Category Archives: September
September 19th – Gold!
Marie used to drive tour buses around Colorado Springs, and one of her favorite spots to highlight was the old mining operation in Cripple Creek, which is about forty miles west of Colorado Springs. She still loves sharing her knowledge of this area, so I got a free tour! Lou drove as Marie narrated, and Valli and Lou Sr. joined me in listening.
We started by driving to the town of Cripple Creek, parking, and taking a short walk. The town was founded in 1892 by the gold miners who started flooding in after gold was discovered in the fall of 1890. Now the town is a small-scale tourist attraction. Because of its status as a historical site, it is allowed to have casinos – and it does. I skipped past those and went straight to the real attraction – the candy store. I picked up a small bag of gummy coke bottles and another of gummy cherries. They also had a wide variety of truffles. I picked two: cinnamon and cappuccino.
With the essential candy stop taken care of, the real tour started. Marie explained that gold mining still goes on today, but it has changed over the years. We started off by learning about the old style of mining and finished the day by visiting a modern mining operation.
We visited the Molly Kathleen mine, which is one of the most successful historical mines in Colorado. If we’d come on the right day, we could have gone on a tour and descended into the mine shaft to see the branching tunnels where miners blasted and chipped ore from the walls. We did not come on the right day though, so we had to use our imaginations.
We did find several pieces of mining equipment displayed above ground. This dumper car was used to pick up loose ore and put it into the ore car, which then traveled along the railway to reach the mine shaft elevator.
In the pictures below you can see the tower that stood above the mine shaft, and to the right, the cable room which housed the ropes and motors necessary to raise and lower the elevator.
These buildings were the first stop on a great walking path that looped around and through an assortment of old mining equipment. We found storage buildings, insulated dynamite sheds, and a beautiful view of the countryside.
Gold mining still alive and well at Cripple Creek, but it is now done primarily at an open pit mine which sits on the backside of the hill we were walking on. During our walk, we heard an explosion and saw smoke float over the ridge.
When we finished our walking loop, we drove to the other side of the hill and observed the huge mining pit that has been blasted out over the past twenty-two years. The enormous area dwarfs the huge ore trucks that are used to transport the blown rocks up to the processing site.
The ore that comes from operations like this is an extremely low grade, usually resulting in less than one gram of gold per ton of ore. The extraction process involves crushing the ore and mixing it with water and cyanide, then allowing this solution to leech the gold out of the ore in a liquid form.
And that was the end of our tour. We drove back to Marie’s house, then went back to The Mansion and lived happily ever after!
September 18th – Settled Down
I’ve been at The Mansion for six days now! Life almost feels normal, even though I’m a thousand miles from home and I still have three months of travel ahead of me. It is a bubble of routine in a bathtub of adventures.
Since my days have become so normal, I won’t bore you with the details. I wake up, eat, and sleep in normal patterns now; I don’t have to drive in circles looking for a place to park at night. On days like this, where most things are routine, I will just pull out a couple details to share.
Work
The slope is progressing wonderfully. Marie (Lou’s sister) came over and lent a hand today. Actually, she lent two hands, and they were both greatly appreciated. She used her two hands and a shovel to dig trenches in the slope at the spots we’d spent so long marking out last week. Lou and I came behind to level the dirt in the trenches and to start laying the steps.
Food
Valli made Colorado Green Chili for lunch. I didn’t ask a whole lot of questions about it, I just know that it was a very good stew and that the dish gets its name from the Colorado Green Chillies used to make it.
At dinner, I enjoyed my first calzone. We went to a restaurant called Old Chicago, which is a pizza place/brewery that reminds me of BJ’s Pizza back home. My delicious calzone had ham, sausage, and three types of cheeses inside the crispy folded crust.
Home Video
When we were working on the steps today, we had to split several stone blocks in half so that our stairs would fit into the spot we had for them. We used a chisel that seemed pretty normal to me, but Lou said that there was a story behind it.
In the evening, he brought out an old home video that showed the story. When Lou was young, his family lived in Colorado Springs (not in The Mansion though). His dad, Lou Sr., decided that he wanted a basement in his house and that he wanted to construct it himself. So he set up a conveyor belt to carry dirt out to the yard and started digging. When the family finished clearing out the dirt, they started working on the walls. Lou Sr. still had a job during the day, and often went on business trips. That left his wife to keep working on the project in the “spare-time” she had while raising Lou and his siblings. That’s where the chisel comes into the story. After putting the children to bed, she went downstairs and chiseled away at the walls until Lou Sr. called home around 10 P.M. and made sure she stopped for the night.
September 17th – Backyard Visitors
Today was full of many good things; church in the morning, lunch at a Chinese restaurant, rest in the afternoon, a phone call with my family, and a chance to play my guitar and sing with Lou and Valli in the evening. There were two extra good points in the day though.
First, I saw two deer in the backyard of The Mansion. I was talking to my parents on the phone and walking around outside when I saw them. Lou and Valli had mentioned that their backyard was a popular hangout for deer, but seeing them right there, so close up, was another thing entirely.
I got the impression that one of them didn’t like me and the other one didn’t trust me, but they continued eating contentedly as I walked to the edge of the porch and took pictures of them. I left them alone after that and noticed that they were gone about twenty minutes later.
Second, I got to make sushi to go with our delectable dinner of miso soup, rice, and curry chicken. This was the first time I’ve made sushi, so Valli showed me how to do it. We placed a seaweed sheet on the cutting board, covered a section with sticky rice, then put cucumber, pickled plum, and shiso leaf (also called beefsteak or Japanese basil) inside, then rolled it all up and cut it into two-inch pieces. This kind of sushi is called an ume roll.
During dinner, I tried a tiny dab of wasabi on my first piece of sushi. Wasabi is so strange – the way it burns upward through the nose instead of burning the mouth like most spicy foods do. Looking at my next piece, I thought, “Well, if a little wasabi is interesting, why not try a lot?” So I put on about five times as much. Whew! This time the burn flared all the way up my face, blowing through my nose and getting my eyes on the way up. Another experience to remember!
September 16th – Pike’s Peak
Louis and I planned to drive up Pike’s Peak this morning, so we were excused from helping with the yard work. I suppose we abused our freedom though because we spent the morning sleeping in rather than driving. Finally, a little before noon, we got into the car and started on our way.
We enjoyed a beautiful drive to the base of the peak. The leaves have just started changing on some of the trees around here, so the sun makes the hillsides glow green with streaks of bright yellow cutting through.
At the bottom of the peak is a toll booth. I knew we would have to pay to get in, and I figured that the fifteen dollar vehicle admission fee was better than the forty-four dollar fee to ride the railway up the mountain.
At the top, Louis and I put on our heavy winter coats before getting out to explore. The wind whipped right through my coat as if it weren’t even there. My car said that the temperature was only forty-two degrees, but the wind made it feel at least ten degrees colder.
Eventually, the air got too cold for me and we went back to the car, ready to begin the descent. And then we changed our minds and got back out. There was one store at the top, called the Summit House, and we wanted to check it out. We found that most things were expensive (of course), but we were hungry. We passed up the seven dollar chicken sandwiches for one dollar “world famous” donuts and three dollar cappuccinos.
After enjoying these goodies, we began our descent for real. Well, we did still have one more stop to make. Marie told us we should take a walk on the Elk Park Trail which is about a mile down the road from the top of the mountain. We had looked for it on the way up but didn’t see it. Her description hadn’t done much to get me excited about finding the place. She said, “You’ll see a white marker sticking up out of the ground slightly to the left of the road. Drive straight toward that marker until you drive off the edge of the mountain. Once you’re over the edge, you’ll see that there’s actually a dirt road under your tires, and you won’t fall thirteen thousand feet to the ground.”
Those were her directions for approaching the trail from below. Finding it from above turned out to be very easy and much less terrifying. As I drove around a bend in the mountain, I saw the dirt road connect to the main road that I was driving on, and I just had to do a quick U-turn to get onto it.
A few hundred feet down the road, we saw the trailhead and found a place to park. Louis and I got out and followed the trail for about three-quarters of a mile. I didn’t notice that the path sloped downhill until we started back uphill to return to the car. It was just a short walk, but by the time I made it back to the top, I was winded. Maybe it was the thin air, or maybe I need to start exercising again!
We made it back to The Mansion around 3:30 P.M. Louis had to be back at the airport at 5 P.M. tonight for his flight back to Brea, so we went out for an early dinner at Culver’s. I’d driven past a couple of these fast-food restaurants so far during my stay in Colorado. Their advertisements highlight their “frozen custard” and “butterburgers.” I tried a butterburger. It was good but tasted just like any other decent hamburger to me. I still want to try their frozen custard though.
After dinner, we made it to the airport on time and dropped Louis off at his terminal. Lou, Valli, and I went back to The Mansion and concluded the night with two games of Sequence (a board game where you place tokens on the board based on the cards in your hand and attempt to be the first player to make a row of five tokens), and two games of Cribbage (a card game in which you gain points from various combinations of the cards in your hand, and try to be the first player to a hundred-twenty points).
Tomorrow is Sunday, so we won’t be working in the morning. I won’t sleep in quite as late as I did today though.
September 15th – Movie Night
Back to work! This morning, after waking up a little later than I had intended, I joined Lou in the backyard to see what our tasks would be. I was not thrilled to find out that we would spend the day redoing yesterday’s work. We would be positioning the stakes about eighteen inches further back toward the house. That means Lou won’t have to buy as much dirt and the steps will sit more naturally in the existing slope.
Since I woke up late though, the work day was pretty short. It felt like I’d just gotten outside when Valli started making apple pancakes for lunch. We cleaned up the tools around noon so that we could go eat them. They were wonderful!
Our afternoon was spent at Marie’s house, where we joined in with a weekly game of Blitz (a card game I had never played before) between Marie, Lou Sr., their friend Ed, and Ed’s caretaker. When we weren’t busy playing, I heard a little bit about Ed’s experiences in the Air Force. He served during WII, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. His favorite plane to fly was the F-4 Phantom. After he retired from piloting, he continued in the military as a flight instructor for several years.
Marie won the first game of Blitz and I won the second, After these games and a snack, Ed and his caretaker returned home. The rest of us talked for another half hour at the table before deciding to go for a walk around the neighborhood. Along the way, I met two dogs that looked like Alaskan Huskies. From the howls and growls that this one made though, it may have been a wolf instead.
Back at Marie’s house, Louis and I were interested in watching 2001: A Space Odyssey. Since I am interested in Sci-Fi, I’ve heard of both the book and movie quite frequently. It came up in conversation again earlier this week, and I figured it would be fun to finally see it.
I was wrong. It was not fun. Most of the movie was slow, boring, strange, and confusing. There was one fun part in the middle though.
The middle part of the movie focuses on a colony ship that is headed for Jupiter. Most of the colonists aboard the ship are in artificially-induced sleep, but two crew members remain awake to take care of necessary procedures. They are aided by a supercomputer named Hal – the newest and most reliable version of artificial intelligence yet made. In the end, he turns out to be a bit too smart and decides that he (and possibly the universe) would be better off without the humans aboard the ship. So turns against his human masters, kills one of them, sends the other one spiraling off into space, and then turns off the life-support systems on the ship, thus killing the rest of the colonists.
Other than this interesting interlude, the whole movie was spent on drawn-out scenes of apes jumping up and down, spaceships flying slower than snails creep, and colors strobing across the screen in strange psychadelic patterns.
We finished the movie and discussed its obscure and confusing plot. Then we drove back to the Mansion and went to bed.
September 14th – More Work!
This morning I met Lou’s sister, Marie. We drove over to her house in the Black Forest at 7:30 A.M. to help her with the arrival of a new refrigerator. The fridge situation was rather complicated and didn’t turn out too well. However, after this slight ordeal, we got to enjoy Chile Rellenos and sausage for breakfast.
I also got to meet Lou and Marie’s father and enjoy a walking tour of Marie’s beautiful gardens. All of the garden landscaping was done by Marie, her father (Lou Sr.) and her brother (Lou Jr.). In addition to being beautiful, this garden also helped protect Marie’s house when a devastating fire swept through the Black Forest and destroyed many of her neighbors’ houses several years ago.
Long before the fire, homeowners in Marie’s area had been advised not to allow trees to grow close to their houses because of the fire hazard they posed. Because of Marie’s garden, there were no trees close to her house and there was instead a well-watered border of green plants to discourage the flames from reaching her house.
By the time we headed back to the Mansion, it was afternoon. Lou, Louis and I got working on the backyard. Today, our task was to survey the land. Lou did all of the brain work and I just tried to follow instructions. We set one stake at the top of the slope and one at the bottom, and we used those to measure the proper distance for each row of steps. At each row, we hammered stakes into the ground and used a surveying scope to make sure we set them at the right depth. Going forward, we will use those stakes to tell us where to place the blocks for our steps and how deep to dig.
In the middle of this surveying work, I took a break. I had made an appointment to take my car to a Goodyear tire store today. I needed the slow leak on my tire repaired and I wanted to get an oil change as well.
I took the car in and Valli brought me back to The Mansion. I worked for another two hours, then the shop called me. They said that they were able to fix the tire, but not to change the oil. They thought the plug was cross-threaded and they did not want to risk stripping the threads. Instead, they wanted to change the entire oil pan, which would cost $512.
That was silly, so I just told them to just forget about the oil change. I will just have to do it myself somewhere along the road. I picked the car up and was happy to see that the tire was indeed fixed. Thankfully, I won’t have to use my air pump for awhile!
Back at The Mansion, I helped to finish up the day’s work and put the tools away. We’d put all of the stakes in that we needed, but Lou didn’t seem quite happy with the way they looked. It appeared that he would need to buy a lot of dirt to make the path level, when he had wanted instead to dig back into the hillside and avoid the need for new dirt. As I said though, I’m not the brains behind this project, so I’ll just wait to see what he decides to do.
We had a yummy vegetable and chicken casserole for dinner and a mud pie for dessert. The mud pie made me think of home – it was from Trader Joe’s, and my family and I had enjoyed the very same type of pie several times.
After dinner, it was time for bed, and I was ready for it!
September 13th – Digging In
Lou and I woke up around 7:30 A.M. to eat a breakfast of eggs and pork belly before getting back to work. I tried pork belly first about a year and a half ago when I started working at Mendocino Farms (a sandwich shop in Brea). I liked it a lot there, but it was marinated in brown sugar and other spices. I was surprised to find that it tastes great without all the sugar too!
Our job today was to remove the rest of the sod on the slope. Yesterday, we tried rolling up the sod after we had cut it out, but the rolls were too awkward and heavy to move out of the way. We’d found it worked best to cut rectangles about eighteen inches long and eight inches wide. These were small enough to carry and could be stacked to the side of our work area.
I fell into a rhythm of cutting borders into the sod with a crescent-shaped spade (fittingly named a sod cutter). Lou came through next and cut the underside of the sod with a trenching shovel which had a long, narrow blade that made it perfect for the task. Since my job didn’t take as long, I came back and carried the newly cut rectangles of sod to our piles nearby.
While we worked, we talked. Last night Lou told me quite a bit about three summers he spent working at a sugar beet factory in Southern California, and today he told me some more about his experiences and the general workings of these factories.
There were two separate stages of production in the factory Lou worked at. The first stage took raw beets and turned them into a liquid called “thick juice” by a lengthy process of slicing, baking, and soaking. The second stage purified and crystallized the thick juice so that it was eventually refined down to usable sugar.
Lou had a different job each summer he worked there. There was always one goal though – to keep the factory running from when the first beet was delivered until the last beet was processed. The two stages of production that I mentioned above could be stopped independently for a short time to perform essential maintenance, but there was always a rush to get things back online. While dealing with these tight schedules, the workers also had to survive the sweltering heat that often topped a hundred-twenty degrees.
The processing of beets into sugar may not be the most fascinating subject, but I enjoyed learning about it. Like so many other things I’ve seen and heard so far, it helped me appreciate the work that on behind the scenes of the world I see.
We finished working around 2 P.M., before the afternoon sun started beating down fully. Of course, the mild Colorado sun was nothing compared to the hundred-twenty degree sauna of the sugar beet factory Lou told me about, but I was still glad to avoid it.
I spent the afternoon writing about my trip and updating my blog. Then we enjoyed dinner, visited, and finished off the day by going to the airport to pick up Lou and Valli’s son, Louis, from the airport.
We made the half-hour drive to the Colorado Springs Airport around 11:30 P.M. It was a nice size – much smaller than LA International Airport which we fly out of sometimes back home. Louis’s flight was a few minutes early and he had no baggage to pick up, so we got in and out of the airport quickly. We arrived back at the house and went to bed shortly thereafter in preparation for an early morning tomorrow.
September 12th – Colorado Springs
This morning I had the strange and welcome surprise of waking up in a real bed again. When I got over that, I had another pleasant realization. Breakfast would be waiting for me out in the lobby! That got me out of bed with an added bit of excitement for the day. I enjoyed eggs, buscuits and gravy, sausage, a waffle, and a glass of milk. When I finished eating, I made up another waffle to take on the road (shhh, don’t tell anyone!).
I made full use of my hotel room by writing at the desk until ten minutes before the 11 A.M. checkout time. Before incurring a fine for breaking the deadline, I turned in my key and filled up my large mug with ice and coffee. I walked out to my car and made sure everything was ready for today’s drive. Yesterday I noticed a slow leak in my left front tire, so I made sure to pump air into it before driving both yesterday and today. Thankfully, my dad sent a handy little electric air pump along with me. I brought it along so that I could leave my basketball deflated while crossing the mountains and then reinflate it when I needed it. Now it’s turned out to be very useful for my tires. As always, my dad thought through the “what ifs” and sent me off well prepared.
I started listening to a new book on my drive. It’s called Assassin’s Fate. This is the last book in a series I’ve enjoyed for several years. Way back in book one, the main character was an illegitimate little prince in a faraway fantasy world of political intrigue, invading armies, and hereditary magic. He was trained to be an assassin and alse developed two kinds of magic – the one that was a birthright of his bloodline and another that was condemned by society. Through the series, he developed into a young man and lived a life full of love, war, pain, and loss. In Assassin’s Fate, he is now an old man, but he is driven into one more adventure by the kidnapping of his daughter. The book follows him to the end of this adventure and ties up the threads of his nine-book saga.
After listening to this book for awhile, I took a break to call my friend in New Mexico and then listened to the radio for awhile. I was surprised to find that northern Colorado has five country music stations. I thought I’d need to go a little more southeast before hearing so much country.
Around four in the afternoon, I arrived in Colorado Springs and drove up to “The Mansion.” That’s my name for the home I’ll be staying in for the next week. The friends I’ll be staying with (Lou and Valli) have been friends with my parents for longer than I’ve been around. My dad owned a duplex with them for several years. Right now they’re splitting time between California and Colorado, and eventually, they plan to stay in Colorado. Their son, Louis, is three months older than I am. We sometimes say that we have been friends since before we were born. He is still in California right now, but he’s going to fly out on Wednesday and visit for a few days.
In my mind, a mansion is a large house that is more than one story tall and has a cool gate on the pathway leading to the front door. This place passes the test. There is also a great view of the Cascade Mountains from the back patio and a workshop/garage in the large backyard. Upstairs, my favorite thing was the enormous kitchen. It has two ovens and plenty of room for multiple people to cook at the same time. Downstairs is a huge sitting room with a sectional couch that can fit at least nine people.
As my hosts showed me around, we visited and discussed plans for the week. Before arriving, I had let them know that I would be available to help out with any projects they could think of. I found out that they did indeed have something for me to do. Lou showed me a slope in the backyard that leads down to their workshop. It is a somewhat steep slope and was only broken up by a few levels of block steps that weren’t helping out very much. Our job will be to make a real set of steps. We’d have to pull all the cement blocks out, remove the sod, cut into the slope to make steps, put the blocks back, and level the grass in between the steps.
The job sounded like fun to me. I was all settled in and had nothing else to do, so we decided to start right away. We began by pulling out the blocks. That didn’t take long. As we moved onto cutting and removing sod, I realized that I needed to document this project – at least the beginning and end of it. Here is a picture of the slope with only the cement blocks pulled out.
