Taos; a beautiful place to be. From Lathrop State Park, we drove over LaVeta Pass to Fort Garland and turned left. We were going to drive to Alamosa before we turned left on Highway 285, but at Fort Garland we saw a sign that said Taos 74 miles. We turned left. New road! That doesn’t happen much in Colorado now, driving on a new road. It was a great discovery; much less traveled, and the surface much smoother than the road south out of Alamosa. It’s a new favorite.
So here we are, settled in the Taos Valley RV Park, surrounded by sage. All the RV sites here have names. We’re in the Jeremiah Johnson space. Being fans of old guys who used to be young, like Robert Redford, that’s a good space for us.
I’m really looking forward to going back to work. After a week of house packing, a week of work will feel like vacation.
Watching the afternoon thunderstorm approach, the rule of thumb about how far away the lightning is comes up. You count the seconds. When we were kids, the rule of thumb was one second per mile. I believed it then, but now it doesn’t sound right. A few years back, during a backpacking trip in the Black Hills in South Dakota, Brother Bill and I were trapped in a tent by a lightning storm and the question came up then too. We tried to work out the math in our heads, but it never came out the same way twice, and we couldn’t remember the speed of sound anyway, so we fell asleep instead. Using round numbers, if sound traveled at 600 miles per hour, we’d express that as one hour represents 600 miles. Then we’d multiply that one hour by 60 minutes, then multiply again by 60 seconds to get a total of 3,600 seconds, then divide that result by 600 miles to get seconds per mile. The result of this calculation is 6 seconds per mile; a result drastically different from the old rule of thumb of 1 second equals one mile.
The speed of sound varies, depending on atmospheric conditions. It isn’t really 600 miles per hour, it’s higher, maybe more like 760 miles per hour, so the actual count may be more like 5 seconds per mile instead of six, but the point is still the same. It is not one second per mile.
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