Aspen

Off to Aspen.

Drove right up here. Got reservations for the campground at Difficult, a five mile commute from the Physics Center. We're not staying in a condo this time, we brought Shamu. We get to wake up to the birds in the forest every morning. Every day at lunch I get to run on the Rio Grande Trail along the Roaring Fork river. The weather has been perfect. 80s during the day and 45 at night. It’s been a good week.

We got a stuff-to-fit campsite for the motorhome. A trip around the outside with the wire snips to trim the distorted foliage, and we were all set. We got a nice sunny spot to give our new solar panel a good workout. We added one more this year. Now we have two collectors on a system that will accommodate three. We like to run a fan at night for air movement and background noise. We ran a bunch of other stuff one day too and ran the battery down pretty low. The next day we left everything off all day long, so by the evening, the battery was charged most of the way up! It looks like we could take a totally spent double house battery, lay off it for two days, and completely recharge it. Cool. We can monitor the charging. In the middle of a sunny day it is charging at five to six amps.

I get to fly fish almost every afternoon at all my favorite places, and I've already found a new favorite section of stream as well. All on the Roaring Fork. Slow shallow clear wide winding meadow stream with lots of cuts and holes. Firm sandy bottom for wading. Filled with trout. The Aspen Valley. What a place to be.

The five-day job went very well. We completed it in four. Stayed over Friday anyway, to just hang out and do everything we like to do some more.

Annie was a big hit at the Center as always. She gets to go everywhere we go.

Went to an interesting public lecture Wednesday night. Our friend Pierre, one of the Physicists gave a talk about neutrinos. They hadn’t invented neutrinos yet when we were all in school. Well, they had been thought up, but not many people believed in them yet. None had been observed or measured. According to Pierre, a trillion of them penetrate our bodies every second and pass right through. Lucky for us, our bodies are mostly empty space and neutrinos are so small, nothing gets hit very often. Neutrinos are so small, and so stable, they really aren’t looking to hit anything or react with anything anyway. They come from lots of places. From the core of the sun, it takes eight minutes to get to us. They’re a lot faster than light, in that regard, because it takes a long time for light to escape the core of the sun so it can even begin the journey to us. This was a public lecture, so he kept it simple. Of course he went way off over our heads early on in the talk, but he is so charming and such an accomplished speaker, that it was a good lecture all the way through. A minimum of mathematical formulas, and generous use of understandable analogies and anecdotes. If you want to know about neutrinos, I guess Pierre is the guy to know. He is one of the inventors of “superstring theory” and “supersymmetry”. He is one of the inventors of the “seesaw mechanism” for light neutrino masses. I have no idea what the seesaw mechanism is. From hanging around the Center, I gather that String Theory has to do with tying together all the different Physical Theories into one comprehensive structure. The concepts you use to describe gravity are different from those used to describe electricity or astrophysics, or particle physics, and so forth.

My office-mate this trip, Murray, is a Nobel Laureate, but we never saw him. I’m guessing he’s really really smart though.

On our last trip I described crossing the Great Divide on our way through New Mexico. I thought it was funny, because it’s essentially flat desert down there, and the Divide is just not that impressive. However, McKee was kind enough to explain to me that if I really crossed the Great Divide, then I was actually thousands of miles north of where I thought I was, in the Yukon, between the Arctic and Pacific Oceans. So. To the best of my knowledge, I never really left New Mexico that day. When I crossed the divide, I didn’t really cross the Great Divide, I crossed some other divide, that sometimes seems great, but not in New Mexico. We crossed the Continental Divide.

I thought this campground looked quiet when we first got here, but I was wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. The birds go off at about 5:30, and they don’t stop yelling all day long. They go till dark. What a racquet! But it’s a horrible place for birdwatching. All these birds making all this noise, but the only ones you can see are the robins. The rest are all little warblers off in the woods warbling their little hearts out. You can't see them from very far away, but if you go in search of them, they shut up whenever you get close. Contrary little creatures. There are fifty camping spaces carved out of an aspen/oak brush forest with views of the mountains surrounding. Nice spot.

We got the satellite TV rig out to test it. We had it installed and tested in Louisville. Everything worked just right, while we were in our driveway. So to test it under actual field conditions, we set it up, pointed it to where the satellite should be …, and nothing happened. No cell phone reception, so we couldn’t call for help. Next time we drove into Aspen, we called the 1-800 help line and they gave us some hints, so back we went to mess with it some more. I set the tripod up on the roof of the motorhome to get a better shot at the satellite. We made progress, but the screen told us we couldn’t actually watch any of the channels until we subscribed to them first. Of course, we have already subscribed. So Judy drove back down the road toward town until she could get cell phone reception, called the 1-800 number again, and relayed instructions to me over the walkie talkie, and I read error messages back to her until they had all the satellites talking to each other in the appropriate languages, and it all worked perfectly. Judy came back and we shut the television off for the rest of the trip. After all, who would want to go out into this wonderful wilderness and sit and watch television?

Oops. The sky clouded up for a thunderstorm in the middle of a hot sunny day, and the amp meter went down from 5.5 amps to 0.5 amps. Several cloudy days in a row could send us off in search of a different system. Good thing that doesn’t happen very often anywhere.

Oops. Remember that new favorite fishing spot? The wandering stream through the mountain meadow? Well, nevermind. We fished it again. We spent three hours there and did well. We fished this great loop way out into the meadow and back to the road again. On getting out, we read the sign again about not allowing your dogs to run free, and about staying on the established trails, and about no fishing. NO FISHING? Oops. All those fish must have been really surprised to find hooks in their faces. We’re the people who follow the rules. We always keep our dog on the leash when we’re supposed to. We always pack out our trash. We always pick up our dog’s poop. We never make noise during quiet hours. We ditched our gear and snuck back to the car. We read the sign again where we got into the water. Yep. No fishing. We didn’t get arrested, but there are probably wanted posters out on us by now.