It's in the woods

kw: vacations, sightseeing, photographs

Been in Oregon a couple days, on family business, and the bunch of us went to Camp 18, a restaurant and outdoor logging museum.

Wood carvings abound here. This image is one of their own. Camp 18 is located at milepost 18 on Highway 26, which goes northwest out of Portland to the Oregon coast. It is about an hour's drive out of Portland.

My brothers and I chose the occasion to coincide with our father's ninetieth birthday, so it was a trip for fun as well. We had Saturday free, and had lunch here. We also stopped by Sauvie Island, which someone had said was interesting. That was a bit of a dud, unless you get a kick out of ducks in a swamp.

By contrast, we spent a couple hours wandering around the equipment that is scattered around the land surrounding the restaurant at Camp 18.

What is a logging camp without a portable sawmill? This mill is belt-driven. The camp has several old tractors with take-off pulleys for hooking up a leather belt. I've seen a mill like this in operation. The belt is 20-30 feet long. Click on the image to see a larger version, where you can see that the saw blade's teeth have relief grooves cut; these reduce fouling of the blade. That's one of my brothers moving in for a closeup photo.

Inside the restaurant, one of the first things you see is this quartet of dancing bears, cut with a chainsaw out of logs. We had a great meal there, sitting at a table cut from the stump of a tree that had been nine feet in diameter. I overdid it; their "ordinary" burgers are 1/3 pound, but they had one that was double size. I had to try it. It was eight inches in diameter, on a bun so thick I had to cut the dome off so I could eat it. A couple of my brothers ate the trimmed-off dome.

Outside the restaurant's front door is this welder's whimsy. It was the only bit of artwork that wasn't chainsawn from a log.

This is another iconic bit of equipment: a tree faller (for some reason, loggers don't call it a "feller", which would be more etymologically correct; but what does a logger know of etymology?!) The business end at the left has three clamps to grab onto a trunk as thick as thirty inches. At the bottom, there is a chainsaw with a blade an inch thick, going around a 32-inch bar. Once the faller's clamps grab a tree, the blade is shoved out to saw off the tree. Then the tractor, which outweighs a typical hundred-foot tree by 5:1, simply lays the tree down and unclamps from it.

We also saw several kinds of donkey engine, winches that pulled themselves into the forest on skids; a band saw for cutting logs up to three feet, that had a 2-sided blade (16 inches across) so it could cut logs pushed through in either direction; a portable bunkhouse and camp galley on railroad cars; and a number of rigging poles for lifting and swinging big logs about. We are all mechanical machinery freaks, so it was an occasion for much exclaiming and explaining and arm-waving. A fun day.

A bit of the big city

kw: travel, sightseeing, photographs

(You'll need to click on all these pix to see them at a nice viewing size.)

My wife and I have wanted to have a day away for some time, so we joined a bus trip to Manhattan yesterday. I'd have posted these images last evening, but events conspired to get us home quite a bit later than we expected.

The bus dropped us all off near Times Square. Most people had come for a show or to shop (I don't understand paying $40 to go to NYC to shop). The two of us went first to the Empire State building. We walked there, which takes less than a half hour from Times Square. We were lucky, the crowds were light Saturday morning, so we were at the 86^th floor observatory within an hour of arriving.

This is one of a number of nadir-to-horizon panoramas I took. Most were three-image groups that I stitched using the panorama stitcher in Windows Live Albums. This one is the best-aligned, and shows the Chrysler Building and its surroundings. You can be sure I had the camera strap firmly locked around my wrist as I held the camera out through the grid to take these!

We spent an hour at this level, then paid the extra $15 to go to the glassed-in observatory at the 102^nd floor. The smudgy glass impairs the view, which is not that different from the view below. It is also a very small space; they only allow about thirty people in there at a time. I did get a better view of Central Park than I'd had before. This is one of those "OK, now I did that, there is no need to repeat the experience."

Before leaving the building, we had a bite in the Europa Cafe, which is very pleasant, and the sandwiches were excellent. It is on the South side of the building at street level.

We took the subway to the 81^st Street station and spent the rest of our day at the American Museum of Natural History. I love NH museums. The entry lobby, on the second floor off Central Park West, features this stupendous dinosaur group. I didn't take quite enough photos to get a clean panorama to the height of the tall Camarasaurus's head. This is a stitch of nine images.

If you look closely, you can see a smaller Camarasaurus to the lower right, and an Allosaur (I don't know which species) to the left. The rearing sauropod is supposedly defending the youngster. This is quite a different view from the way sauropods were depicted when I was a child. They were once thought to be lumbering bags of meat without brains enough to do more than watch stupidly as carnosaurs ate them up, when they weren't keeping half-submerged in the swamps. Now they are known to have had the strength to rear up, and to trot along at respectable speeds.

We quickly made our way through the museum to the back rooms where the geological exhibits are kept. I am a mineral junkie. I'll probably post some mineral photos later. I took closeups of many large groups of crystal druses for wallpaper images.

But one treasure I simply have to show is this trilobite accompanied by a trace fossil. To a paleontologist, trace fossils, or fossils of the marks made by animals walking, are at least as valuable as skeletal or shell fossils, because they show something about animal behavior. In this case, the trilobite was walking along when it must have been overwhelmed by a mudslide, which smothered it in place at the end of its trackway.

In their day, trilobites filled the niche now filled by crabs and their relatives the lobsters and isopods. Did you know that the little pillbugs you find in your garden are isopods, related not to ants or millipedes but to lobsters? Oceanic isopods look a lot like big pillbugs, and just a little like their ancient relatives the trilobites.

We left the museum with just enough time to catch a subway back to Times Square; we actually didn't take the transferring train, but walked the last mile from Columbus Circle in plenty of time to catch the bus home. Upon our return, we found friends in the parking lot who were having trouble starting their car. Another friend had already tried, and failed, to jump start their car. They are not presently members of AAA, but I called AAA and was told I could still have someone come to start the car because we were with them. AAA insures us, whatever car we are in. However, that necessitated our staying with them, so we had a nice visit with them, which got us home an hour later than we expected. It turned out their battery was on its last legs, so they bought a battery on the spot, from the AAA guy, and were good to go.

We went straight to bed, and I also took a long nap this afternoon, so here I am, late Sunday evening writing about our Saturday. Glad to be home.

The red mill

kw: holidays, photographs

Friday (11/27/2009) we avoided "Black Friday syndrome" and slept in. Just before noontime we went on a tour of Bob's Red Mill, a whole grain miller that caters especially to health food enthusiasts and those needing a gluten-free diet. There is a special gluten-free area of the millworks. Later in the day, at lunch, we met Bob, a very personable 80-year-old. All the employees seem to be chosen for upbeat, good attitudes.

The mill uses stone wheels for most of its milling. There was a good explanation of how the wheels never touch, but are kept a tiny distance apart, depending on the fineness of the meal or flour being produced. Some grains just gum up a millstone, and these are ground using other methods such as steel wheels or cutters. Their steel-cut oats just won an international award, the "golden spurtle", at a contest held in Scotland, the land of oat enthusiasts. I've had oatmeal from those oats, and it is definitely superior.

The guide explained that we would not actually see mill wheels in action. We could see some of the mills, but they just look like large washing machines. Without their cover, the air would be filled with flour and you wouldn't see anything! But on one close to the window, we could see the grain going into the shaker or "damsel", from which it enters the millstone's center hole. The guide told us this bit of folklore:

Since mills were invented, they have had a shaker attached at the top, which feeds the grain to the stones. It is the noisiest part of the operation, and for centuries it has been called the Damsel because it chatters like a young girl. No matter where you are in a millworks, you can hear the damsel. When the hopper feeding grain runs out, the sound of the damsel changes dramatically, and the miller will say, "I have a damsel in distress" and rush to the "rescue", adding a new bag of grain to the hopper. That is the origin of the term "damsel in distress".

Near the packaging area they have a selection of antique milling machinery, including these stones and the original "Mill #1" that Bob started with. If I understand rightly, all millstones are taken from a quarry near Paris, France, which has been mined for quartzite for the stones since Roman times.

The stones wear slowly, but do need dressing and sharpening a couple times yearly. This is a much easier task now with power tools. Imagine refurbishing the surface of a stone about a meter in diameter with a hammer and chisel!

We found out that if the milling is done too fast, the bran and germ come out coarser than the white flour and can easily be separated. Slower milling produces a more homogeneous whole grain flour. Some entrepreneur, a century ago or so, made a virtue of haste and invented white flour. It is so low in nutrition (being almost entirely starch) that by the mid-1900s federal regulations were imposed requiring millers to "enrich" white bread with vitamins and minerals. One of the early white-flour separators was on display. We use only whole grain breads, as I have done for decades.

Just as the tour ended, we all were given a few souvenirs (samples of various products), and these wooden "coins" that have, on the other side, a coupon for a free cookie at the store and restaurant Bob runs just down the road. Of course we went there for lunch. We used one of our wooden coins for a cookie and I kept the other one as an added souvenir.

Disappointment on the Brandywine

kw: sightseeing, photographs, travel notes

Just east of famed Longwood Gardens is a rather minor attraction, Brandywine Battlefield Park. We made it a quick trip, to plan a longer visit later. I composed a framing shot of the Visitors' Center and found that my camera's battery didn't have enough charge left to focus the shot. This turned into an even briefer trip. We took a quick look at the Ring and Gilpin houses and headed home.

This is the Benjamin Ring house (photo from a friend), Washington's headquarters during that part of September 1777. He was hoping to forestall a British advance on Philadelphia, and chose this farmhouse with its overlook of Chadd's Ford.

Washington's forces were defeated September 11, 1777 (the original 9/11), and the British forces went on to ravage Philadelphia about two weeks later.

There is a re-enactment of portions of the battle over Labor Day weekend, just a month from now, an event I hope to attend. I'll make sure my camera's battery is fully charged!

Patenting's past

kw: photographs, sightseeing, science, inventions

Friday, July 31 was the last day this year that DuPont employees could get free admission to the Hagley Museum in Wilmington, Delaware. We walked around for an hour in the powder yards, then went specifically to the Patent Models exhibit.


Beginning in 1790, America's original patent law required a working model of a new invention as part of the patent application. This exhibit contains more than 120 of the original working models, covering the whole period up to 1880, after which models were no longer required. As these two cabinets' labels show, the display is arranged according to functional areas.


This Paddle Wheel – only a portion was shown, to display the innovative construction – and Life Boat were submitted in 1892 and 1873, respectively. The kayak behind them is of similar vintage.


The Screw Auger, the main feature of this little case, is a much earlier invention, submitted in 1809. It is identical to one I used to use with a brace-and-bit belonging to my father, in the 1950s. Some things are hard to improve on. Some time I'll get some decent photos of the Machine Shop, which contains lathes, shapers, mills, drill presses and other equipment from the early and middle 1800s. Again, when I worked as a machinist in the 1970s, I used equipment which was little different from a hundred years earlier, except it ran by electric motor power rather than off a water-wheel-driven leather belt.

Other inventions don't fare so well. You may know that Thomas Edison received more than 1,000 patents. Of all his inventions, the only one still in use is the incandescent bulb, and that will soon be extinct. There are proposed laws making them illegal (!) in favor of compact fluorescent lamps, and I expect those to be superseded in a few more years by high-power LED lamps. I already use LED night lights and flashlights, and plenty of my neighbors use LED Christmas lights.

A visit to Hagley

travel, sightseeing, photographs

DuPont employees anad their families get into Hagley Museum and Powder Yard free this month, so my wife and I took advantage of the chance to see it. We haven't been there for several years. We mainly walked along the powder mill buildings.

More than twenty of these blast-resistant structures remain, and another dozen or so are in ruins or just the foundations are left. Most of them are in pairs; the waterwheel or turbine would be between with a shaft going each way to power the mill wheels.

A rectangular building has five "sides", four walls and a roof. Powder mills have three solid walls, about three feet thick, as blast protection for the rest of the powder yard and dwellings that were rather nearby, including the E.I. DuPont mansion, Eleutherian Mills. The fourth wall, facing the Brandywine River, was very lightweight, or that side was left open, and the roof was also lightweight. Thus, if there was an accident, the explosive force would be directed across the river. "Going across the river" was a euphemism for dying in an explosion among the 19^th Century workers in the mills.

The earliest water wheels were "breast wheels" like this one; the water sluice hit the wheel on a level with the axle, at breast height, and pulled that side downward. This view is of the back of the wheel. It is about ten feet in diameter. Later wooden wheels were overshot, with about twice the efficiency of breast wheels. After about 1840 metal turbines, which are more efficient yet, were used.

To minimize the chance of accidental sparks, the walkways and rails in the vicinity of the powder mills were all of wood. Once metal turbines began to be used, they were enclosed in wooden barrel-like structures, and kept wet continually, so no sparks could ignite any powder dust, which was always in the air. Carrying metal on-site, even your wedding band, was grounds for dismissal.

I was told that, at the office and home of Mr. DuPont, there was a wash basin which had to be used upon entry, to make sure no powder remained on your hands. This was particularly important in winter, when anyone in the building might throw a log on the fire; invisible amounts of powder were enough to cause an accident!

Geared mechanisms like this one were used to raise and lower large gates, so you could start and stop the mill wheels as needed. I like mechanical stuff, and Hagley has a lot of it. This particular gate and its lift gears are still in use.

On a later tour of the DuPont mansion (no photography allowed), someone asked why the place is named Hagley. The guide answered that one of the larger properties that was purchased to make up the facility was bought from a Mr. Hagley, and much of the existing area (240 acres out of an original 1,000 acres) is composed of the land bought from him. However, it still could have been called "DuPont Powder Museum" or some such, so perhaps the wishes of company representatives entered into that decision.

A Photo day at Rockwood

kw: photography, nature, sightseeing

In May I visited Rockwood Park and Museum to scout the area for a photographic field trip (and posted on it here). Today was the field trip, with four photography students. I've put just a few more photos here, and you can click on each for a somewhat bigger version (up to 800px).

This is the house, from a bit different angle than before. I hoped to get a good picture of the other side of the house and its veranda, but it is being maintained, and there are blue tarps everywhere. This image is a panorama from three vertical images, so it is pretty wide angle, about 140°.

As luck would have it, today was the first summery day, warm and humid, that we've had this year. It has been a cool Summer so far along the mid-Atlantic. Nonetheless, we rather lackadaisically strolled about the grounds and tried out all kinds of photography. Since all the students this time are experienced in landscape photography, we spent much more time on intimate shots and even macro images.

Of course, we could not pass up the architecture. This "fruit cellar", which I can't tell from a root cellar, is not far from the main house. It could keep fruit longer just as a refrigerator can, for the same reason. Shaded by trees and built into the ground, it would stay 20°-30°F (~12°C) cooler than the house.

It seems we spent the first half hour making sure everyone could recognize poison ivy. The stuff is everywhere along the pathways outside the immediate grounds about the house. I didn't take any pictures of it; maybe I will for a future post.

Near the parking lot is "Edward's play house", now in ruins. Before the students arrived, I had my wife take this picture of me taking its picture. People have been wondering what I look like: I look like a tubby middle-aged guy, yes?

Perhaps this, or a similar shot, will be used by the Darlington folks for the promotion of future photography workshops. If you live in the West Chester/Concordville/Wilmington area, have a look at Darlington Arts Center as a place to learn music, dance, theater, and fine arts…and occasionally, photography.

The students were all interested in close-up and macro photography. These days it is pretty simple to put your camera in "flower" mode. Waiting for a live subject to "pose" is another story. In this case, it took a few minutes before this wild bee landed on a coneflower close to me, then I shot as soon as she crawled around the flower head. This is a full-resolution clip, a small part of the whole image.

It turned into quite a nature tour at one point: a few frogs and a snake, but I didn't get any usable photos of them. I was busy keeping everyone together. But there were enough insects to get another shot or two.

For example, this dragonfly kept landing on the same rock, so by keeping still a while, I got close enough for this somewhat distant shot. Again, this is a full-resolution clip from a much bigger image. To do justice to insects, I need to use a longer lens so I can photograph them without spooking them.

We were scheduled for four hours together, but the students all agreed they'd got what they came for by the three hour mark. We'd stopped and gone into the museum's ticket shop to get water, and it had begun to rain. I'm glad they liked it. It made for a pleasant day away from the office, and when I got home I had a nice, refreshing nap.

Griffith Park Observatory Renewed

kw: travel notes, sightseeing

When I lived in Southern California I went to the Griffith Park Observatory several times a year to see a planetarium show, and usually to look through their telescope. Late on the second day of our trip (Saturday, May 16), I took my wife there. My brother had returned to his conference on Mayan studies, and his daughter took our son (her cousin) to hang out with her friends.

The park was so full we had to park a half mile from the observatory and walk up. I shot this picture from a spot near where we parked. The small dome on the left (east) houses the "nighttime" telescope, the large central dome is the planetarium, and the small dome at the west end (in front of the main dome from this perspective) houses the solar telescope and spectrograph used in the exhibits at the west end of the building. You can see in the picture that the western dome is open and facing the Sun. The building faces north.

The basement of the building, which used to be inaccessible to the public, houses two new attractions, the Gottlieb Transit, shown in part here, and the Nimoy Theater, which was not running any shows when we visited. We were short of time, so we didn't see any planetarium shows either. We just scoped out the museum and scientific displays on the main floor and the new Gottlieb exhibits.

The planet models seen here are Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune; Uranus is behind Saturn's ring and the smaller planets are off-view to the left. There is an exhibit below each, giving a succinct list of facts about each planet. The dark globe at lower right gives viewers some idea of (moderately) deep space. Seen from a particular angle, one sees the Big Dipper. You can barely see a distorted dipper shape from this angle. The seven bright stars in the Dipper are at quite different distances, so looking at the constellation from different angles you see it as aliens might see it from other parts of space.

This is a replica of one of Galileo's telescopes. It is about a meter long. I was surprised at how small the objective lens is, only about 2 cm (3/4 inch). My first telescope, made at age 11, has a diameter of 7.6 cm (3"). However, this was sufficient for Galileo to discover craters on the moon and the larger satellites of Jupiter.

This is part of a planetary and science history in the east wing of the main building. They also have the "donut hole" from the Palomar telescope's mirror. The entire mirror was polished to perfection, then the central meter was cut out for light to get to the prime focus and other instruments.

Until a few years ago, the "donut hole" was used as an indoor telescope (with a 55 foot focus!) that people could use to look at a small picture of Saturn in the other end of the building. Now it is on display against a wall, and its optical path is blocked by a scale model of the Palomar observatory.

A great uncle of mine was working at CalTech in the 1940s, and was one of the polishers of the big mirror. He and two dozen other men, chosen because their hand temperatures were the same, polished the mirror by hand. In the 1970s I worked in CalTech's Physics machine shop, and did some work that was carried out in the same room where that mirror was ground and polished. I was also working on a telescope, but this one was a radio telescope, made of lots of metal tubes that had to be very exact lengths. It was my boss's job to get the lengths right and mine to fit them together and attach the panels that made the reflecting surface.

The telescope we can look through, opened after dusk most evenings, is larger than most amateur instruments, but not considered all that large. It is 12.5 inches in diameter (32 cm), but is a refractor, using lenses instead of the mirror optics that most amateurs use. It is of superb quality, sixteen feet long, with its main focus f/15 to reduce secondary "rainbow" from its achromatic objective lens. I love looking through it. The beauty of a refracting telescope is that the objective has no obstructions, so images are perfectly clear without spikes or other artifacts. A reflecting telescope's mirror nearly always has a second mirror in front of it, to take the image out to where you can look at it. Light scattering off this "central obstruction" degrades the image a little.

I regret that we only had about 90 minutes to spend at the Observatory. We had a family dinner to get to, and congratulations to confer on our niece, in preparation for her graduation the next day.

Saturday at Rockwood

kw: travel, sightseeing

Saturday afternoon, after the rain had stopped for a while, we visited Rockwood Park, home of the Shipley Mansion, which houses the Rockwood Museum. We've visited before on a couple of occasions for the Ice Cream festival, and had one tour of the mansion. This time, we walked the grounds. I was scouting photo opportunities, because I plan to lead a field trip for a Photography class in July, and this is one place that the grounds are free.

Shipley Mansion at Rockwood Park
The mansion is quite impressive. But I discovered something several years ago when I took my parents on the tour here in the morning, and to Winterthur (the biggest DuPont mansion) the same afternoon. Captain Shipley was decidedly rich. The DuPonts were filthy rich!

HaHa (Recessed Stone Wall)
The Shipley family and those who followed produced an English landscape garden surrounding the house. The landscaped grounds and those further away, left in a more or less open meadow condition, are separated by walls recessed into the land, called HaHa's. The walls can be seen when looking toward the house, but from the house and yard, they are not seen, and it looks like unbroken landscape.

Wisteria Growing Right Up the Trees
There is only one small area of formal garden, in an area that used to be the kitchen garden. the few flowering plants there were not yet in bloom. Dogwoods were the main flowering plant to be seen elsewhere; Landscape gardens are not known for floral beauty, being composed of trees and shrubs. One of the few kinds of flowering plant in bloom, this early May day, was Wisteria. There are a few wisteria vines used on trellises near the house and the carriage house. In one area to the southeast of the main house, wisteria vines have climbed up the trees, reaching fifty feet or more. They are the largest wisteria I've seen anywhere.

I was told by a docent that there will be almost nothing in bloom in July, but that many of the plants in the conservatory will be set out during the summer. There are a number of unusual species, so perhaps we'll have a few exotic views. The main photography venues I could discern for the moment are the house and the various landscape views. No doubt there will be more intimate views to be had; there's no telling what a van full of avid photography students can discover!

The Watts Towers, a first look

kw: vacations, sightseeing

They comprise the largest work of art produced by one person working unaided. For 33 years, Simon Rodia worked alone to build these towers, using no blueprints, scaffolding, welds or bolts, using only tile-setter's tools. The tallest tower is 99½ feet (30.3 meters). When the city of Los Angeles wanted to destroy them as an "earthquake hazard", a consortium of preservationists made a good case for an engineering test. When the main tower was unaffected by a 10,000 lb test, they were deemed safer than the skyscrapers then a-building downtown, and allowed to stand.

Their innards are reinforcing rod, textured steel bars, wired together (no welds), and covered with a concrete coat a couple inches thick. Into this coating, the artist embedded shells, tiles of many sorts, pieces of rock, broken china and glass, the bottoms of colored bottles, and other found materials. He must have spent a lot of time collecting stuff! You can find out a lot more about the Watts Towers at the Watts Towers website and in this Wikipedia article.

My father, his friend, and I visited the afternoon of March 10, 2008. Dad has been there a few times, but it was the first time for me. This picture captures the tiny feeling I had looking up at them. But there is a lot more than just a few towers. At their web site, you'll find out about the Gazebo, the two decorated walls, the staircase, and other marvels built into and around them.

A closeup shows examples of the seashells, dinner plates, and tiles used for decoration. Other panels had stamped impressions in the concrete and rock and slag coatings.

The Watts Towers Arts Center has been set up nearby to teach and lead tours of Rodia's monument. We visited on a Monday, when everything is closed. Tours are scheduled only on Friday-Sunday, and the Center is closed on Monday. We did talk to a guard, who gave us a brochure with Rodia's biography and a short description of the towers' details. The web sites above are much fuller.

Conserving the structures has turned into a time-consuming job for a number of people. When an earthquake did come, the towers pretty much shrugged it off. However, the concrete cracked in a number of places, so people had to remove and restore some sections to prevent rusting of the steel inside. The towers were completely photographed in the 1970s, so whenever a piece of tile or other decoration is found on the ground, they can get it back to the spot it came from. Still, I found a number of gaps where stuff had fallen off and not yet been restored.

These details aside, the Towers are awesome.