Ryan Cooper

Upheaval Dome, via [ This is Part III of my dad's story about Cataract Canyon. Part I is here , and Part II is here . ] We begin to shuttle the people down to the beach at Ten Cent Rapid, the last one above the lake. Doug flies the people on a short detour round the field of spires and pinnacles known as the Doll’s House by way of accumulating actual vacationing points. We’re still having fun, right? Then he’s ready to take the gear and kitchen down to camp, only he doesn’t have a sling and it would take dozen trips to haul it all in the cockpit. “Throw it all on one of those boats,” he says, “I’ll just tie on to that.”  “Are you sure?” I ask him right out, “We haven’t had the best luck trying to fly these things.”  He fixes me with a cool eye. “Throw it on,” he says. We use my boat, the “ Tuolumne ,” as the flying cargo container. There’s the kitchen full of cast iron cookware, stoves, food, tables; the toilet set-up goes in a hatch by itself.  I cram ...

My folks finally got some chairs to go with my dad's awesome custom sandstone table . Check em out! Apparently they're made by honest-to-god Amish craftsmen.

Cataract Canyon, via Wikimedia  [ This is another story from my dad, about the flood of 1983  on the Colorado through Cataract Canyon. I'll be posting it in installments. ] They thought it was probably going to start dropping soon. The river was already higher than any flood since the gauges went in back in the 20’s, so the safe bet for forecasters was to say it had just about peaked. “Highest water ever recorded,” would be a fair statement. How much water that was in actual volume would be hard to say. It was off the graph. Floods like this are suppose to be a spike in the pattern. Once the level started down it was expected to fall off precipitately, which would be good. The Green River wasn’t anything I recognized at this level. The camps were gone, the side hikes under water.  The river was painfully cold and going so fast it was hard to get all the boats landed in one place. I’d had a sketchy time of it just pulling in to the notch in the tamarisk tree...

So Kevin Drum is in the midst of an argument with Ezra Klein over his latest New Yorker  article. Ezra says the president isn't that good at convincing people, while Kevin disagrees somewhat. I think they both make good points, but I was struck by this passage from Kevin: Before 1980, it was possible to raise taxes both locally and at the federal level. After 1980 it became virtually impossible, and after the early 90s it became very nearly literally impossible. In Congress and at the polling place, where it really matters, public opinion was loud and clear: higher taxes were a killer. Mesa Verde, the Cortez economic support system I completely agree when it comes to the federal level (obviously), but I immediately thought of my old rinky-dink hometown of Cortez, Colorado , population ~8500. It's a pretty conservative place--our representative is the ur-shmuck  Tea Party hack Scott Tipton. You see, a few years back people had the idea that the local government should bui...

Kevin Drum has a crazy chart looking at the favorability ratings of each state: Coincidentally, Colorado (where I lived from age nine) is the fifth-most popular state, while Utah (where I was born and lived until age nine) is the   fifth-least popular state. This is nuts, in my view. Sure, Utah has more than its fair share of crazies, but that's more than balanced out by its superior scenery and generally high-quality governance.

Pops says this is maybe his greatest creation yet. I'm inclined to believe him, and that's saying a lot. I won't tell you exactly how it started, but in brief, about 25 years ago my dad bought a slab of sandstone about the size of a sheet of plywood. He put it up on a wood frame, and there it sat, including a move from Utah to Colorado, until a couple months ago when my mom threatened to finally buy a new table or else . The story of how he got it polished is itself quite the yarn—I'll see if I can get him to write it up for you sometime. (In case you don't know, cutting and polishing sandstone is incredibly hard, more difficult than granite.) But here's how it looked after the polisher got through with it: While I was home for Christmas, I helped him move it around with the tractor so we could get the bottom set up to attach the legs and frame, which my dad welded up himself: Unfortunately the bottom of the rock wasn't terribly flat, so we had to gr...

News is a bit light (plus I'm cooking up a whopper of a post for tomorrow, hopefully), so for now here are some pictures I took on a trip down to Belt Salvage with my dad for your consumption. It's a recycling and metal sale place that deals mostly in scrap metal; you can sell them your scrap copper, steel, or aluminum (plus some more, probably). This means they have some truly awesome piles of random scraps. These two pictures are of some complex machine made by Mueller Martini of unknown function. A bit of googling makes me suspect it's a book-binder: Our theory for this one was that it was some kind of reaction vessel for making industrial quantities of some chemical: This crane, presumably functional, was in the "for sale" lot: This looked like an old cannon, but on closer inspection it was really a lawn ornament—the inside of the barrel was made of rubber: Here we have a giant pile of refrigerators. We were looking to scavenge a few of the feet...