Coast-to-Coast Convenience

No village in America can aspire to greatness in the 21st century without a dollar store.  Parowan got its first in January:  A Family Dollar with a creepy logo, like something out of Slaughterhouse Five.  A place to purchase the plastic packaged rubbish of American life.  Buy it, use it up, throw it on the ground.  Trash now everywhere you look.  Every scrap of real estate covered not with sage-brush, rabbit-brush, or even cheat grass, but with Styrofoam cups and candy wrappers, degraded by the sun into a million shards of petroleum-based detritus.

But I digress.  This post is not about dollar stores.  This post is about convenience stores.  A whole different animal.  Along with selling fuel, the convenience store is where America goes for hydration:  Beer and soda pop have made us what we are.  When J.C. Fremont arrived in the Parowan Valley—long before the Civil War—he identified the above location as a good place for a convenience store.  We cannot, he intoned, defeat both the Mexicans and the British, let alone the Modoc, without a place to refill our tankards of Pepsi.  At long last the developers have responded:  With Parowan's third convenience store.  Move over Vegas and San Berdew, we'll imitate you yet.

Break Up

It is an interesting time of year for travelling in the back country.  I took some colleagues hunting for the spruce beetle last week.  We were working between 9,500 and 10,500 feet.  There was snow.  There was mud.  There was bare ground.  And anything else you can think of.  Cross country travel required a large bag of tricks.  Over the course of two days we used trucks, snow machines, ATVs, skis, and snowshoes.

Ephemera

It is that time of year.  The soil is warming.  You can be walking along a barren, rocky ridge.  At your feet a flash of color.  Here today.

Adams Theatre

This week VSO has been engaged in sketching and painting the Adams Theatre in Cedar City.  The facility is slated for demolition after the 2015 season, and the Utah Shakespeare Festival is soliciting art for a farewell exhibit to run later this fall.  The submitted works are required to feature the Adams Theatre, but in my opinion the most beautiful thing at the place is this sycamore tree (pictured).  In looking at it, VSO and I regretted that it will probably need to be destroyed when the theatre is demolished.  I know that my opinion doesn't count for much, but one of my part-time readers might have some influence over the fate of this tree.  And I know that he likes trees at least as much as I do: probably more.

The Guide

We got our guide back today.  Which was good, because we were at Snowbird.  It is a big place.  Unfortunately, he didn't arrive until lunch time.  By then, Wally and Benson were a little bit tired of me.  They went down for a nap.  The guide took me to the cirque.  Deciding where to drop in took a few minutes.  But it was the best lap of the day.

Demoted

Usually, at Alta, we have a local guide.  But, today, Saurer was detained in Provo Canyon, working on the howitzer.  So, the task fell to me.  Unfortunately, I made some bad decisions.  Like this one.  When I saw that no one was skiing this shot, I thought we might enjoy having the run to ourselves.  Benson, somewhat unhelpfully, pointed out that there might be a reason that none of the season pass holders were on the slope.  For starters, we had to drop in through this little gate.  It seemed a bit tight, but everyone made it in style.  (As you can see).  After that, I figured that nothing could go wrong.  Um.  No.  The sun had warmed the slope yesterday and today it was what some might call "bullet-proof."  I tried to put a good face on it:  "Not too bad, huh?"  But I noticed a certain unwillingness to follow my lead for the rest of the afternoon.

ACM

Yesterday afternoon I was walking around on a little ridge not more than a mile from the Gap.  I was watching for aboriginal carvings.  I didn't see any, but I did find a historic graffito.  At the turn of last century, ACM left his initials on the ridge.  Who was ACM?  Assuming that it was a "he" and that he is probably no longer with us and that he may have been a local, I looked at the map of the Parowan Cemetery.  Actually, I do not have a copy of the complete map, but only a very nice partial rendering by the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers showing the locations of some of the most interesting or famous graves.  For example, two-term Utah governor Scott M. Matheson is buried in Parowan, and his grave is labeled on the map.  But, speaking of Matheson, ACM could have been one:  Matheson is a very common name in the Parowan Cemetery.  The other two "M" names that are historically, or famously, common in the Parowan Cemetery are Miller and Mitchell.  I immediately thought of Arthur Miller, but I don't believe the death of that particular salesman occurred in Parowan.  Moving on to Mitchell, I found that there was an Albert in the Cemetery.  So I went to look.  Albert C. Mitchell?  Nope.  Albert O. Mitchell born in 1906.  The mystery remains unsolved.

Nordic Day

With all the new snow, the girls wanted to go skiing.  I'd left my Nordic gear in Beaver, so we had to go there to get it.  Heading north gave us the option of Eagle Point—which is free on Sundays.  In the event, they picked the back country over the resort, so we parked at the potty in Merchant Valley and went up Three Creeks to the reservoir.  The snow was untracked the whole way up—nice, soft mid-winter snow.  I broke the trail and, by the time both the girls had come up, it was pretty well packed.  We stopped at the top for lunch.  By the time we were done, the sun had popped out.  The sun is so strong at this time of year that it immediately turned the snow to slop.  We hustled to start back.  I re-waxed the skis and we got on the trail.  It was OK.  If you kept moving you wouldn't stick.  But there were some pretty gloppy spots.  It was better at the bottom where the sun hadn't worked on it so much.  We made it back to the parking lot by 1430.