As we wrap up our trip, you might have noticed that the itinerary I outlined in my first entry for this trip isn’t what we’ve been doing ever since we headed east. As it turned out, Route 120 leaving the San Francisco area was still snowed in and closed to traffic, which forced us to take a more northern route home. While this negated our seeing some exciting national parks, we saw some other beautiful landscapes, especially following I-70 through Utah.

And it was exciting to go over Monarch Pass again, although that was the beginning of our wet weather.

Since that time rain has been a force to be reckoned with, starting with a nagging presence that spattered the windshield when cars and trucks passed to flooded rivers…

…to flooded rivers that forced us to detour…

… to dodging major wind and downpours in Kentucky for an entire day, only to find ourselves hovering in the basement of our campground office building that evening as a tornado warning was in effect. The picture below doesn’t capture the heavy winds, driving rain we all watched, hoping the house wouldn’t be blown away—or us!

Nevertheless it’s been a wonderful trip. We’ll be home tomorrow and we’re ready to return to our normal routines, to our family and friends and to our music. Thanks for all your comments along the way. It’s been great fun sharing it all with you.

Before leaving San Rafael, our family took us to visit China Camp State Park, a favorite place of theirs for running and biking. This park captures the history of a group of Chinese Americans who supported themselves primarily by shrimp fishing in San Pablo Bay. In its heyday in the 1880s, about 500 Chinese Americans lived in the the village which had three general stores, a marine supply store and a barber shop. China Camp was one of approximately 26 such shrimp-fishing villages established along the coast by Chinese Americans, many of whom had moved from San Francisco to escape racial prejudice and persecution. Below is what remains of China Camp.

In the late 1800s, the Chinese American fishermen of China Camp would catch 3 million pounds of shrimp per year, much of which was exported to China and Hawaii. However, the economy of the village was severely harmed by the passage of laws in the early 1900s that outlawed the export of shrimp, closed the height of the shrimping season, and prohibited shrimping with bag nets which were the main method of catching shrimp. As a result, the population of China Camp greatly declined, leaving only one family — the Quans — carrying on shrimp fishing.

One of the buildings holds a museum which has a number of exhibits about this remarkable and nearly forgotten history.

A huge oven for drying the shrimp also remains.

Fortunately, in 1914 a new net, the trawl, was invented, which made it possible for the Quans to resume their commercial shrimp fishing enterprise and process 5,000 pounds of shrimp per day. The Quan family has remained since and a member of the family recently did in 20 16 at the age of 90.

It was a beautiful day for visiting the park and bay, and on our way back home we stopped at a Pub whose owner (or decorator) had a delightful sense of humor. Great day!

Visiting the Nevada State Railroad Museum, we discovered that Nevada had a major boom in the building of railroads throughout the state in the mid 1800’s, along with the engines and cars that traveled the tracks. But with the development of the automobile industry, the golden age of railroads rapidly came to an end, and many of these railroad cars fell into disrepair. So when the Western film craze took off in the mid 1900’s, a few of these found new life in Hollywood films. One of them is beautifully restored and in a place of honor in this museum in Carson City, Nevada.

Next to it is a railroad car with a legacy (fictional or not?) of being haunted.

Other unique vehicles are on display in this museum.

And there were many others which represented the wide variety of railroad cars that were used and the high quality of their construction. It was a glimpse into a very different time. Amtrak, please take notice!

On the last leg of our trip to connect with family on the West Coast, we stopped off to see a small but important museum that captures a broad spectrum of aviation history important to the area. The Oakland Aviation Museum is located in an old hangar at Oakland International Airport, and aircraft of many different vintages pepper the field around the museum and fill the inside.

Perhaps the most notable historical event that took place at Oakland International Airport was that it was site of Amelia Earhart’s take-off on her final flight. An eerie Earhart artifact at the museum was a print of her hand as interpreted by a palmist.

The most notable airplane there was the one that Roger learned to fly in.

One of the most recent additions to the collection was a model of a dirigible that had been made for the Boeing Company in 2000.

There was also a Russian MIG in excellent shape. All of these aircraft had been carefully restored; some looked new.

And what fascinated me more than the MIG was seeing the interior of an air balloon basket!

On the grounds outside the museum there was a wide variety of military aircraft from every recent war. And in the center of the museum was quite a surprise: the local model railroad club has a huge table set up with four sets of trains operating, clearly a labor of love for these individuals. The entire setup was based on a Bavarian theme, and that alone was well worth the $4 admission fee for the museum!

The West abounds in superlatives and along with the Grand Canyon, Sequoia National Park is a great example. The giant Sequoia is the Earth’s largest living tree. Even Join Muir called it the Big Tree. It’s nearly conical trunk which remains thick high into the branches is why. At least one species of tree lives longer, one has greater diameter, three grow taller, but none is larger. For example, the General Sherman Tree is 275 feet tall and is estimated to be 2,200 years old; every year it grows enough new wood to produce a 60 foot tall tree of usual size.

Sequoia trees are only found naturally on the west slope of the Sierra Nevada between about 5,000 to 7,000 feet. There are 75 groves in all. In the 1880s loggers were prepared to harvest the Sequoia for wood needed to build housing for the rapidly developing Western communities, but local people urged Congress to protect the trees and in 1890 Sequoia National Park became the second national park. It rapidly grew with additional tracts added and is now combined with Kings Canyon National Park.

Seeing the park is a bit of a challenge, as the roads through the park to the various sites is one of the most convoluted and squiggly we’ve ever traveled. See our route below. The road with the most curves and switchback is the one we took. Fortunately it was slow going enough that we could really enjoy the the peace and other-worldliness of the park.

The Grand Canyon deserves something, well, grander for it’s name. Like magnificent, awesome, awe-inspiring, glorious… On second thought, I don’t think there is any word that can capture not only its size, but the beautiful colors hidden away in a billion nooks and crannies, valleys and walls, or the sudden steepness that catches your breath. Despite the recent rash of deaths from falls into the Grand Canyon, we did see several people climbing over the guard rails and walking onto high promontories inches away from a thousand foot fall. One of them had a small child and a woman with sandals never designed for climbing rocks. (They survived, but only after a few precarious stumbles. Don’t these people read the news?)

This is my third visit to the Grand Canyon, but in many ways my first. At the age of 12ish, I viewed the Grand Canyon through the haze of dramamine, and was only partially present. The second was about ten years ago when my sisters and I took a 5 hour trip from Las Vegas to stand by the edge of the canyon at the Grand Canyon Village for about an hour before returning. This time, Roger and I entered from the east and we stopped at many stops I’d never seen before, each with its own spectacular/awesome/magnificent view. We were sufficiently awed that when we did arrive at Grand Canyon Village and faced a very grand parking problem, we opted out and headed on down the road.

There are probably billions of various views of the GC, each unique and compelling. I’m sharing a few of my own, but I highly recommend some of the commercial videos you can find on YouTube that much more effectively show the incredible size, the breadth, depth and phenomenal vistas it offers.

Petrified Forest National Park is one of the best places in the world to see fossils that date back to the Late Triassic Period (approximately 200 million years ago.) While petrified dinosaur remains are relatively widespread through the West, this park is noted for the petrified forest and petrified wood pieces that are scattered throughout the southern portion of the park. Making petrified wood takes a very long time (like millions of years) and the process is detailed below.

A road bisected the park and below are a small sample of the vistas you can easily see from your vehicle. They may look like wood, but they are definitely as hard as stone!

The park also has many petroglyphs, a written record of ancient people who lived in this area, some more than 2000 years old. These were some of the easiest to spot and recognize.

The Puerco Pueblo is another remarkably well-preserved site dating from the 13th century which showed clearly with the many visible remains where the kiva and the main living quarters of the village were located.

Painted Desert

We had run out of time by we reached the Painted Desert section of the park, and a quick drive through this section was all we had, but it was a drive with vistas like these below at every turn.

If you’ve ever wondered where pictures like these come from, it can only be from the radio waves emitted from these objects billions of light years away. So you need something on earth that can translate these radio waves into images, and that is the Very Large Array (VLA.)

The Very Large Array, one of the world’s premier astronomical radio observatories, consists of 27 radio antennas in a Y-shaped configuration on the Plains of San Agustin fifty miles west of Socorro, New Mexico. Each antenna is 25 meters (82 feet) in diameter. The data from the antennas is combined electronically to give the resolution of an antenna 36km (22 miles) across, with the sensitivity of a dish 130 meters (422 feet) in diameter. The entire array and the associated computer constitutes a single telescope.

The array has to be situated in an very isolated place to minimize the amount of radio frequency interference from Earth, and New Mexico is the ideal place. It is located in the central part of the state southwest of Albuquerque and many miles (and cattle guards) away from civilization and still large enough that Route 60 goes right through the middle of the telescope. They are very strict that no electronics are permitted to be turned on (airplane mode doesn’t cut it) and they’re particularly strict that no drones be allowed. Because of these restrictions, taking photos with my iPhone wasn’t possible, so the pictures below are from the VLA website image gallery.

I highly recommend visiting this website for more information about this remarkable, hidden away treasure in our country. In particular, there is an excellent 23 minute video narrated by Jodie Foster giving a great overview of the VLA and its plans for a future Next Generation VLA at https://public.nrao.edu/gallery/beyond-the-visible-vla/. Check it out!

No, I don’t mean Billy the Kid, a/k/a William H. Bonney, I mean the Museum’s originator, Ed Sweet. To be blunt, Billy the Kid was a murderer who killed 8 men in the course of his criminal career. He was found guilty twice, sentenced to be executed twice and escaped twice. All before the age of 21 when he himself was gunned down. Not a person I’d want walking the streets of my town. But he was brash, young, notorious and somewhat attractive to the ladies and became the stuff of legends. Several imposters came forward claiming they’d survived; why they’d want to do that when he was a condemned felon with execution awaiting him I’ll never understand. His gravestone was stolen twice (and disappeared for 25 years), and a hundred years after his death he was considered for pardon by the current governor (which was denied.) Movies were made about him, ballads composed. He’s had his moment.

Ed Sweet’s son Don, who has carried on the legacy of his father.

In my opinion, Ed Sweet is the person who made a major difference in the town of Fort Sumter, and his legacy continues long since his death in 1974. Ed Sweet was an avid and open-minded collector of any antique items with a western heritage. After collecting several thousand such items, he and his wife decided to open a small museum to display them. As Billy the Kid had a history with town, they named it The Billy the Kid Museum. The museum now contains at least 60,000 items.

The actual artifacts connected to the Kid are fairly limited, the most notable being the rifle he owned, shown below.

There are dozens of newspaper articles of the era and many Wanted posters. For such a brief life he created a great deal of newsprint.

And of course, there is Billy the Kid’s grave site, located a few miles east of town near the site of Fort Sumter.

Aside from the nominal tip of the hat to Billy the Kid, what impressed me most of Ed Sweet’s legacy is that he brought together artifacts that capture the essence of a time and that easily could have ended up in dusty attics or been thrown in the trash by younger generations, and instead he made sense of them in the context of the history of Fort Sumner. The fort itself was short-lived and a failed attempt by the federal government to control the local Native Americans. But a town grew from these efforts and that museum captures the history of the homes, the local businesses, and, yes, all the criminal activity in a relatively lawless town. It’s a real step back into the Old West.

This is cattle country

Spurs

Typewriters and irons

Types of barbed wire

Just a small selection of the many arrow heads found near Fort Sumter

In our many travels, we’ve passed through a few towns where one person or one committee made the affirmative decision to honor its history by gathering from people’s homes, barns or attics those items that capture their town’s history and the people who settled it. These places are special and feel very alive, even if they might be as dusty and worn down by age as the other towns that are on a slow path to becoming a ghost town. Fort Sumner is one of those special ones, primarily because of the efforts of a man like Ed Sweet and his family. Our visit alone left about $100 in the community. In the short time we were there about 30 other people were touring the museum and buying things in a very lovely gift shop. I’m certain the museum is doing much to keep the town’s economy alive. Good job, Ed!

The answer could be Jake Bartles, who owned a mill and a general store on the Caney River and traded with the Cherokee, Osage and Delaware, but it also could have been Carrsville for Nelson Carr who built the gristmill and also built the first school. Or Keelerville or Johnstoneville after George Keeler and William Johnstone who were investors in the 1870’s lucrative fur trade. All were notable citizens who invested their money, time and talents in the area to help found a thriving city that today even boasts of a Frank Lloyd Wright building in its downtown. I was charmed by the city and if I had to live in Oklahoma I’d choose Bartlesville.

Of course, oil had a lot to do with it too. Oklahoma’s commercial oil and gas industry was born in 1897 in Bartlesville Indian Territory when the Nellie Johnstone oil well came in a gusher. (Johnstone’s daughter Nellie dropped the explosive charge that released the oil 1,300 ft into the ground.) That led to a boom that created many oil companies and brought the railroad to town. Today, Conocophillips and Phillips 66 are the main companies in this area.

An important part of the story is the positive collaboration between the native and non-native people. Intermarriage was very common and for some an advantageous way for a non-native to acquire valuable land rights. It appears that some of the tribes became wealthy along with their white colleagues.

The Bartlesville Region Historical Museum contains many artifacts that capture this rich history. Here are some of the highlights.

Above is a replica of the one room schoolhouse that Carr built for his children and the other non-native children in the community. The tribal communities had their own schools that the non-natives were not permitted to attend.

Below is a reproduction of the Carr family parlor.

The Delaware, Osage and Cherokee were an important part of Bartlesville growth. The majority of photographs showed the Native Americans in Western dress, but the respect for tribal customs still remains with many native ceremonies and dances taking place throughout the area.