full holographic video with HD smell-o-vision, or your fickle audience will go elsewhere; or b.) everyone's too busy scavenging and fleeing atomic mutants to worry about this stuff. I'm not really sure which is more likely.

Harvard Bridge

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Boston's Harvard Bridge crosses the Charles River between the Back Bay neighborhood and the MIT (not Harvard) campus. It's not really that photogenic of a bridge, and I only ended up with a handful of photos of it. I became distracted by other more interesting things and neglected to take any photos of it from the side until I was pretty far away. You can probably find better ones on the net somewhere if you're curious.

(Also, @Mile73 points out this is usually called the "Mass Ave Bridge", due to carrying Massachusetts Avenue over the river. That seems much better than naming it after a university it doesn't even go to.)

In the top photo, you might notice a green painted mark on the sidewalk, and (if you look closely) similar marks in various colors further away. These are "Smoot marks". Their story, as told by Wikipedia:

The Harvard Bridge is measured, locally, in smoots.

In 1958, members of the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity at MIT measured the bridge's eastern sidewalk by carrying or dragging the shortest pledge that year, Oliver Smoot (who later became president of the International Organization for Standardization), end over end.

Crossing pedestrians are informed by length markers painted at 10-smoot intervals that the bridge is 364.4 smoots long, "plus one ear". The qualifier "plus or minus" was originally intended to express measurement uncertainty, but over the years the words "or minus" have gone missing in many citations, including the markings on the bridge itself. The marks are repainted twice each year by members of the fraternity.

During the reconstruction in the 1980s, the smoot markings were repainted on the new deck, and the sidewalks were divided into smoot-length slabs rather than the standard six feet. The Cambridge police use the smoot marks as a coordinate system when reporting accidents on the bridge.

Given that Smoot was 5 feet 7 inches (1.702 m) tall in 1958, the given measurement in smoots of 364.4 yields a "bridge length" of about 620 meters (2,030 ft). Published sources give the length of the bridge as approximately 660 meters (2,170 ft). The difference in length between the sidewalk markings and the published figure represents a 40-meter (130 ft) discrepancy.

An article at the Cambridge Historical Society mentions the Smoot connection, and points out a plaque marking the spot where, in 1908, a shackled Harry Houdini jumped off the bridge and made one of his famous underwater escapes. That's way cooler than any fraternity prank, if you ask me.

LADEE Launch, Wallops Island VA

LADEE Minotaur V @ Wallops Island

Photos from Launch Pad 0-B at Wallops Island, Virginia. This Minotaur V rocket (a converted Peacekeeper ICBM) is set to launch the LADEE moon probe tomorrow night, at 11:27pm Eastern.

Sun Lakes

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Here's a slideshow from Sun Lakes-Dry Falls State Park in Eastern Washington, about 40 miles north of Moses Lake. The state parks description of the place:

Sun Lakes-Dry Falls State Park is a 4,027-acre camping park with 73,640 feet of freshwater shoreline at the foot of Dry Falls. Dry Falls is one of the great geological wonders of North America. Carved by Ice Age floods that long ago disappeared, the former waterfall is now a stark cliff, 400 feet high and 3.5 miles wide. In its heyday, the waterfall was four times the size of Niagara Falls. Today it overlooks a desert oasis filled with lakes and abundant wildlife.

These photos are from the park area "downstream" of Dry Falls. (There's a separate post on the way with photos from the overlook above Dry Falls.) It's hard to comprehend the sheer magnitude of the Missoula Floods, but to my non-geologist eyes the the Sun Lakes area (and similar areas around Washington's Channeled Scablands region) really do look like the result of an enormous flood, with piles of rocky debris, and deep gouges now filled by lakes. This sort of terrain is considered to be the closest terrestrial analogue to outflow channels on Mars, like the one visited by Mars Pathfinder in 1997.

The high freestanding rock formation in a few of these photos is Umatilla Rock. I ran across a blog post about it with a lot of great photos, including some from the top of the rock, at a site devoted solely to Ice Age Floods.

I should point out there's more to the park than gawking at geology. A recent Associated Press story about the area goes on about the recreation options here. Beyond the obvious hiking, boating, and fishing options, apparently there's even a 9 hole golf course somewhere in the state park. It seems like a long way to go just to play golf, if you ask me. But then, crossing the street is a long way to go just to play golf, as far as I'm concerned. The park also has mini-golf (aka fun golf), paddle boats, and even a concession selling water balloons at $2 per bucket, so you can have a water balloon fight without the hassle of filling water balloons first. That actually sounds cool.