GLACIER NATIONAL PARK, Montana: A Place to Renew Your Spirit

Hidden Lake, Glacier National Park, Montana

Recently, I came upon an article about Glacier National Park promoting it as a place to go to renew your spirit and it brought back memories of my trip to Glacier with my family in 1961. We drove from our home in Minneapolis across North Dakota and most of Montana to get there and spent a week camping in the park, sleeping in our umbrella tent and cooking on our camp stove and over the fire. As I still do when I travel, I kept a diary of the trip.  My parents saved the diary, and I found it recently when I was going through some old family photo albums. My entries note both our activities of the day and more mundane issues such as the weather and what we ate for dinner. (In one entry I describe making peach cobbler over the campfire. In another, I tell how I burned all the lamb chops for dinner!)  I have put some excerpts of our daily activities below. Bear in mind that I was seventeen when I wrote them! For information about visiting the park today go to the National Parks website for Glacier at http://www.nps.gov/glac/index.htm.

Glacier National Park 

Excerpts from Caroline’s 1961 Vacation Log
August 5
We entered Glacier at 1:00.  Our campsite is nice, near St. Mary (Rising Sun Campground) and after it was set up we swam at Lost Lake, a beautiful, cool, but refreshing lake at the bottom of a mountain.

August 6
We first went to Sun Point and then walked to Baring Falls.  The walk was so pretty we used up all the film in the cameras! 

Hike to Virginia Falls with Ranger

 August 7
We got up early for a 9:00 hike to Virginia Falls.  Since no one else was there, we got a specially guided tour by the ranger.  The hike didn’t really seem like six miles because he knew so much and made it sound so interesting.  We ate our lunch on a beautiful grassy ledge about half way up the falls, where we were continually sprayed with mist.

August 8
Most of today was spent in the car recuperating from yesterday’s hike. ... We stopped at Avalanche campground and went on a self-guided nature trail and saw a bear.

August 9
The clouds descended and the rain poured forth as I stayed in my tent all morning reading,  ignoring the deluge in hopes that it would desist. [I was reading the Scarlet Letter, which today sounds like rather ambitious summer reading.  Perhaps it inspired my rather ambitious prose.]

August 10
We took a somewhat leisurely hike back to Hidden Lake for lunch, photographing wildflowers along the way.  We saw three ptarmigan, who were so tame that I got within eight feet to take a picture.  By the same rock on the way back Steve and I saw a hoary marmot, but he, not being so friendly, ducked into his hole before we could photograph him. 

August 11
This morning we arose bright and early for our hike along the Garden Wall.  For the first hour and a half it was rather chilly because of being in the shade of the mountain.  Later the valley dropped below us, revealing a spectacular view, at one point all the way to the end of Lake McDonald.  After four and a half hours of easy walking, with the exception of one switchback, we stopped for a picnic lunch within view of the Granite Park chalet. The last three and half miles went surprisingly fast.  After recuperating for an hour at the chalet with a 35 cent piece of pie, we descended to the end of the trail.

August 12
After lunch we decided to go to Waterton Lakes National Park [the Canadian side of Glacier National Park.] After four miles, however, we got a flat tire, out in the middle of nowhere. [As I remember, the only road connecting the parks was rough gravel.]  The trip, when we finally arrived was worth it, for the scenery was beautiful and the Prince of Wales Hotel was just like a castle out of an old English storybook.

I have fond memories of the Glacier trip and remember the park for its spectacular scenery and as a place not overcrowded with tourists.  Several years ago, one of my brothers returned to Glacier and went back to many of the same places we visited in 1961.  One difference now is that the glaciers, for which the park is named, are rapidly melting due to global warming.  Nevertheless, it is still one of our most beautiful national parks and a perfect place for renewing your spirit at any time of year.

BERLIN and POTSDAM: Brandenburg Gate, Sans Souci, Marble Castle, October 1998

Potsdam, San Souci, former summer palace of Frederick the Great

(Entry from my London Diary, October 5, 1998)
    Last night we returned from a four-day trip to Berlin and Hamburg, Germany, where our days were so full it seemed as if we were gone even longer.  This was my first visit since the Wall came down in the fall of 1989.  The changes to the city are remarkable with countless new ultra-modern buildings, many more building projects underway, and the refurbishing of many beautiful old buildings that had been sadly neglected during the communist era.  The architecture of Berlin is a mix of grandly historical buildings side by side with modern buildings of glass and chrome and the two are surprisingly well integrated. 
     October 3 is the date of Germany’s Reunification Celebration (somewhat equivalent to our 4th of July), so Saturday was a national holiday with speeches and parades.  The weekend of our visit also coincided with the opening of a huge new development called Daimler City, a business, apartment, shopping, entertainment center, built by Daimler-Mercedes Benz  on the site that had once been the no-man’s land close to the Wall and the Brandenburg Gate.  For many people it symbolizes the birth of the new Berlin.  The ceremonies began with music and a huge laser and fireworks display and then the whole center was opened to the public.  It seemed to us that everyone in Berlin had come to see the new center as we pushed our way through the crowds who had come to look, eat, drink, shop and view the new IMAX theater. 
    Berlin has always been a city with a lot of entertainment and culture and boasts many art museums, theaters and musical events.  On Thursday night we went to a piano concert in the Philharmonic center and on Saturday we went to an orchestral concert in a beautiful refurbished concert hall in what had been East Berlin. The entire time that we were in Berlin the weather was bitterly cold and rainy, and we had to wear every layer that we had brought in order to stay warm. but this didn’t deter us from sightseeing.
    On Saturday we went to Potsdam (Berlin’s twin city on the other side of the river) where we visited the castle and garden of Sans Souci.  We ate lunch nearby at Cecilianhof, which is now a hotel and a museum where you can see the room where the Potsdam Agreement was signed after World War II.  We then walked across a large park to visit another recently refurbished royal residence, the Marble Castle, where we admired the art as we skated across the beautiful parquet floors in the wooly slippers that we were required to slip over our shoes.

Boat Trip in Berlin

    On our drive back to Berlin from Potsdam we passed by the cottage at the side of a lake where Albert Einstein lived for several years before he came to America.  Our stay in Berlin also included a little shopping (we added to our china set and Art finally found a leather key case), a boat ride around the city, and a tour of the Technical University where our friend works. 
    By the time we got back to London we were ready for some quiet time. 

FAIRFIELD, IOWA, Mailboxes and More: Guest Post by Barbara Siebenschuh

"American Gothic" Mailbox, Fairfield, Iowa

My friend Barbara Siebenschuh, classmate (Grinnell College) and roommate (University of Iowa), who still lives in Iowa City, recently visited the small town (population 9464) of Fairfield, Iowa, in the southeast corner of Iowa, about 1 ½ hours from Iowa City.  I have never been to Fairfield, but I was charmed by her description of the town and Maharishi University on the outskirts.  I think you will enjoy reading her report.

Barbara and mosaic mural

     I went with my friend to Fairfield, Iowa, to retrieve a jacket she had left in a shop there the week before. I had never been to Fairfield, Iowa. It was a beautiful day and not windy. The jacket was waiting for her at the Blue Fish specialty clothing store. We eventually walked the whole square. Many shops had special hours so not all shops were even open, or opened later. I found a neat little kitchen store I liked very much. In the back, it was a yarn store as well. The clerk there told us to look at some mosaics in an alley nearby. We did and they were very ambitious and colorful.

"Dressed Up" Mailbox, Fairfield, Iowa

Also, there had been a town enterprise to design mailboxes and a few were still up. They were really neat, especially when one thinks they have to hold up to the elements. Perhaps, Fairfield had seen a large grasshopper population lately because one of the boxes had a jaunty grasshopper and a message to be rid of such, suggesting I guess, to mail them out of town. My favorite mailbox was a Trojan pony because of the construction--the wooden tail served as notification that there was mail. There was also an over-the-top fruit and baubles mailbox which seemed like Carmen Miranda had commissioned it. Great creativity!


    We ate at a vegetarian place called "Revelations" and I had a faux BLT with protein strip colored like bacon to provide some crunchiness. We sat among a whole room, one of many, of used books for sale. Nice place.
     More shops were tried or peered into. By the time we got back around the square to the car, a Aryuvedic store was open with lots of expensive looking statues. We did not go in as we could see a lot of it from the doorway.  I was charmed by the shops on the square–many little features that left Iowa City years ago.

     We had gotten directions to hit Highway 1 (we had come another way) in order to see Maharishi University as we drove out of town. We got on Highway 1 but were not prepared for the sprawling huge size of the Maharishi complex.  We saw the student union but we also saw unmarked buildings (huge) and signs farther down for Vedic City. The architectural hallmark seemed to be swirling cones atop yellow pinkish buildings that showed nothing to the outside. It was almost like the window panes were opaque; no signage, well, one: visitors park and go in the building here: no lawn features. Wow. Well, I have seen Maharishi in part-at least from the outside.
     We saw little traffic on our entire trip and the outstanding impression was that this area around Fairfield had been hard hit by the drought. Many trees and bushes were dead looking. I doubt they will survive the winter winds.

Mural detail

With thanks to Dania De Bortoli of the Fairfield 1st Fridays Art Walk for photos of the mailboxes and to Barb's friend Kathleen for the photos of the murals.

Easter Island's Giant Statues: How Did They Move Them?

The first European visitor to Easter Island was a Dutch sea caption, Jacob Roggeveen, who landed on April 5, 1722.  In the tradition of his time, he named his “discovery” for the day of his arrival, which was Easter Sunday.   Today, the island is known both as Easter Island (Isla de Pascua in Spanish) and Rapa Nui, a Polynesian name given to it in the nineteenth century by Tahitian sailors.

Sixteen centuries ago, about 400 A.D., a small group of seafarers and their families sailed east across the Pacific from their island homes in central Polynesia.  Their large double canoes were filled with food, water, tools, and other things they needed to survive.  After many weeks they reached the rocky shores of a small island, later known as Easter Island.  There they established homes, planted gardens, and started a new life.  They developed a rich and complex culture that lasted for more than a thousand years.  Perhaps their most remarkable and unique accomplishment was the carving of giant stone statues called moai.  They created nearly a thousand of these stone figures, some more than three stories high, and erected hundreds of them on huge stone altars called ahu.  Even more amazing is that all this was accomplished by people whose only tools were stone, bone, and coral.

The ancient Easter Island statue makers were skilled craftsmen specially trained in the art of stone carving.  They were privileged and honored members of the community, and, according to legend, they did no other work.  They were provided with food by fishermen and farmers.  Ruins of stone houses found at Rano Raraku are believed to be the places where the sculptors lived.
    Sculptors carved the moai with basalt adzes, or axlike tools called toki.  Thousands of toki litter the ground in the Rano Raraku quarry.   Basalt was also used to make axes for wood cutting as well as for fishhooks and household tools. Obsidian, a glass-like rock that is formed when lava cools rapidly, is another stone that Easter Islanders used for tools.  Obsidian is extremely hard and can be shaped into a razor-sharp cutting edge,  It was used to make cutting and scraping tools, drills, and files.  Because obsidian absorbs tiny amounts of water when it is cut, this can be measured to determine the date that the tool was made.  

    Sculptors carved a moai with the statue lying on its back.  After chipping the outline of the statue’s profile into the quarry wall, they made a niche around it so they could work from both sides.  People at the back side worked in a cramped space about two feet wide and five feet deep.  The sculptors began by carving the head of the moai and finished with the hips. 
    No two moai are exactly alike, although most follow a basic model.  All of them are designed to be standing figures with the base at about hip level.  The arms hang straight down the sides of the body, but the hands, which have elongated fingers, curve around the front of the abdomen.  Moai heads are elongated and always face forward.  The faces usually have narrow lips, large noses, and deep eye sockets below a large forehead.  The ears are usually long and sometimes have depressions in the earlobes where ornaments could be inserted.  Most moai are male although there are a few examples of female figures.

Moai at Anakena

   After the carving of the top, or the front half, of the moai was complete, the bottom was slowly undercut until a narrow ridge of rock was all that attached it to the quarry.  This was then cut away and the moai was lowered to the bottom of the hill with ropes.  There the figure was set upright into a hole in the ground and carving of the back was finished.  The standing statues that now litter the slopes of Rano Raraku are abandoned moai whose lower portions gradually became buried by eroding rocks and soil from above.
    The real challenge in moving the finished moai was getting it from the quarry to the ahu where it would be erected.  Most of these sites were at least several miles away, an enormous distance to transport a huge object weighing many  tons.  The ruts of several roads that were used for moving statues to various parts of the island from the quarry can still be seen.
    No one knows exactly how the moai were moved or whether the statues were transported lying down or standing up.  A variety of experiments have been conducted, both with real moai during the process of reconstruction, and with models, to test possible methods of transportation.

    In the July 2012 issue of National Geographic, the cover article asks the same question. How did people move the moai, which, in some cases, weighed more than 80 tons?  According to local legend, the giant statues “walked” from the quarry to the altars where they were mounted.  In experiments conducted in 2011, scientists showed that as few as eighteen people could maneuver a large statue by tipping it from side to side, as if it were walking, and move it a few hundred yards.  Perhaps this is the answer.  But, no matter how the moai arrived at their destination, they will always be an impressive sight.

I visited Easter Island in 1996.  My experience there inspired my book Easter Island: Giant Stone Statues Tell of a Rich and Tragic Past (Clarion, 2000). The picture on the left, of a detached Easter Island head, was taken in front of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.  If you imagine the full-size statue, relative to my height, you can appreciate the enormous size of the Easter Island moai.

Note:  For a fictional story set on Easter Island, inspired by real events, you  might enjoy reading Easter Island:  A Novel, by Jennifer Vanderbes.  I recently read this book and it brought back many memories of my visit there.

UPDATE (November 12, 2012):  To view the latest attempt to solve the question of how the Easter Island moai were moved, you can watch the PBS Nova program The Mystery of Easter Island online. In it researchers demonstrate how the statues may have "walked" to their sites.  The program first aired on November 7, 2012.

Australia's LAMINGTON NATIONAL PARK: A Birdwatcher's Paradise

View of Lamington National Park, Queensland, Australia from O'Reilly's

(April, 1999.  Excerpt from my Melbourne diary, written during our three month stay in Australia.)

On Saturday morning Art and I left Brisbane and drove about two hours south to Lamington National Park (a World Heritage site) where we stayed at O’Reilly’s, a family owned guest house perched on a mountain ridge (elevation about 3000 feet) in the middle of the park and surrounded by lush, subtropical rainforest.  We made our way to O’Reilly’s up a narrow mountain road 20 kilometers from the nearest town.

Entrance to O'Reilly's with Regent Bower Bird

When O’Reilly’s homestead first started taking paying guests in the late 1920's  there was no road and getting there was a two day trip from Brisbane, first by train, then by carriage, and then by horse.  We ate dinner one night with an 88 year old woman who had been coming to O’Reilly’s since 1931 and told us that in the early days she made the last part of the journey sidesaddle on a horse!   A full schedule of activities come with your stay at O’Reilly’s, beginning with a bird walk at 6:45 each morning, plus guided morning and afternoon hikes and evening programs.  On Saturday night we went to what was billed as an Australian Bush Dance, which turns out to be much like American square dancing and line dancing.  This is the only kind of dancing I really like to do because the caller tells me where I have to put my feet!

Caroline with Rainbow Lorikeet

The symbol of O’Reilly’s is the regent bower bird, and in the morning these large luminescent gold and black birds will come down and sit on people’s arms to be fed.  So will hundreds of parrots and crimson rosellas.  Dozens of other bird species, as well as pademelons (a small rainforest kangaroo), are also seen around the guest house.  Needless to say, it is a bird and animal lover’s paradise.  For those who don’t get up early, there are bird feeders outside the dining room windows so you can watch the birds as you eat.

Treetop Walkway

Another feature of O’Reilly’s is a treetop walkway, a series of suspension bridges about fifty feet above the ground that allow you to view the canopy of the rainforest at eye-level.  For those (unlike us) who do not have height fright, you can climb another fifty feet to a platform above the trees.  When we walked along the paths on the rainforest floor the trees were so tall we couldn’t even see the tops and in some places the foliage was so thick that it was almost dark where we were.  Also impressive were the giant air plants clinging to the trunks of the trees high above our heads.

By the time we left O’Reilly’s on Monday we were stuffed with good food from their dining room and exhausted from all the activities.  In a little while I will go to the photo processing place to pick up our pictures.  I hope that some of them will be good, but I know already that the photos will only hint at the actual experience.

Air Plants

MORE POSTS on this blog from our 1999 Australia trip:

Brisbane 9/17/12
Phillip Island 3/5/12
The Great Ocean Road 1/23/12
Tasmania:  Cradle Mountain 9/5/11
Tasmania:  Hobart to Queenstown 8/22/11
Alice Springs 7/4/11
Uluru (Ayers Rock) 6/27/11

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BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA: Queensland Museum, Koalas, and More

Botanical Garden, Brisbane, Australia

(April, 1999. Excerpt from my Melbourne diary, written during our three month stay in Australia.)

Last night we returned from another activity packed trip, this time to Brisbane and Lamington National Park in southern Queensland.  In the central business district of Brisbane (or the CBD as they call it) one finds turn of the century churches and other historical buildings as well as high-rise office buildings.  The main shopping section, on Queen Street, has been turned into a walking mall with outdoor restaurants, entertainers, etc.  Our hotel, which opened in January, was a few blocks from the shopping area and was built in about 1910 as medical offices.  A few years ago the building changed hands and was restored to its original splendor (including a creaky lift) and all the doctor’s suites were turned into hotel rooms.  One wonders what medical specialty our room once represented!

The Brisbane river winds its way through the city and on the south bank there is a park and arts complex.  I walked across the bridge from the city center and visited the Queensland Museum which had a number of interesting exhibits including one on the role of women in pioneer days (how they washed and cooked and stored food with no electricity or refrigeration and how the party line telephone kept people connected even when they lived long distances apart.) 

Megalania skeleton (photo by Richard Hewett in my book Dinosaurs Down Under)

At the museum there were also numerous dinosaur skeletons and fossils of other extinct animals such as the giant lizard, Megalania.  There was a realistic life-size animated model of Megalania with a warning that small children shouldn’t look if they were easily frightened.  (It also had realistic sound-effects.)  Megalania was a MUCH larger relative of the modern Komodo dragon and I must say that when I turned the corner to view the exhibit, I jumped.  Unlike dinosaurs, this real life monster was roaming Australia at the same time as the early Aborigines and would have been a fearsome animal to encounter. The Megalania exhibit reminded me of a book I wrote called Dinosaurs Down Under: Fossils from Australia (out of print but available online or at your library).
 
In another part of the museum there was an exhibit of a device invented by an early state meteorologist, a man by the name of Clement Lindley Wragge.  Although his device, a kind of giant cannon intended to seed rainclouds, never worked, Wragge is famous for being the first person to give names to cyclones (hurricanes.)  According to the label on the exhibit, he named them after politicians of the day on the grounds that they were both national disasters!

One morning I drove to the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary, an animal park on the river about a half-hour from the city center.  This was a nostalgic trip for me because that was where I had researched one of my first animal books, Koala.  Although the ownership of the park has changed and most of the staff are new since I was there in 1985, they welcomed me and gave me a nice tour.  It is still one of the few places in Australia where visitors can “cuddle a koala” and, of course, have their pictures taken.  I was lucky to have beautiful, warm weather and spent most of the day watching the animals, including the wild turkeys and lizards that roam the grounds and are a bit of a nuisance.  I also found a mother wallaby and her joey who was cautiously exploring outside the pouch.

Note:  This was actually my third visit to Lone Pine.  The first time was in 1983 on my first trip to Australia when I visited with my family. You don't have to go to Australia to see the Lone Pine koalas. They now live at zoos in San Francisco, San Diego, and elsewhere.  The story in my book Koala follows a young koala born at Lone Pine who eventually makes her home at the San Francisco Zoo.

(To be continued next week with our trip to Lamington National Park.

NORTON SIMON MUSEUM, Pasadena, California

Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, California, view from sculpture garden

On a recent Sunday afternoon we visited the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, one of my favorite art museums in the LA area.  Familiar as a backdrop for the Rose Parade on New Year’s Day, it had been a long time since we had been inside to view the collections.  Walking up from the parking lot to the main entrance we passed the Burghers of Calais and several other Rodin sculptures, bringing back memories of our visit to the Rodin Museum in Paris.

14 year-old Dancer by Edgar Degas

We were reminded of Paris again on the inside as we viewed the impressive collection of Impressionist works, notably more than 100 pieces by Degas. I was pleased to see his sculpture of the young dancer (in the photo you can't see the yellow silk ribbon tying back her hair.)  On our visit to Paris in 1998, we took an almost identical photo of me with this sculpture in the Musee d'Orsay.  The statue was originally cast in 1922. Twenty-seven copies have been made.  Later, on our way out of the museum we received a (free) beautiful frameable print of a Degas painting. 

Hiroshige, Noto Province, Waterfall Ba

In a small gallery off the main foyer was a wonderful temporary exhibit, Lessons of the Cherry Blossoms, Japanese Woodblock Prints, celebrating the 100th anniversary of Japan’s gift of 3000 cherry trees to Washington, D.C. in 1912.  Each print in the exhibit features cherry trees or cherry blossoms and explores the significance of cherry blossoms in Japanese culture. While most of the prints are landscapes, or meisho, some are of beautiful women.  Japanese artists often equated beautiful women and cherry blossoms as symbols of the temporary nature of beauty and life.  The detail in the prints is remarkable as is the subtle range of colors.  A fold-out book in a glass case demonstrated how separate blocks add each new level of color and detail.  The exhibit closed September 2nd.  The prints are all from the Norton Simon permanent collection.

It was a beautiful day to be outside so after a refreshing drink in the Garden Café, we took a stroll around the pond and sculpture garden.  Apparently, some of the trees in the garden were gifts of naturalist John Muir to the Carr family, the original owners of the property, who settled it in the late 1870's.  Tucked into shady nooks and open spots along the path are sculptures by Henry Moore and various other 20th century sculptors.

The Basel Murals by Sam Francis

We then went back inside to spend some time in the 20th century wing and pay a visit to the 17th and 18th century rooms and admire the Rembrandts.  I’m always amazed by how much art is packed into this museum and the quality of the collection.  On this visit we focused on the exhibits on the main level .  The whole lower level features the collection of South and Southeast Asian art.  We’ll have to go back another day and start there.
For information about visiting the Norton Simon, click here.