FALL IS OFFICIALLY OVER

Wednesday October 9 Hi of 75°.
Thursday morning October 10 Lo of 22° and snow.
Friday morning 16°!!!!!!
Saturday predicted Hi of 65°.
And then you hear "Welcome to Colorado"
Of course our garden (zucchini, pumpkins and 1 tomato) is gone and many of our flowers have died. The saddest part is that our Datura is done for the year.

For 10 years we had a Datura plant that had up to 15 blooms at a time, but it died out over last winter and we thought we would have to plant more seeds. However in the middle of June we saw some small plants starting. By September we had 7 plants with 4 of them producing blossoms. I have high hopes for next year!

10 year old Datura 2018

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La Caverna del oro

One of our first backpacking trips in Colorado was in the Sangre de Christo Mountains. One mountain in particular drew our attention. Marble Mountain was the location of a famous story of a Spanish cave of gold. There are many places on the web that tell this story better than I could, suffice it to say that we wanted to locate it and see the iconic 'Maltese Cross' located at it's entrance. In 1974 after I got out of the Army we invited some friends to join us on this trip. We parked our car at the trailhead in the Wet Mountain Valley and backpacked up Marble Mountain to 12,000 feet. In one of the culverts we found the entrance to the cave. Maltese Cross at the Caverna del oro It turned out to be a real thing. The large red cross was still visible after 400 yrs. According to legend the Spanish put it there in the 1600's. I did have the courage to crawl into it but only a few feet. After about 10 feet there is a vertical shaft that drops about 750 feet! The Cross is v...

The Amadinda

The Amadinda is an African xylophone originally made from slabs of wood or even large sticks, with or without gourds for resonators. There was no reason for this project other than to see if I could make a simple mallet instrument. The box was made from plywood (which also acted as the resonators) and the bars were made from maple. Since this was to be a true xylophone, the bars were all of equal width. Tuning was done by cutting the bars to different lengths and removing material from the bottom. Using a router I created a sort of 'stepped pyramid' instead of the traditional arc cut found on marimba or xylophone bars. Cutting the underside is not only for tuning but it focuses the pitch and creates the characteristic overtones of the instrument. Since I wanted to play this with other 'Western' instruments, I chose to use a pentatonic scale of 2 2/5 octaves (C#,D#,F#,G#,A#,C#,D#,F#,G#,A#,C#,D#). Two people sit on either side of the instrument and strike the ends of ...

Camino del Diablo: The graves

This is not meant to be morbid but rather a reminder of the extremes of danger for those who traveled this desert trail. What I saw were the historic graves, nothing from the pre-Spanish era. The Sonoran Desert has been inhabited for over 10,000 years and archaeologists have limited knowledge of the first people. What little is known consists of trails, trail shrines, petroglyphs/pictographs, mano and metate sites, sleeping circles and geoglyphs (the Blythe geoglyphs being some of the most famous). Some of these markers were names of people who may have died on their desert crossing or maybe just the fact that they were here. There is little information even for the historic markers. They are marked with rock piles in the form of a cross. Many were just rocks piled over the grave. One documented grave is that of Dave O'Neill, a prospector whose body was found along the trail in 1915. The irony of the circumstances of his death is that his body was found face down in a puddle...

A Percussionist's Notebook

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