Erin’s weblog of travel & interesting local stuff

We had so much fun at the hot springs that we went back Tuesday morning, and stayed for over two hours.  I spent some time in earnest at the lobster pot, which in the daylight showed its eerie, slightly green mineral coloration.  I took turns dipping in the 115-degree water for a minute or two, and taking an ice cold shower, and trying to make conversation with the naked guy also enjoying the lobster pot.  He went to great pains to twist and turn as he got in and out, and wasn’t very talkative.  I figure if you’re gonna go in the nude in a place like that, just roll with it.

Thus thoroughly poached, and dosed with naturally-occurring lithium in the water, we groggily ate lunch in the parking lot and headed to the next town, Ouray.  Walked around a little, drove on to Silverton, stopping at some historic mining sites along the way.  In Silverton, we stopped in at the Montanya Rum Bar.  Philosophizing that it’s easier to take sugar to water than water to sugar, they make their own dark and light rum with mountain spring water right there.  They serve a dazzling array of fresh cocktails, of which I enjoyed:  basil-infused platino rum with grapefruit and lime juice, and cucumber-infused platino with lavender, honey, lime and jalapeno.  Ohh yeah.  We sat on the patio, laughing and ignoring the fact that we were getting rained on.

Climbing out of Silverton, there was a complete double rainbow arcing through the air at eye level.  It was bigger and more intensely colored than any rainbow I’ve seen, maybe because it was so close?  Maybe because of the rum?

All good trips must come to an end – we arrived back in Durango around dinnertime.

Telluride is a really fun tourist town, and the ski resort looks fantastic – tons of trails, bowl skiing at the top, everything you could need.  Since it’s summer, the slopes were open as mountain biking trails, and there were lots of bikers (pedalers?) riding the free gondola up and biking down.  It was in this context I learned some local vernacular:  bro-bras (dudes who are totally stoked to make some gnarly runs), gapers (tourists like us I guess), and 13′ers (trails at 13,000 ft. elevation, for instance).  After riding up and down the gondolas, we drove to the end of town to hike to Bridal Veil Falls, one of several falls bursting off the red mountain cliffs and plummeting a thousand feet towards the town below.  Unfortunately, yet another afternoon storm rolled in when we were about halfway up.  We scuttled back down the trail, which is a gravel access road, jumping every time the lightening struck nearby.

With nothing better to do, we got back in the car and left Telluride a little earlier than we’d hoped.  We took the road out of town and then North towards Ridgway.  Still bent on the idea of camping for free on BLM lands, we took a forest access road up into the mountains.  We were really on the other side of the mountains that cradle Telluride, and the storm was still alive and well.  We drove several miles up the gravel road.  The elevation kept climbing and the thunder kept bouncing off the hills around us, and we decided we’d end up above the treeline and maybe in the snow if we continued.  So it was back to Ridgway for another night in a State Park campground.

But first, we went to the Orvis Hot Springs.  What a magical place!  We showed up just after dark, and paid to get in.  It’s on a flat piece of land in the valley, surrounded by a rusty corrugated aluminum fence.  Inside, it’s a garden oasis with several pools filled with hot spring water.  There is a large pond surrounded by a wall with little lights and flowers.  There is another set of two small, shallow pools.  And there is the “lobster pot,” which is fed by a hotter spring source – it’s small but a little deeper.  We were among the most clothed people there, and the large pond was full of happy naked people in the dark. 

Once again, we got back to camp in the dark.  We had the luxury of a picnic shelter in our campsite, so we slept on that instead of setting up the tent.  It was a great idea at first – we got to watch the moon rise and fell asleep to a light breeze.  Sleep was short-lived, though, because mosquitoes ate us alive the rest of the night.  If they hadn’t waited until after midnight to start biting, maybe I would have been awake enough to make other arrangements, but instead, I miserably tossed and turned, put a t-shirt over my head in vain, and cursed the awful creatures until sunrise.  I finally got an hour or so of sleep, and woke up with a slightly sunburned forehead. 

Monday we slept late, and took a much-needed bath in the river.  I expected the water to be cold, running off the mountains, but it was warmer than the pond we swam in the first night in Durango.  We stopped by the office to pay, and the hostess said she had no idea we were even there.  They had free coffee and big flowers growing by the front door.

From Dolores we drove North, pulling off the road in Rico.  Cora’s roommate had given us directions to a hot spring, where his father and some of his friends had, back in the 90’s, installed a hot tub shell in the trees and piped the water in.  We found the shed, and the hot spring source behind the shed, just like our directions said.  We also saw a large PVC pipe leading out of the source and downstream.  However, our directions said upstream, so rather than yielding to logic, we walked half a mile upstream, the river on our left and a series of increasingly-yellow mine runoff basins on our right. 

I was getting increasingly nervous about submerging myself in any water near mine runoff, and had resolved not to, should we ever find the place.  We turned around and walked back to the source, and by the complex process of elimination, walked downstream, where we found the hot tub shell on the other side of a shrub.  It was crusted over with inches-thick mineral deposits and looked like something out of Jurassic Park.  There was a guy sitting on a bench next to it.  He had a long black ponytail, hoop earrings, and lots of tattoos.  We said hi, and I, still not convinced, asked him … are there mine chemicals in this?  He laughed and said there hadn’t been any active mining in this area for 15 years, and he’s sat in it once a week for ten years.  He affected a twitch and said, as crazy as I am, there’s nothing wrong with me.

Thus reassured by a complete stranger, I went along with the crowd and got in.  It was really nice.  We hung out for a while, chatting with the guy, who was from Cortez.  He said a lot of people who live around Rico commute to Telluride for work.  That the two-lane highway up through the mountains gets a surprising amount of traffic at rush hour.  And that there are a lot of crashes – according to him, caused by people looking at the scenery rather than the road.  It is quite beautiful through there; and as we drove on towards Telluride we saw Lizard Head, a thirteener that is notoriously difficult to climb.

Eager to see more Anasazi ruins, we left Mesa Verde and drove to Canyon of the Ancients.  We drove through prime Colorado farmland to access the Lowry Pueblo on the north end of the park.  It’s been restored quite a bit, and you can go into part of the complex.  Just down the hill from the pueblo is a Great Kiva – much larger than any family-size kiva we had seen, it stretched almost 50 feet across.  It was likely a community gathering place for many villages in the area.  A recent visitor from a New Mexico Pueblo identified two stone figures on the floor as summer and winter people.

On the way out, Cora found a small pottery shard by the parking lot.  We dug madly and found a dozen or more pieces of random artifacts – mostly pottery, and some plastered sandstone.  We agonized over what to do with them as a dark stormcloud thundered and rolled in overhead.  Maybe I’m superstitious, but I was not about to be struck down by angry spirits.  We quickly snapped some photos and buried the shards a few feet away, a little further off the path as the rain started to come down.  This kind of debris is literally strewn everywhere around these sites, since the inhabitants made trash piles near their dwellings.

We drove through the rain to another remote site in Canyon of the Ancients – Painted Hand Pueblo.  The forest service road that leads to it was completely deserted, and we were the only ones there.  There was a stone tower, and some more cliff dwellings.  Most awesomely, there are two hands painted on the sandstone wall of one of the rooms.  They were probably made by holding one’s hand against the wall, and spitting soot paint around it to create an outline.  I also spotted a petroglyph on a wall further to the north. 

You can camp for free on land owned by the Bureau of Land Management, and one option was to camp off the road leading to Painted Hand.  However, it was still thundering, and since the site was pretty exposed, we drove on.  The storm grew more intense around us as we drove East again, to Dolores.  We pulled into an RV campground around 10; the office was closed, so we let ourselves in and set up the tent and had dinner – again in the dark.  A river flowing just behind our campsite and a steady rain made for peaceful background noise.

Sunday morning we went on another cliff dwelling tour – this time of Balcony House.  It’s one of the more “adventuresome” tours, with a 32-foot ladder on the face of the cliff, an ancient man-made tunnel you have to crawl through on hands and knees that was the original entrance to the village, and a 60-foot climb back up the cliff on stone cut-out stairs.  No big deal of course, ’cause I ain’t afraid of nothin’.  It was my favorite tour, because it was the only one where we got to go back behind the dwellings, rather than only look at them from the front.  We went through a narrow passage at the back of the alcove, where the eroded sandstone met the floor, and a small pool held what was at one time two families’ main source of water.

Each family that lived in these complexes had its own kiva – an underground circular room that archeologists think doubled as the main living space and the main place of spiritual significance.  They are designed such that smoke leaves the hole in the center of the ceiling, which doubles as the entrance – via ladder.  Fresh, cool air comes in through a small shaft down the side of the kiva wall, hits a deflector stone as it blows in across the floor, and circulates around the room.  A tiny sipapu (borrowed from a Hopi word) – a hole to the underworld – allowed ancestors to pass back and forth from the other realm and live among the family still.

The Anasazi people appeared in Mesa Verde around 550 A.D.  They lived in pit houses on top of the mesa early on, farming the land there, and hunting.  It was only in the 1200’s that they began making cliff dwellings – at this point they had developed the brick and mortar technology with which to build pueblos, hence the brick and mortar construction in the cliffside alcoves.  They were in a period of prosperity when the cliff dwellings were first built, and may have chosen to “build down” to accommodate a growing population.  By 1300 they had all left their home of Mesa Verde.  Archeological evidence points to many potential causes:  a 24-year long drought, overhunting, deforestation … an end to the prosperity that allowed these amazing villages to be built.  Descendents of Mesa Verde now live as Hopi in Arizona, as well as in the Rio Grande Pueblos in New Mexico.  Our ranger guiding the Balcony House tour has asked descendents at three of these Pueblos why their people left Mesa Verde, and their answer in all cases was simply, “It was time to go.”

After bumming around Durango for a day and an evening, we woke up Saturday morning and loaded the car.  We headed West to Mesa Verde, a spectacular National Park with around 600 ancient Anasazi sites, around 40 of which are cliff dwellings.  We toured two of them that day – Spruce Tree House and Cliff Palace, the largest one.  The tours generally involve climbing up and down steep cliffside paths, wooden ladders, and sometimes small crevices.  The reward is getting to see mortared stone buildings packed into the natural alcove in the cliff.  It is created at the interface of soft sandstone above hard shale – water stops flowing downward when it hits shale, and begins to flow outward, slowly eroding away a shelter with a naturally filtered spring at its base.

A family of dancers from the Jemez Pueblo in New Mexico had traveled to Mesa Verde that weekend to perform.  It was a father, who drummed, and four of his sons – two grown, one about ten, and one only three years old.  The two older brothers did a dueling warrior dance with spears and shields.  In the dance they would spar, and then halt in a striking pose, letting out a high-pitched yelp.  The smallest boy was napping through this, but woke up and drowsily watched his 10-year old brother do the Eagle dance, equipped with wings made of what were probably turkey feathers. 

Then, with his father’s encouragement, the youngest also performed a dance, holding a tiny spear and shield, and letting out tiny yelps.  His father explained he had learned just from watching the rest of his family, and his small feet had the steps down – as you might imagine, the crowd really fell in love with him.  Then the two older brothers came back out to do the Buffalo dance, which they performed with big shaggy buffalo head costumes.  At the end of the performance, everyone came down to do a large friendship circle dance. 

The performers had more siblings at home, and their mother hand-made all their beaded and sewn costumes.  The father had just retired from law enforcement, and was devoting his time to educating and performing these traditional arts around the region.  They hope to perform internationally at some point.

Near the end of the day, we saw a pack of wild horses grazing next to the road.  We watched the sunset from the top of the Mesa, where the light caught the most amazing colors from the landscape in front of us – dark green shrubs with black shadows on the hillsides, deep yellow rocks with an indigo-colored sky behind them, fading to pinks and golds at the horizon. 

We made camp and dinner in the dark.  Full and happy, we sang songs for another hour or so, trying to be at least somewhat quiet so as not to keep all our neighbors up.  We only had a two-person tent, so I slept under a tarp just outside.  The campground had deer everywhere, and they rummaged around in the brush behind my head after we went to bed.

It’s truly a blessing to have friendships that you know will last your whole lives.  Briahn, Cora and I try to meet up once a year and go on an adventure – this time throughout Southwest Colorado.  I arrived in Durango the day after Cora’s birthday, and we celebrated at her friend’s house.  Her friend lives in an awesome adobe house on a horse ranch, just big enough for one person.  It has a kitchen and living space, a small bathroom with a slanted ceiling, and up some stairs, a small bedroom that is perched above a horse stable, which is attached to the side of the house. 

We went swimming in a pond on the property – it was crawdad mating season, so there were dozens of them along the edge of the water.  I nearly passed out, dizzy from the altitude as we swam out to a platform.  I am much too bull-headed for my own good sometimes.  Halfway through the swim back, I wizened up and bailed towards the shoreline.  Close to sea level to 7,000 feet is a bit of a transition…

Had a great dinner and some margaritas, and was thrilled to discover I knew some people in common with Cora’s friend, whom I’ve never met and lives thousands of miles from me.  We ended the night flipping through Rise Up Singing, and chose a cheesy song called “I Like the Age I Am.”  We had no idea how it went, so we sang it to the tune of Happy Birthday. 

Alright, this summer it’s serious.  I’m not completely broke, but I also still don’t really work full-time, so it’s fiddle festivals or bust.  As always, I went to Mt. Airy - that’s a standard.  I earned a reputation this year as the snake lady, or so I’m told.  Thursday someone had discovered a blacksnake, maybe 3 or 4 feet long, slithering out from under an RV.  They grabbed it by the tail and flung it into the road, where it coiled into a defensive figure 8, trying to tell the half dozen or so gawkers it didn’t feel like being killed today.  Fortunately, that crowd has enough people who grew up in the country that they knew not to kill a blacksnake.  However, they were the sort to speculate about throwing it in so-and-so’s tent, or letting it loose in the middle of a jam.  Trying not to sound too much like nerdy nature girl, I suggested to the guy who found it to let it go in the woods.  Well he did, sort of — he took it to the nearest treeline and let it go in someone’s campsite up on the wooded hill.  Next day, someone was walking by and the thing struck out at him from under another camper.  All the guys ran, I’m not making this up, but I chased it out from under the camper, and used the brush end of a broom to hold the thing’s head down long enough that I could swoop in and grab its neck, shimmying my hand upward quickly before it could turn around and bite me.  I then proceeded to let it go in the woods, away from campers and musicians alike.

Well, it’s tradition to play in the band competition and get your $5 back.  I had a hard time rounding up a band this year, and finally collected two friends, and on the way towards the stage, grabbed two strangers from a nearby camp.  “Hey, anyone want to be in our band?  We have a few spots, we’re playing Soldier’s Joy!”  It went over really well.  Despite being one of the most over-played songs in folk music history, it also happens to be the song most often played .. over… and over … and over.. for the dance competition, so the dancers went nuts.

As usual, the awards ceremony was held long after anyone should have still been hanging around the main stage.  While the judges were tallying the scores between about 12:30 and 1am, there was an open mic for jokes.  This is where I really miss the old veteran who used to MC, speaking in a dry voice all weekend, and at this shining moment pulling out some of the dirtiest jokes you’ve ever heard.  This time, anyone who wanted could come up, and the jokes were not particularly good.  A little kid broke the ice, I think, by informing everyone that Papaw had big ears.  This started a terrible chain reaction wherein all the local folks got on stage to make fun of each other.  When the awards ceremony ended at 2am, I wondered why exactly I’d watched the whole thing.  The dancers were impatient to commandeer the main stage space, as well - they were a short distance away, dancing on top of the picnic tables with utter abandon.

Something some of the younger folks have started recently is hosting their own unofficial dance competition after everything else is over.  So, at 1 or 2 am, back at the campsites, you have an even drunker and rowdier version of what was on stage an hour or two before.  A band plays Soldier’s Joy over and over, and random onlookers are dragged onto a wooden board in the grass and made to dance.  If they entertain everyone, the band plays longer and makes them keep dancing.  I got to see this at Elk Creek, but I must admit I stayed pretty far back in the crowd, because I have not the first clue how to flatfoot.  Someone flips a flashlight onto the dancer’s feet when they start, and I can see their silhouette from across the crowd.  “Ride the whale! Ride the whale!” a girl is shouting, and the dancer twirls their leg back behind them in a circle, and everyone cheers.

This week I’m returning to my adopted home, Swannanoa, North Carolina, to attend the Swannanoa Gathering.  It’s a series of week-long folk music workshops, and while much tamer than a festival, it has the same crowd and good energy.  I’m looking forward to the class I’m signed up for, and the late night jams.   I’m getting in free by helping my dad’s best friend, who I consider family, sell CD’s at his booth.  I only have time to take one class, but there are so many others I want to take too — singing while fiddling, shapenote singing, odd meters, cajun fiddle, duet harmonies … I sat there this afternoon, watching kids run around on the hillside and listening to people sing and play music, and wondered why on earth I ever do anything besides this.

It’s 11:30 on a Friday night, and just a few of us are still sitting around the bonfire in the backyard.  I’ve moved into a house in Richmond that was built in 1904, and has been restored and split into a front and back apartment, and basement efficiency.  We’ve become friends with the girls who live downstairs, and today was the first time it’s hit 80 degrees since last summer.  Everything was abuzz this afternoon, with fifteen or twenty neighbors in our backyard, and now we’ve settled into a pleasant grilled food and beer coma.

A few drops start to land – small, but enough that Syd groans in disappointment.  Her family, the landlords of our building, restore old houses in the neighborhood, and she is their lead carpenter.  They’re saving a small house on M street that’s been abandoned for over 25 years.  It’s currently missing a back wall, and has foundation dug out around the back for the second half of the house.  I’d call it an addition, but it’s more of a subtraction and re-addition, because the original half of the house which stood there is now gone.  We grab our beers, pile in the car, and drive ten blocks to the site to cover it with plastic.

Despite the missing back wall of the house, Syd unlocks the front door and we walk in.  The house’s name is Emma – so named by her girlfriend in a moment of inspiration.  The front of the house looks like a bunch of loose gray boards floating in an upright position, with tags across the No Trespassing sign.  Inside, it’s very small:  just one large room upstairs and downstairs, and a bathroom space framed off.  But it’s cute.  Hanging out the upstairs window and looking over the back of the site, they discuss how they’ll build a second landing off the stairs, and the back half of the house will be two stories instead of just one this time.  Having seen their work (and in fact, living in one of their restorations), I know this house is going to be beautiful again.  We step over the gaps in the floor and go out again, locking the plywood board behind us.

“The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.”
— Masanobu Fukuoka One-Straw Revolution

Through a series of coincidences and generosity, I am attending an international conference hosted by an agricultural nutrition company in Lexington, KY.

Some themes I’m noticing around this year’s theme … sustainability and economic recovery, the trend of moving away from inorganic minerals, new nutrient supplements that appear biologically inspired, e.g. stimulating the Vitamin E recycling pathway rather than adding expensive Vitamin E to the diet, fertilizer derived from yeast, minerals in biologically available forms.  A lot of buzz about selenium.  The focus on “natural” creates an excited stir alongside absolute skepticism in the attendees.  I think I may have a unique perspective, being an outsider to agribusiness.  The voices of small rural farmers with less than 50 acres, with mechanization appropriate to their scale, and some using biodynamic practices where one system feeds another on the farm, echo in me and react to what I learn.

Many of these developments are being aided by new nutrigenomics technology (yep, had to add that one to my spell check dictionary), which is way cool.  Imagine a computer chip that reads which genes are turned “on” or “off.”  It allows you to see the effects of nutrition on the body real-time, based on what the DNA is up to:  making insulin? Stress hormones? Digestive enzymes?  Etc.  Big Brother would have a field day, but I see a critical benefit here.  It’s clear from these sessions that our food is produced from nutritionally fortified feed, which more often than not means heavy metal and PCB accumulation.  Nutrigenomics is speeding up the ability to quantify and prove the effects of modern diets, as well as test these new biologically-inspired products.  Algae, yeast, etc.  Here’s to hoping someone tests organic diets using nutrogenomics.

Some background:  traditionally, as in most nutritional fortification in place today, essential minerals are added to feed from a stock of say, zinc or copper.  A lot of this is derived from recycling, which is great!  Only in melting away whatever it’s coated in, say plastic tubing, PCB’s are generated and end up in the animal.  (For the record, this company measures contamination and sends back what doesn’t meet purity standards.)  So it’s better to use minerals directly mined from the earth, right?  Well, simply using clay as filler or anti-caking agent in chicken feed, for instance, introduces volcanically-originated dioxins.

Since I’m not a nutrition scientist or biochemist, and I’m not an employee, I don’t know the ins and outs of these next-generation supplement products.  I really want to understand in detail how they are derived, and what they do in the body of the animal and the consumer.  I am optimistic that it’s a step in the best direction, and I can comment on the direction I hope this research ultimately goes.  Agricultural feed generally lacks leafy plant material, as seed material is more energy-dense.  I suspect nutritional balance lies in capturing the minerals and chemicals green material provides.  Plants extract these things and put it in a biologically available form, and even render toxic substances inert…I hope the goal of this research is to reproduce that.  I’ve long believed algae is extremely promising, being fast-growing and energy-dense, and biologically similar to leafy plant material.  I was very excited to hear a new algae plant announced; it should open this year.

Agriculture reinvents the wheel:  it researches what works in nature and gets it to work at a much higher density.  This type of science-based agricultural nutrition reinvents the metabolic process not only of the animals but of the plant matter that feeds them.  It takes an extremely objective viewpoint to see both sides of this fact:  the ability to feed more people more food, and inherent unforseeable effects of our imperfect reinvention of nature.

A speaker in the opening plenary session pointed out that Earth doubled its food production in the past 30-40 years, and needs to double it again in the next 30-40.  He identified small, poor, rural farmers around the world as having the greatest opportunity for improvement, and argued that in helping them the distribution of food increases where it’s needed most.  He then said rather than helping them become better sustenance farmers, the powers that be should attempt to convert them to commercial farmers.  Two things go through my mind.  One, the Mobile Processing Unit and small chicken farming system some friends of mine in Old Fort, NC brought to the area.  With grant money, they built a mobile, rentable chicken processing trailer that allowed some elderly farmers and landowners to enter the Asheville chicken market for the first time, or re-enter after decades.  That to me is cool.  Then I think of the dangers of technological “missionaries” to foreign cultures and economies.  The gentlest giant has a heavy, heavy hand.

Also awesome:  this company is building a sustainable agricultural mini village center in Haiti, intended as a model in revitalizing rural economies in poor countries.  I think this could be done really well.  It reminds me a lot of the work IPÊ does in the Pontal de Paranapanema with resettled landless workers…how they set up tree nurseries and trained locals in biology and business, and also created a market for the trees through reforestation and shade-grown coffee operations.

There is wisdom in science, and wisdom in intuition and empirical experience.  On the ground (so to speak!) are farmers who rely on intuition and empirical experience…and increasingly, they trust science to provide seeds, feeds and fertilizers.  Agribusiness relies on science to maximize production while keeping food safe and nutritious.  Perhaps science can trust the empirical wisdom of crowds for inspiration.  This may be farmers, or it could be someone unexpected.  In the developed world, you’d be amazed the types of education people have before deciding to be a farmer.  I’ve met engineers and bankers, botanists and professors who’ve switched careers.  It’s a good place to be, and there’s plenty of food for thought!