Zion

As a general rule, I will not enter Zion.  But, today, VSO had sort of an idea of a place we could go.  We got up and out of the valley, into a canyon that is not necessarily on the tourist track.  It was a pretty nice little eight mile round-tripper.  Here she is on the way down.

After the Epilogue

As my reader knows, I spent some time earlier in the year analyzing a bunch of trash data collected from the ditches around Parowan.  One of the topics I addressed during that analysis was something I termed the Buzz Price.  On that particular topic, I reached the conclusion that the best buzz price available in southern Utah was found in a shampoo bottle full of rotgut hard liquor.  In other words, bottom shelf vodka provides the best bang for your buck.  I know that at least one commenter feels that I need to move on, and stop being distracted by alcohol related trash.  But, I feel compelled to relate that I took my researches to Beaver, Utah—the next town north of Parowan.  I visited the liquor agency there and had a chat with the owner.  (She is always friendly, and probably sees me a little too often.)  I asked her to name her biggest seller.  Without even a split second of hesitation she said, "Cheap vodka."  I am not kidding.  I asked her, "You mean the stuff on the bottom shelf in the plastic shampoo bottle?"  "Yeah, I sell more than 30 cases per month."  I almost fell on the floor.  Cases?!  In Beaver, Utah?!  "Yeah," she said, "most people buy it by the case."

Another Technology Passes Us By

We were somewhere on the north side of Mt. Terrill yesterday.  We were doing some off-trail training on the snow machines.  I've putted around on snow mobiles a fair number of times before.  But, like most outdoor sports, the technology and the terrain have been pushed to the limits, leaving me to appear incompetent in front of my peers.  In fact, one of my colleagues tried to teach me to steer the machine by leaning the track from side to side.  He insisted that I should not need to use the skis for turning, but should be able to do it by leaning.  I'm sure he is correct—and the proof is in the picture—but I couldn't master it.  Needless to say, I flunked the training.

Epilogue

I'm going to begin this post with a recap.  We started this series with a description of a data collection project that we conducted on the outskirts of Parowan.  Specifically, we counted aluminum cans dumped in the ditch along 1.5 mile segments of two area roads.  Along with those data, we recorded the availability and pricing of mass-market suitcase beer in Parowan.  Putting those two bits of information together eventually lead us to a consideration of the economics of drinking behavior, which lead us further to consider why some of the behavior seems irrational, at least from a cost and calorie standpoint.  This post is going to be a speculation on irrational behavior.  Nothing in this post has been proven.  This is conjecture.

Before we begin, let us list our assumptions.  These assumptions have been generated by our consideration of the data.  Nonetheless, we do not consider them "proved."  In other words, we think they are justified, but we are aware that our sampling design, including  the lack of a control as well as missing information about, among other things, traffic volume, leaves us without proof.

*The presence of 899 aluminum cans along three miles of road that we surveyed in the Parowan Valley is an extraordinary amount of trash, especially when we consider that Rural Ways has collected several hundred cans for recycling along both segments in the past two years.  Put simply, our first assumption is that the amount of can trash is more than normal, more than what we should expect.  (Granted, we have not sampled in Kentucky or Tennessee, so we could be wrong—and those who have ever lived in or visited those two states will know what I mean.)

*The cans that we counted were from drinks purchased locally.  Specifically, there are two places to buy suitcase beer in Parowan.  And we believe that most, if not all, of the beer can trash is being generated by purchases at these two locations.

*Drinkers of mass-market suitcase beer, despite its low alcohol content in Utah, are drinking it for the effect.  That is, we do not believe that buyers of 18 can suitcases of Natty Light are drinking it for the excellent flavor.  We believe that most of our beer drinkers and beer can tossers are engaged in the pursuit of buzz.

Given these assumptions, and the rest of the data we have presented, the question remains, what is going on?  Our best guess is that these data demonstrate that there are some closet drinkers in the area.  In other words, someone is buying, drinking, and tossing beer cans so as not to get caught consuming alcohol.  This is drinking that is designed to be hidden from someone.  Well.  Like.  From whom?  The easiest answer is parents.  I mean, what high school senior has not spent an evening sneaking around with the gang trying to drink a six-pack undetected?  (Please do not let my daughter read this post.)  Part of the Parowan area can trash is undoubtedly underage drinking.  But does that explain it all?  Again, without a control, it is tough to say, but we think there is more trash than a couple of wild high-schoolers can be dumping—especially because this is a small town where everybody knows everybody and it is not legal for high-schoolers to buy it.  Dare we say it?  We think that the position of the church regarding the consumption of alcohol may be pushing otherwise legal drinking underground.  There.  In this case, the "church" is the LDS church.  (Full disclosure:  Nearly all of our neighbors and friends are LDS.  We have a lot of respect for the LDS community and believe that LDS people make the best friends and neighbors in the world.  So, this is by no means an attack on anything LDS.)  If someone with a Mormon affiliation of some kind, either through blood or marriage, is interested in having a little drink on the side, how is he or she going to do it?  He can't go to the liquor agency—it sits directly in the middle of town between the city office and the bank.  He is going to stop at the TA to buy gasoline—nothing wrong with that—and quickly slip a suitcase of the Beast into his truck.  He is going to drive a lonely country road with the window down, chugging half the suitcase and tossing all the evidence out the window.  He is going to stop at the end of the road and put the remaining six cans in his work cooler, at the bottom under the Mountain Dew.  He is going to chew a bunch of gum for the rest of his commute.  He is going to arrive home for dinner, where some member of the domestic community would not appreciate the consumption of alcohol, with a bit of a buzz.  He is going to say little, do a few chores, and fall asleep early.

Is any of the foregoing true?  Honestly, we don't know.  But, we think it might partially account for the high volume of can trash around Parowan.  Do we care?  In other words, do we have a moral problem with people maybe drinking a little beer on the down low?  Absolutely not.  About the only criticism that we might have at the end of this whole experiment is that we don't like trash, and this particular behavior creates a lot of trash.

Buzz Price

Vendor	Item	Per Can Cost	Buzz Price	Annual
Maverik	18 Can Natty Light or Equivalent	$ 0.56	$ 2.80	$ 1,022.00
Maverik	12 Can Natty Light or Equivalent	$ 0.58	$ 2.90	$ 1,058.50
Maverik	30 Can Natty Light or Equivalent	$ 0.60	$ 3.00	$ 1,095.00
Maverik	12 Can Beast	$ 0.62	$ 3.10	$ 1,131.50
TA	12 Can Beast	$ 0.67	$ 3.35	$ 1,222.75
Maverik	30 Can Budweiser or Equivalent	$ 0.67	$ 3.35	$ 1,222.75
Maverik	18 Can Budweiser or Equivalent	$ 0.72	$ 3.60	$ 1,314.00
Maverik	12 Can Budweiser or Equivalent	$ 0.75	$ 3.75	$ 1,368.75
TA	12 Can Keystone Light	$ 0.86	$ 4.30	$ 1,569.50
TA	12 Can Coors Light	$ 1.13	$ 5.65	$ 2,062.25
TA	12 Can Budweiser or Equivalent	$ 1.16	$ 5.80	$ 2,117.00

In the past few posts we've presented a fair amount of data from our trash collection experiments in the Parowan Valley.  At this point, we are prepared to hazard a couple of tentative conclusions.  As we mentioned in the prologue these conclusions may reveal things about personal behavior.  We realize that our reader may disagree or disapprove.  At the risk of alienating our already tiny audience, we are going to go ahead and highlight two points.  The first, what we call the Buzz Price, will be discussed here.  The second, which is our speculation about the reasons for beer can tossing, will come in a subsequent post.

Without further comment, let's jump right in to an interesting topic.  Why do people drink alcoholic beverages?  Clearly, there are numerous reasons, including taste, status, peer pressure, etc.  But, the number one reason has got to be the effect.  Can anyone seriously disagree?  People drink alcohol for the buzz.  If that is true, which we think it is, why is so much 3.2% beer consumed in Utah?  If you want a buzz, there is more buzz per mouthful in a glass of wine or a shot of whiskey.  Thinking about this question lead us to come up with a measure of buzz per buck—the buzz price.  Is it cost effective to look for buzz in 3.2% beer?  If not, why not?

We start with a couple assumptions.  First, the average person will be buzzed from three drinks.  While we understand that to get a large person really hopped up might take six or eight, we're going to stick with three.  This is partly due to a lot of personal experience, but also because it seems to be the standard for bartenders and regulators.  Three drinks is generally understood to equal 1.8 ounces of alcohol (.6 ounces per drink).  In Utah, where convenience store beer cannot contain more than 3.2% alcohol, it takes five drinks, or five cans of beer to reach 1.8 ounces of alcohol.  (The number is actually 4.7 cans, but we rounded up.)  We're not going to show all our math, but you can quickly see that it becomes a straightforward calculation.  Convenience store beer buzz prices are ranked above.  (Natty Light equivalents are Keystone Light, Busch Light, and Busch.  The annual cost is for 365 daily buzzes.)

To get your buzz on for under three dollars a day seems like a pretty good deal.  But there might be a couple of other things to consider.  First, what is the cost of your other options?  And, second, what does it do to your waist line?  The answer to the first question is that you can do better elsewhere.  You can, in fact, drink wine—not plonk—for about the price of Natty Light and for far less than Budweiser.  I don't mind the red wines sold in the BOTA box—malbec, zinfandel, shiraz.  Like I say, they're not for real wine people probably, but they are at least one cut better than plonk.  (For plonk, you could certainly pay less.)  But let's stop fooling around.  If you want the best buzz price you should be looking at hard liquor in a shampoo bottle.  Go to the state liquor agency.  Go to the back.  Go to the bottom shelf.  And take the plastic bottle.  The label doesn't matter.  Whatever is in it will make you gag.  (Or so I have heard.)  But you will be paying something less than a dollar for your buzz.  So, what about the answer to the second question?  How many wasted calories are being consumed in pursuit of the buzz.  I suspect that my reader may have guessed the outcome.  Light beer is something of an improvement, but you're clearly going to minimize the beer gut if you switch to vodka.

Vendor	Item	Buzz Price	Annual	Buzz Calories
Liquor Store	Plastic Bottle of Popov Vodka	$           0.91	$                332.15	291
Maverik	18 Can Natty Light or Equivalent	$           2.80	$            1,022.00	475
Liquor Store	4 Bottle BOTA Box of Wine	$           2.82	$            1,029.41	366
TA	12 Can Budweiser or Equivalent	$           5.80	$            2,117.00	725

 

If you can spend less and consume fewer wasted calories by drinking wine or spirits, why would you drink convenience store beer?  Maybe beer drinkers truly prefer beer?  I mean, I can understand that.  I am very fond of brown ale.  A Newcastle or a Moose Drool will keep me coming back (up to three times).  But we're talking about tasteless, over-carbonated, ah, stuff.  Is anyone really drinking it because they like it?  OK.  I'll admit rotgut liquor is hard to like, too.  Or so I've heard.  Be we suspect that there might be something else going on, and will post about it shortly.

Data Collection Site 2

Any serious student of can trash will quickly begin using the terms "can density" and "can diversity."  While our first can sampling site had very high can density, our second site was notable for its can diversity.  At our second site, we identified 36 different species of can.  More importantly, however, there were fully 10 different brands of can for which we recorded at least 10 cans.  Given this diversity our reader will probably not be surprised to hear that there were some surprises in the data.  But before getting into the details, let's look at the totals and divide things up by genera:  We counted 278 beer cans, 65 caffeine cans, and 10 fruit cans, for a total of 344 cans.

Starting with the largest data category, we counted 18 species of beer, two more than at our other site.  Half of them did not qualify as "important" (at least five cans).  These were Icehouse, Michelob Ultra, PBR, Miller Lite, Coors, Steel Reserve 211, Modelo, Miller High Life, and Redds Strawberry Ale.  The other nine made our pie chart.  And this is where the surprises begin.  At our first site, Milwaukee's Best made up almost 60% of the trash; at this site, it was barely 6%.  (I immediately drove to the local convenience store—the Maverik—and found that a 12 can suitcase of the Beast was $7.49.  Ah-ha.  That is less than you'd pay at the TA, but more than you'd pay for Natty Light at the Maverik.)  But what really stands out is the Fosters Lager.  Out of nowhere it jumps to 9% of the beer trash.  And with no suitcases.  You may buy Fosters at the convenience store.  But only by the can.  You can buy one can at a time.  And it costs more than $2.50 per can.  The cans are large, but still . . . this is one of the mysteries of our study and one which cries out for further research.

Moving on to the other families, you'll notice that the non-beer population is slightly more important at this site than it was in our earlier data set.  The caffeine and fruit categories combined make up nearly 20% of our data from this site, but that is partly because there are fewer cans overall.  Perhaps a better way to compare sites is to look at another metric:  trash/linear foot.  At our first site, there was a non-beer aluminum can every 152 feet; at our second site, that dumping rate had increased to one can for every 120 feet of road.  The other surprise here was that Pepsi and Mountain Dew switched places.  At our first site, Mountain Dew lead the caffeine family by a fairly wide margin over the number two choice, Pepsi.  At the second site, Pepsi was on top, with Mountain Dew falling to third.  This battle between Pepsi and Mountain Dew, though, really was the story of the caffeine data—at least from our small data set.  Red Bull made a showing, and there was some Monster out there, but Mountain Dew and Pepsi are truly fighting for the hearts and minds of the local caffeine can tossers.

Now that we've discussed a little of the raw data from our second can counting location, the question quickly becomes one of beer economics.  What does a beer suitcase cost at the local seller, the Maverik?  And this is where things become very interesting.  Have you ever been inside the Maverik?  Half of the shop is taken up with beer suitcases.  I'm serious.  The variety of styles, sizes, and prices is boggling.  Right away this may explain the increase in can diversity at the local dump site.  I'm not saying that mass-market beer drinkers are too stupid to pick the best deal, but I am saying that I'm too stupid to do it.  There were at least seven different price points.  I had to put it all in a spreadsheet.

(When I went to the local Maverik to gather my price data I stood for a long time in front of the beer cooler.  Several people came and went.  Eventually I was standing there with a friendly young guy, covered in tattoos.  He said, "Choices, choices."  I am not kidding.  We switched places a couple of times.  He was trying to decide what to buy.  I was pretending.  Eventually we got to talking.  He'd worked for a time in California.  "Out there you can get all kinds of beer.  When I came back to Utah, I had to switch to whiskey.  Beer is just my chaser now."  He laughed.  "What you can do—with a beer bottle—is to drink the beer down to the bottom of the neck and then fill the neck with a shot of fireball whiskey.  It's awesome.  I can only do three or four of those in a row though."  We stepped past each other again.  "Hey," he said, "I guess I'll go with the Busch today."  He picked an 18 can suitcase for $9.99.  Smart.  Very smart.  Smarter than me.  By a lot.  I was still standing there trying to figure out how to do the math.)

	12 Can Suitcase	Cost/Can	18 Can Suitcase	Cost/Can	30 Can Suitcase	Cost/Can
Natural Light	6.99	0.58	9.99	0.56	17.99	0.60
Keystone Light	6.99	0.58	9.99	0.56	17.99	0.60
Busch Light	6.99	0.58	9.99	0.56	17.99	0.60
Busch	6.99	0.58	9.99	0.56	17.99	0.60
Bud Light	8.99	0.75	12.99	0.72	19.99	0.67
Coors Light	8.99	0.75	12.99	0.72	19.99	0.67
Budweiser	8.99	0.75	12.99	0.72	19.99	0.67
Milwaukee's Best	7.49	0.62	none		none

The spreadsheet results (above) start to tell the story.  They certainly explain, for example, the rise of Natty Light and Keystone Light at this data collection site.  The two combine for almost 100 cans, or almost a third of the trash.  It is, however, more difficult to tell what is going on with the Busch Brothers.  Given the price, it is hard to explain why they are languishing in the polls.  (Again, we admit to some missing pieces of information:  Perhaps Busch drinkers simply don't throw their cans in the ditch?)  The positions occupied by Bud and Bud Light correspond to what we found at the TA.  That is, those brands seem to be in a position to charge something of a premium among mass-market beer drinkers—without giving up a lot of sales volume.  They evidently hold a good market position.  In contrast to our first site, Coors Light, with a similar strategy, is doing a little better here.  Sort of holding its own.  But overall it doesn't have quite the selling power of the Buds.  Finally, while we find these data somewhat inconclusive, the distance of dumping from point of purchase is quite a bit different at this site.  Most of the cans go out at the one mile mark.  But this actually 2.5 miles from the point of sale.  (See the map in the prologue.)  Are Maverik beer buyers slower drinkers than those who frequent the TA?

Data Collection Site 1

Let's start with some headline numbers, some eye-popping numbers.  In the 1.5 mile stretch from the northern edge of town near the TA to the first 4-way stop in the Parowan Valley (see map in Prologue), we recorded 555 aluminum cans in the ditch.  My reader may not feel that this is any big deal, but it seems like a lot to me.  Moreover, I walked a portion of this road myself about two years ago and collected a hundred cans for recycling.  So, I know for certain that these new numbers underestimate the true volume of trash.  But, even at the rate of 555, that equals one can every 14 feet.

We divided the census data into three families:  Beer, Caffeine, and Fruit.  While everyone knows (and loves) beer, the latter pair of groupings can sometimes be difficult to distinguish.  For example, what is "MUG Root Beer?"  Is it caffeine or fruit?  I don't know.  I don't know if it has caffeine.  If it doesn't have caffeine, it should be typed as "fruit," by which we mean non-caffeinated sweet drinks.  Ultimately, though, it doesn't matter a lot because these categories—especially fruit—turned out to play only a minor role in our data collection.  In fact, at this site only seven of the 555 cans were finally classified as "fruit," or just a shade over 1% of the roadside trash.  Either fruit drinkers are not very trashy, or they are not very common.  As for caffeine, the numbers were quite a bit larger, but still made up only a small percentage of the total (around 8%).  Just to provide a feel for what kind of caffeine is being consumed (and ditched) in the Parowan Valley, the top three vote-getters were Mountain Dew (16 cans), Pepsi (9 cans), and Monster (5 cans).  No other caffeinated drink scored even five votes.

So, if the Caffeine and Fruit families account for just nine percent of the can trash at our first data collection site, what does that say about Beer?  Wow.  We counted 503 beer cans in 1.5 miles, or one every 16 feet.  In addition, there were 16 different species of beer.  Which is to say that we identified 16 different labels.  Of these, we decided that six of them were of low importance—occurring fewer than four times each.  These were Milwaukee's Best Ice, Coors, Hurricane Malt Liquor, Bud Ice, Pacific Western Traditional Lager, and Icehouse.  The ten remaining beer species—shown in the pie chart—accounted for 88% of our data, so we began to concentrate our trash analysis on these brands of beer and their drinkers.

After taking a quick look at these data, we immediately wanted to know what was being sold, and for how much, at the TA truck stop nearby.  It is axiomatic that correlation is not causation, so we're not saying this proves anything, but the truck stop sells just five brands of suitcase beer.  (I don't want to spend a lot of time on this, but we have become somewhat convinced that this particular type of can traffic is associated with beer that you buy in a cardboard suitcase.)  These are Milwaukee's Best, Budweiser, Bud Light, Coors Light, and Keystone Light.  Well.  Are people driving 54 miles—the distance between Beaver and Cedar City, the only other two sources of beer—to buy Milwaukee's Best, drink it, and throw the can in the Parowan Valley?  We think not.  But, before we begin speculating on behavior, let's discuss cost.  For a 12 can suitcase at the TA Milwaukee's Best costs $7.99 ($.67/can); Bud and Bud Light go for 13.89 ($1.16/can); Coors Light is $13.59 ($1.14/can); and Keystone Light is $10.29 ($.89/can).

Let me save the worst of the speculation for the portion of this paper that comes after all the data have been presented.  For now, let me offer a few observations:

*Despite the name, Milwaukee's Best is not famous for stimulating the palate.  As a much younger man I remember drinking it for certain other reasons.  In fact, for a while the brand was widely known as "The Beast," referring I presume to how I looked the next morning.

*All of the beer sold in suitcases at truck stops in Utah has an alcohol content of 3.2%.  All of it.  So, you can't charge more for a higher alcohol content like you might elsewhere.  Despite this fact, Anheuser-Busch, with its two brands—Bud and Bud Light—is selling quite a bit of beer at almost double the per can cost of Miller-SAB's "Best."  Is Budweiser really worth twice as much?  Of all the money spent on beer in this sample, Anheuser is collecting 30% of it.  How are they doing that with beer that is hard to distinguish from, um, other yellowish liquids?  Actually, I have no idea.  I wonder if it is the marketing?  I mean, from what I hear, the Super Bowl is trying to buy television time to run advertisements during the Bud Bowl.

*The pricing strategy of the third big brewer—Molson Coors—doesn't make sense to me.  At least at this location, it seems to be a failed strategy.  They are not really competitive at the high end, where their pricing is similar to Anheuser.  (Although, remember, this is speculative.  Coors Light may be selling very well.  But Silver Bullet drinkers may not be can tossers, which would clearly impact our conclusions.)  But, they are really struggling at the low end, where the price point of $10.29 for a suitcase of Keystone Light is almost incomprehensible.  It is not cheap enough for the cost conscious and not expensive enough for the status conscious.

*Finally, it is worth noting that most of the cans stay in the car for the first quarter or half mile.  At about 1/2 mile there is a big jump in the volume of trash.  Again, this is speculation, but I'm assuming that it takes approximately one half mile to drink the first can of Milwaukee's Best.

Prologue

As some may know, we have always had a bit of interest in trash here at Rural Ways.  We often scour the highways and byways for something useful and sometimes make a little money by recycling metals.  Recently, however, there has been an explosion of interest in trash at The Homestead due to the preliminary results of some scientific trash sampling in the Parowan Valley.

(DISCLAIMER:  Before beginning any discussion of trash, however, I think it is only fair to warn my reader about two problems.  First, while many may not know this, trash data—and the conclusions to be drawn from them—may be divisive and controversial.  It is difficult to discuss trash without discussing people and what they do.  So, if you are unprepared for Rural Ways to delve into issues of human evil—namely, beer and capitalism—you might better jump ahead to safer topics such as tree identification and house painting.  Second, despite our best efforts to design sampling protocols in such a way as to avoid spurious and biased conclusions, a number of data collection issues may become increasingly obvious as we publish our preliminary results.  It is, for example, difficult to identify trash after it has been through a rotary mower.  Because our sampling locations have been mowed at different frequencies, the results from one area may not be comparable to the results from another.  One way to control for this particular problem is to select trash that is less likely to be obliterated by a mower.  And, in this case, that is exactly what we have done.  So, if we are ready to move on from the legal small print and into the topic itself, I will begin by stating that we collected just one kind of trash:  cans.  These data and the conclusions we draw from them are from aluminum can trash.)

What did we count?  We counted cans along the road, from the edge of the pavement to the edge of the right-of-way—basically we were surveying drive-by trash, trash in the ditch, trash out the window.  For every quarter mile we did a 100% can count by species on both sides of the road.  We did this for six road segments—each 1/4 mile in length—from mile zero to mile 1.5.

Where did we count?  We started with two hypotheses.  First, we assumed that only the most obnoxious trash tossers—and believe me there are definitely some trashy people out there—would jettison the can immediately into the driveway or front yard.  So we wanted to start our counts exactly on the edge of town, just past the last house.  Second, we assumed that beer cans would make up an interesting segment of our data and we wanted to be in a position to count them.  With the exception of the state liquor agency—where microbrews can be purchased at $3 per can—there are just two places to buy beer between Cedar City and Beaver, a distance of 54 miles.  So, we wanted to begin our counts along sections of road that were directly accessible to these two vendors.  Based on this pair of hypotheses, we chose to start counting cans at two locations.  The first was on the north side of town on a paved county road starting almost adjacent to the TA truck stop (one of the beer sellers).  The second was along old Highway 91—the former road to Las Vegas before the interstate was constructed.  This highway leads directly away from the second beer vendor, Maverik—which is exactly 1.5 miles from the edge of town and the start of our data collection.

 

What we do not know.  At this point, we have no control.  That is, our preliminary experiments have been conducted without the benefit of baseline information.  We don't know what "normal" should be.  As a result, it is difficult to write authoritatively about our conclusions.  We also have no data on traffic levels.  Thus, we have no information regarding the percentage of trips that include trash tossing.  Does every driver throw a can, or is it one in 50?  On a related note, we have no way of knowing the age of the can.  So, we don't know if it has been lying in the ditch for two years or two months or two days.  Because of these problems, and many other missing pieces of information, our reader may be tempted to ask, "Why bother?"  Why bother publishing these data if you know nothing about them?  Because, as we believe our reader will agree, they are simply very interesting and very curious on their own.  So, without further ado, let us finish the prologue.  Our next post will address the first set of data.

Rehabbing

At the end of December I was walking a lot.  On some days it was up to eight or nine miles.  My left knee started to get sore.  But there was a lot to see, so I kept walking.  Eventually the knee was very sore.  Not unstable or acutely sore, but chronically, wear-and-tear sore.  I needed to do something for it.  So I took a couple of days off, gave it a blast of ibuprofen—up to 1600 milligrams per day—and started rehabbing it.  It has worked out pretty well.  My goal is to keep it to about two miles per day.  I'm more or less on target, but sometimes it isn't the mileage that matters.  On Friday I probably overdid it.  I wanted to get up on a little ridge above town.  It wasn't a lot more than two miles but it was pretty steep ground.  I found myself 1200 feet above the Chev:  Climbing down was pretty hard on both knees.

Hovenweep

Last Friday much of the Four Corners area was blanketed in an icy fog.  It was five degrees fahrenheit.  It wasn't the best day for painting, or even hiking the canyons, so we went to Hovenweep.  The new snow and low light made for good pictures—highlighting the ruins.  We completed the entire circuit at the main part of the monument and then went out to Cutthroat Castle.  The castle was a little higher up the mesa.  It was sunny there:  The pictures were less interesting, but the structure itself was unique.  On the way out, the Chev—running on bald tires—failed to clear a couple of steep sections on the road.  I had to shovel my way to the top.