Age of Innocence – 1954, Part Four – The Nuclear Arms Race and News Readers

Last time I took a look at nuclear weapons testing and finished with the bikini swimsuit.  Anyway, back now to the serious stuff of destroying the World!

Nuclear testing was big business in the 1950s as the United States and the Soviet Union prepared with stubborn enthusiasm for wiping each other permanently off the face of the earth.  The fact that a major explosion even on the opposite side of the World might have serious consequences for both protagonists and pretty much everyone else in between just didn’t seem to occur to them.

What also seems foolish to me is that both the US and the Soviet Union carried out nuclear testing within the boundaries of their own countries which is rather like setting the chip pan on fire in the kitchen of blocking up your own WC – rather foolish.  Compare this with the strategy of Great Britain which was much more sensible in this regard and who carried out its own modest nuclear bomb experiments on the other side of the World, in Australia, and although Australians like to call us whinging Poms they have done nothing but complain about this ever since!

Years after all this nuclear testing stuff, in 1996, I visited the United States and although I didn’t know this at the time travelled along a road that was only a hundred kilometres or so southwest of the Nevada Test Site which is a United States Department of Energy reservation which was established in January 1951 for the sole purpose of testing of nuclear weapons and the amount of damage that they could do.

Forget Bikini Atoll, this location is infamous for receiving the highest amount of concentrated nuclear detonated weapons in all of North America.

The Nevada Test Site was the primary testing location of American nuclear devices during the Cold War and began here with a one kiloton bomb on January 27, 1951.  From then until 1992, there were nine hundred and twenty eight announced nuclear tests at the site, which is far more than at any other test site in the World, and seismic data has indicated there may have been many unannounced and more secretive underground tests as well.

During the 1950s the familiar deadly mushroom cloud from these tests could be seen for almost a hundred miles in either direction, including the city of Las Vegas, where the tests instantly became tourist attractions as Americans headed for the City to witness the spectacle that could be seen from the downtown hotels.  Even more recklessly many others would thoughtlessly drive the family to the boundary of the test site for a day out and a picnic to view the free entertainment.  In doing so they unsuspectingly acquired an instant suntan and their own personal lethal dose of radioactive iodine 131, which the American National Cancer Institute, in a report released in 1997, estimated was responsible for thousands of subsequent cases of thyroid cancer.

Continuing the nuclear theme, the world’s first atomic power station was opened near Moscow in Russia and knowing now how careless the Russians were with anything nuclear this was probably something that world needed to worry about.

Just look what happened at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in the Ukraine in 1986 when a reactor accident at a nuclear power plant resulted in the worst nuclear power plant accident in history and the only incident ever to record level seven on the International Nuclear Event Scale (and on a scale of zero to seven, believe me, that’s pretty serious!) The accident resulted in a severe nuclear meltdown and a plume of highly radioactive fallout released into the atmosphere and over an extensive geographical area to the extent that it remains uninhabitable today and almost certainly for many more years to come as well.

Mind you, we British could also arrange a nasty little nuclear disaster of our own and on 10^th October 1957 the graphite core of a nuclear reactor at Windscale in Cumberland caught fire, releasing substantial amounts of radioactive contamination into the surrounding area. The event, known as the Windscale fire, was considered the world’s worst reactor accident until Three Mile Island in 1979 before both incidents were dwarfed by the Chernobyl incident.

Here are the results of the Cold War: The West 3 (Bikini Atoll, Three Mile Island, Windscale) – USSR 1 (Chernobyl)  – four own goals by the way!

I leave 1954 with some thoughts about news coverage, which is what has stimulated these posts in the first place.  It is significant that the very first television news first bulletin in the UK was shown in 1954 on BBC TV, which is obvious of course because there was no ITV until 1955, and presented by Richard Baker, who was also by coincidence born on 15^th June (1925).

He was required to give off screen narration while still pictures were put in front of the camera, this was because, and I really find this hard to believe, television producers were concerned that a newsreader with facial movements would distract the viewer from the story. On screen newsreaders were only introduced a year later, in 1955, and Kenneth Kendall was the first to appear on screen.  Kenneth Kendall , it has to be said, was unlikely to distract viewers from the important stories of the day but on the other hand it was probably difficult to concentrate on the weather forecast in this sort of bulletin…

Mount Rushmore, Custer, Crazy Horse and Wall Drugstore

We didn’t get to see the best of the Quality Inn, to enjoy the swimming pool or the bars because there simply wasn’t enough time and in the morning after our first generous American breakfast in the dining room we met our tour guide and were pretty quickly loaded back on to the bus and sped away from the city on Interstate 90 and then Highway 16 towards the famous Black Hills of Dakota.

The Black Hills is an area that is famous for gold, Indian wars and Custer’s last stand.  After the discovery of the precious metal in the 1870s, the conflict over control of the region sparked the last major Indian War on the Great Plains of America known as the Black Hills War.  Previously the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie had confirmed Sioux ownership of the mountain range but this was conveniently overlooked by the authorities when gold was discovered and the native Americans were assigned alternative land ownership on less valuable bits of real estate in order to make way for the prospectors.

This led to real trouble and culminated at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in the neighbouring Montana territory, where the 7^th cavalry under the command of General George Armstrong Custer took on a coalition of Native American tribes comprised of Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapahoe warriors and led by the Sioux chiefs Crazy Horse and Gall and by the Hunkpapa seer and medicine man, Sitting Bull.  The one thousand, eight hundred Indian warriors outnumbered the army troops by four to one and with superior tactics and a rightful cause as motivation won an emphatic victory and killed all of the four hundred and fifty or so US cavalry troopers and Custer himself who despite his heroic image probably committed suicide in preference to ritual mutilation.  Good choice!

Our first destination was to see the U.S. National Monument Mount Rushmore with its famous granite sculptures of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.  The sculptured faces are sixty feet high and are as grand and enduring as the contributions of the men they represent.  Between 1927 and 31st October 1941 the sculptor Gutzon Borglum and four hundred workers created the colossal carvings to represent the first one hundred and fifty years of American history and symbolised these particular presidents who were selected for mountain side posterity because of their role in preserving the Republic and expanding its territory.  Originally the sculptures were to be carved from head to waist but this all proved to be a bit too ambitious so what we have are just the heads.

Next stop was the Crazy Horse Memorial about thirteen kilometres away and a sort of alternative ethnic memorial to the great native American warrior chief.  The monument has been in progress since 1948 and is still far from completion.  The sculptor died in 1982 and if and when it is ever finished, it will be the world’s largest sculpture because the head of Crazy Horse will be a massive eighty seven feet high.

The Memorial is on the road to a place of notoriety called Wounded Knee where on December 29, 1890, the Wounded Knee Massacre occurred on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. This cowardly action is commonly cited as the last major armed conflict between the United States and the Sioux Nation and the massacre resulted in the deaths of an estimated three hundred Sioux, many of them women and children and just twenty five U.S. soldiers.  Attacking in the early morning while the Sioux were still in bed proved to be an overwhelming advantage to the U.S. troops.

Later that day in the afternoon we drove along Highway 44 close to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and through the Badlands National Park, which is a strange and beautiful landscape of deep gorges, saw-edged spires and grassy-topped buttes, an eerie world carved out of the prairies by thirty five million years of wind and water erosion and with wonderful names like ‘Buffalo Gap National Grassland’ and the ‘Sage Creek Wilderness Area’ to inspire the imagination.

The term badlands represents a historical consensus in North America, the Indians called the place ‘mako sika’ and Spanish colonists called it ‘malpaís’, both meaning literally bad land, while French trappers called it ‘les mauvaises terres à traverser’ which translates as ‘the bad lands to cross’.  The term is also topographically apt because these badlands contain steep slopes, loose dry soil, slick clay, and deep sand, all of which seriously impede travel.  Luckily we were on an interstate highway in an air conditioned coach and we found the journey rather more straight forward than the early pioneers.  After visiting the Ben Reifel Visitor Centre in the Cedar Pass we rejoined the Interstate at Cactus Flat and turned west back towards the city.

All along Interstate 90 there were hundreds of billboards advertising the Wall Drugstore and I was beginning to wonder what this was all about when we reached the town of Wall and all was revealed.  ‘The Wall’ is actually a rugged topographical strip a half mile to three miles wide and nine miles long with a succession of tinted spires, ridges and twisted gullies which separates the lower prairie from the upper and from which the name of the town of Wall, South Dakota is derived.

This is a small settlement just off the highway that is unremarkable except for the Wall Drugstore.  This small town store made its first step towards international fame when it was purchased by a man called Ted Hustead in 1931 during the great depression.  Hustead was a deeply religious man and a pharmacist who was looking for a small town with a thriving Catholic community in which to establish a business and he discovered and purchased Wall Drug.

It was located in a small town that was recently by-passed by a new main road in what he himself referred to as ‘the middle of nowhere’ and he thereafter struggled to make a living and business was very slow indeed until his wife hit upon a brilliant idea to advertise free ice water to thirsty travellers passing by on the nearby highway.  This was an immediate success and began to divert motorists off the main road to take advantage of the offer, to the extent that Wall Drug grew into an enormous cowboy themed shopping mall and even today free ice water is always available for travellers who stop by for a rest.  It’s a nice story and the place was busy but full of arcade shops with merchandise that I had no desire to purchase and it wasn’t a place that I would rush back to and I was happy to move on.

This was day 1 of my visit to some of the National Parks of the USA, the rest of the journey can be found here:

National Parks of the United States

Phoenix Arizona and The Rustler’s Rooste

On a business trip to Phoenix, Arizona in 1997 we went one night to a cowboy steakhouse restaurant called the Rustler’s Rooste.  According to legend the original site of the restaurant was on top of a butte in the foothills of South Mountain and it was a hideout for cattle rustlers and outlaws.   The South Mountain recreational area is claimed to be the largest municipal park in the world and it has a commanding position overlooking the city.  Mike parked the people carrier and we stood and admired the views over the city that was stretched in front and below us like a scene from that Robert DeNiro film Heat.

From the outside Rustler’s Rooste looked disappointingly functional and not especially exciting but inside things were really buzzing.  Through the doors we walked over an indoor waterfall and then to get to the dining room there were two options, the stairs were the traditional method of getting down, but there was also a slide that curved around a central stage area and which was both quicker and more exhilarating.  We took this option of course and one by one were deposited swiftly into the dining area that had two large plate glass windows that provided a magnificent view of the city lights.

Rustler’s Rooste served cowboy food and a sign on the door said ‘Better come hungry’; so it was a good job that we had Dave and his reliable appetite with us!  There was a fabulous menu with an extensive choice of food including rattlesnake as a starter.  None of us had ever had that before so we just had to have some but although it sounded dangerous and exotic I seem to remember that it tasted rather disappointingly like chicken.  After that we had the full cowboy meal that consisted of crispy shrimp, barbecued chicken, cowboy beans, seafood kebabs, fries, barbecued pork ribs, corn on the cob, and a big juicy beef steak.  It was all cooked perfectly and I suspect rather better than a simple cowpoke’s meal out on the open range and the cowboys wouldn’t have had the nine layer chocolate cake to finish either, I’m fairly certain!

The best thing about the Rustler’s Rooste was the entertainment because there was live music playing all night as two bands took it in turn to play good old country music which had people line dancing and playing cowboy in between the courses.  My favourite part of the evening was when a man brought a live snake into the room and then, in a carefully rehearsed way, dropped it and it slithered about the floor scattering diners in all directions.  We were assured later that it was not a venomous variety and perfectly harmless of course but it did scare the pants off an awful lot of people at the time.  It turned out that Mike lived out of town on the open range and he knew an awful lot about rattle snakes and he amused us with serpent stories all the way back to the motel.

http://www.rustlersrooste.com/

Columbus Day and The Great Salt Lake

No one can be absolutely sure who first discovered North America but Christopher Columbus stakes a strong claim and 12^th October is celebrated in the United States as Columbus Day.

Whoever found it was lucky for us because in 1995 we visited the mid-west states and starting on Columbus Day spent a couple of days in Salt Lake City.  On the second day there was a choice to be made, we could either enjoy a free day sightseeing and shopping in Salt Lake City or we could go on an optional visit to the Great Salt Lake itself and not being terribly keen on shopping and being so close to the Lake it seemed a shame not to take this opportunity.

The Great Salt Lake is the largest salt lake in the Western Hemisphere, the thirty third largest lake in the world and the fourth largest terminal lake in the world, which means that the water comes in but none goes out except through the process of evaporation.  In an average year the lake covers an area of around four thousand, four hundred square kilometres but the size fluctuates substantially due to its shallowness because it is only about ten metres deep and it can be as much as double or half that size in exceptional years.

It has been called America’s Dead Sea and certainly there are no fish in the Great Salt Lake because of the high salinity but despite this the area is in fact rich with wildlife and provides habitat for millions of native birds, brine shrimp, shorebirds, and waterfowl.  The salinity too is highly variable, and depends on the water level but it is certainly much higher than you could expect to find in the world’s oceans to the extent that it is possible for the average person to float on the water without buoyancy aids and for that reason the shops around the shoreline certainly don’t make a fortune from selling inflatable beds!

We drove to a large lake side resort called Saltair to the west of the city which had the air of an old fashioned sea side town that was once popular but now a place well past it’s sell by date where people just don’t go any more. The unpredictable water levels have affected Saltair badly and it has also had the sad misfortune to be burned down twice.

When it was first constructed it was intended to be the western equivalent of Coney Island on the east coast and was one of the very first amusement parks in the USA and for a time was the most popular family destination west of New York.  The Saltair that we visited however was much smaller than the original and had been rebuilt in 1981 following the second fire and was constructed out of a salvaged Air Force aircraft hangar.  To try and disguise it the owners had added turrets at each corner and the entrance, which gave it the rather unusual look of a middle-east mosque and which only served to give it a strange appearance that was amusing rather than impressive.

Soon after opening the waters receded leaving it high and dry and an awful long way from the new shoreline.  The car park was strangely empty and inside the building we were practically the only visitors and the exhibits were both lifeless and tired.  Outside too it was all rather sad with rows of decaying wooden pilings snaking outward toward the lake, all that remains of a disused railway trestle and a pier which once led to the earlier Saltair resort.

The Lake itself however was a very remarkable sight, a massive expanse of flat deep blue water and as it was early morning there was moody mist hanging over the surface that created an eerie atmosphere.   From where we were on the south shore the lake stretches for a hundred and twenty kilometres to the north and fifty to the west.

Like Loch Ness in Scotland there are stories of a Great Salt Lake Monster which began in 1877 when workers on the north shore salt flats claimed to see a creature with the body of a crocodile and the head of a horse.  They claimed that the monster attacked them one evening and they had to make a quick getaway and hide until morning but sceptics say that this creature was most probably just a buffalo cooling off in the lake.  Either that or they had been drinking moonshine whiskey.   Needless to say, we didn’t see the creature this morning.

Arizona and the Rustler’s Rooste Restaurant

On the 14^th February 1912 Arizona became the 48^th state of the Union.

Before I moved to Lincolnshire I used to work for a French waste management company called Onyx UK that was attempting to take over refuse collection services in the UK and I worked at a depot in Maidenhead in Berkshire and managed the Windsor contract.   One day in February 1997 the Managing Director, a man called Percy Powell, telephoned me to tell me that he had heard of a new type of refuse collection vehicle with impressive labour saving innovations that offered huge operational savings and that he was interested in finding out more.  He asked me if I would be prepared to visit the factory where they were manufactured and give him my opinion.  To be honest I had very little interest in bincarts or how they are made but fortunately, before I could decline, he happened to mention that the factory was in Phoenix, Arizona in the United States of America and as quick as a flash of lightening my lack of interest transformed into complete and total enthusiasm.  Did I want to visit Phoenix to see some dustcarts?  You bet I did!

We had to do some business of course and visit a boring factory but one of the highlights of the trip was a night out to an iconic Phoenix restaurant.  We waited in the bar for our host Mike to pick us up and after a couple of beers he arrived and drove us south for a short distance out of the city to a cowboy steakhouse restaurant called the Rustler’s Rooste.  According to legend the original site of the restaurant was on top of a butte in the foothills of South Mountain and it was a hideout for cattle rustlers and outlaws.   The South Mountain recreational area is claimed to be the largest municipal park in the world and it has a commanding position overlooking the city.  Mike parked the people carrier and we stood and admired the views over the city that was stretched in front and below us like a scene from that Robert DeNiro film Heat.

From the outside Rustler’s Rooste looked disappointingly functional and not especially exciting but inside things were really buzzing.  Through the doors we walked over an indoor waterfall and then to get to the dining room there were two options, the stairs were the traditional method of getting down, but there was also a slide that curved around a central stage area and which was both quicker and more exhilarating.  We took this option of course and one by one were deposited swiftly into the dining area that had two large plate glass windows that provided a magnificent view of the city lights.

Rustler’s Rooste served cowboy food and a sign on the door said ‘Better come hungry’; so it was a good job that we had Dave and his reliable appetite with us!  There was a fabulous menu with an extensive choice of food including rattlesnake as a starter.  None of us had ever had that before so we just had to have some but although it sounded dangerous and exotic I seem to remember that it tasted rather disappointingly like chicken.  After that we had the full cowboy meal that consisted of crispy shrimp, barbecued chicken, cowboy beans, seafood kebabs, fries, barbecued pork ribs, corn on the cob, and a big juicy beef steak.  It was all cooked perfectly and I suspect rather better than a simple cowpokes meal out on the open range and the cowboys wouldn’t have had the nine layer chocolate cake to finish either, I’m certain!

The best thing about the Rustler’s Rooste was the entertainment because there was live music playing all night as two bands took it in turn to play good old country music which had people line dancing and playing cowboy in between the courses.  My favourite part of the evening was when a man brought a live snake into the room and then, in a carefully rehearsed way, dropped it and it slithered about the floor scattering diners in all directions.  We were assured later that it was not a venomous variety and perfectly harmless of course but it did scare the shit out of an awful lot of people at the time.  It turned out that Mike lived out of town on the open range and he knew an awful lot about rattle snakes and he amused us with serpent stories all the way back to the motel.

A Life in a Year – 31st October, Mount Rushmore

We didn’t get to see the best of the Quality Inn, to enjoy the swimming pool or the bars because there simply wasn’t enough time and in the morning after our first generous American breakfast in the dining room we met our tour guide and were pretty quickly loaded back on to the bus and sped away from the city on Interstate 90 and then Highway 16 towards the famous Black Hills of Dakota.

The Black Hills is an area that is famous for gold, Indian wars and Custer’s last stand.  After the discovery of the precious metal in the 1870s, the conflict over control of the region sparked the last major Indian War on the Great Plains of America known as the Black Hills War.  Previously the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie had confirmed Sioux ownership of the mountain range but this was conveniently overlooked by the authorities when gold was discovered and the native Americans were assigned alternative land ownership on less valuable bits of real estate in order to make way for the prospectors.

This led to real trouble and culminated at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in the neighbouring Montana territory, where the 7^th cavalry under the command of General George Armstrong Custer took on a coalition of Native American tribes comprised of Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapahoe warriors and led by the Sioux chiefs Crazy Horse and Gall and by the Hunkpapa seer and medicine man, Sitting Bull.  The one thousand, eight hundred Indian warriors outnumbered the army troops by four to one and with superior tactics and a rightful cause as motivation won an emphatic victory and killed all of the four hundred and fifty or so US cavalry troopers and Custer himself who despite his heroic image probably committed suicide in preference to ritual mutilation.  Good choice!

Our first destination was to see the U.S. National Monument Mount Rushmore with its famous granite sculptures of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.  The sculptured faces are sixty feet high and are as grand and enduring as the contributions of the men they represent.  Between 1927 and 31st October 1941 the sculptor Gutzon Borglum and four hundred workers created the colossal carvings to represent the first one hundred and fifty years of American history and symbolised these particular presidents who were selected for mountain side posterity because of their role in preserving the Republic and expanding its territory.  Originally the sculptures were to be carved from head to waist but this all proved to be a bit too ambitious so what we have are just the heads.

Next stop was the Crazy Horse Memorial about thirteen kilometres away and a sort of alternative ethnic memorial to the great native American warrior chief.  The monument has been in progress since 1948 and is still far from completion.  The sculptor died in 1982 and if and when it is ever finished, it will be the world’s largest sculpture because the head of Crazy Horse will be a massive eighty seven feet high.

The Memorial is on the road to a place of notoriety called Wounded Knee where on December 29, 1890, the Wounded Knee Massacre occurred on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. This cowardly action is commonly cited as the last major armed conflict between the United States and the Sioux Nation and the massacre resulted in the deaths of an estimated three hundred Sioux, many of them women and children and just twenty five U.S. soldiers.  Attacking in the early morning while the Sioux were still in bed proved to be an overwhelming advantage to the U.S. troops.

Later that day in the afternoon we drove along Highway 44 close to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and through the Badlands National Park, which is a strange and beautiful landscape of deep gorges, saw-edged spires and grassy-topped buttes, an eerie world carved out of the prairies by thirty five million years of wind and water erosion and with wonderful names like ‘Buffalo Gap National Grassland’ and the ‘Sage Creek Wilderness Area’ to inspire the imagination.

The term badlands represents a historical consensus in North America, the Indians called the place ‘mako sika’ and Spanish colonists called it ‘malpaís’, both meaning literally bad land, while French trappers called it ‘les mauvaises terres à traverser’ which translates as ‘the bad lands to cross’.  The term is also topographically apt because these badlands contain steep slopes, loose dry soil, slick clay, and deep sand, all of which seriously impede travel.  Luckily we were on an interstate highway in an air conditioned coach and we found the journey rather more straight forward than the early pioneers.  After visiting the Ben Reifel Visitor Centre in the Cedar Pass we rejoined the Interstate at Cactus Flat and turned west back towards the city.

All along Interstate 90 there were hundreds of billboards advertising the Wall Drugstore and I was beginning to wonder what this was all about when we reached the town of Wall and all was revealed.  ‘The Wall’ is actually a rugged topographical strip a half mile to three miles wide and nine miles long with a succession of tinted spires, ridges and twisted gullies which separates the lower prairie from the upper and from which the name of the town of Wall, South Dakota is derived.

This is a small settlement just off the highway that is unremarkable except for the Wall Drugstore.  This small town store made its first step towards international fame when it was purchased by a man called Ted Hustead in 1931 during the great depression.  Hustead was a deeply religious man and a pharmacist who was looking for a small town with a thriving Catholic community in which to establish a business and he discovered and purchased Wall Drug.

It was located in a small town that was recently by-passed by a new main road in what he himself referred to as ‘the middle of nowhere’ and he thereafter struggled to make a living and business was very slow indeed until his wife hit upon a brilliant idea to advertise free ice water to thirsty travellers passing by on the nearby highway.  This was an immediate success and began to divert motorists off the main road to take advantage of the offer, to the extent that Wall Drug grew into an enormous cowboy themed shopping mall and even today free ice water is always available for travellers who stop by for a rest.  It’s a nice story and the place was busy but full of arcade shops with merchandise that I had no desire to purchase and it wasn’t a place that I would rush back to and I was happy to move on.

This was day 1 of my visit to some of the National Parks of the USA, the rest of the journey can be found here:

National Parks of the United States

A Life in a Year – 27th October, Phoenix Arizona and The Rustler’s Rooste

 

On a business trip to Phoenix, Arizona in 1997 we went one night to a cowboy steakhouse restaurant called the Rustler’s Rooste.  According to legend the original site of the restaurant was on top of a butte in the foothills of South Mountain and it was a hideout for cattle rustlers and outlaws.   The South Mountain recreational area is claimed to be the largest municipal park in the world and it has a commanding position overlooking the city.  Mike parked the people carrier and we stood and admired the views over the city that was stretched in front and below us like a scene from that Robert DeNiro film Heat.

From the outside Rustler’s Rooste looked disappointingly functional and not especially exciting but inside things were really buzzing.  Through the doors we walked over an indoor waterfall and then to get to the dining room there were two options, the stairs were the traditional method of getting down, but there was also a slide that curved around a central stage area and which was both quicker and more exhilarating.  We took this option of course and one by one were deposited swiftly into the dining area that had two large plate glass windows that provided a magnificent view of the city lights.

Rustler’s Rooste served cowboy food and a sign on the door said ‘Better come hungry’; so it was a good job that we had Dave and his reliable appetite with us!  There was a fabulous menu with an extensive choice of food including rattlesnake as a starter.  None of us had ever had that before so we just had to have some but although it sounded dangerous and exotic I seem to remember that it tasted rather disappointingly like chicken.  After that we had the full cowboy meal that consisted of crispy shrimp, barbecued chicken, cowboy beans, seafood kebabs, fries, barbecued pork ribs, corn on the cob, and a big juicy beef steak.  It was all cooked perfectly and I suspect rather better than a simple cowpoke’s meal out on the open range and the cowboys wouldn’t have had the nine layer chocolate cake to finish either, I’m fairly certain!

The best thing about the Rustler’s Rooste was the entertainment because there was live music playing all night as two bands took it in turn to play good old country music which had people line dancing and playing cowboy in between the courses.  My favourite part of the evening was when a man brought a live snake into the room and then, in a carefully rehearsed way, dropped it and it slithered about the floor scattering diners in all directions.  We were assured later that it was not a venomous variety and perfectly harmless of course but it did scare the pants off an awful lot of people at the time.  It turned out that Mike lived out of town on the open range and he knew an awful lot about rattle snakes and he amused us with serpent stories all the way back to the motel.

http://www.rustlersrooste.com/

A Year in a Life – 12th October, Columbus Day and The Great Salt Lake

No one can be absolutely sure who first discovered North America but Christopher Columbus stakes a strong claim and 12^th October is celebrated in the United States as Columbus Day. Whoever found it was lucky for us because in 1995 we visited the mid-west states and spent a couple of days in Salt Lake City.

On the second day there was a choice to be made, we could either enjoy a free day sightseeing and shopping in Salt Lake City or we could go on an optional visit to the Great Salt Lake itself and not being terribly keen on shopping and being so close to the Lake it seemed a shame not to take this opportunity.

The Great Salt Lake is the largest salt lake in the Western Hemisphere, the thirty third largest lake in the world and the fourth largest terminal lake in the world, which means that the water comes in but none goes out except through the process of evaporation.  In an average year the lake covers an area of around four thousand, four hundred square kilometres but the size fluctuates substantially due to its shallowness because it is only about ten metres deep and it can be as much as double or half that size in exceptional years.

It has been called America’s Dead Sea and certainly there are no fish in the Great Salt Lake because of the high salinity but despite this the area is in fact rich with wildlife and provides habitat for millions of native birds, brine shrimp, shorebirds, and waterfowl.  The salinity too is highly variable, and depends on the water level but it is certainly much higher than you could expect to find in the world’s oceans to the extent that it is possible for the average person to float on the water without buoyancy aids and for that reason the shops around the shoreline certainly don’t make a fortune from selling inflatable beds!

We drove to a large lake side resort called Saltair to the west of the city which had the air of an old fashioned sea side town that was once popular but now a place well past it’s sell by date where people just don’t go any more. The unpredictable water levels have affected Saltair badly and it has also had the sad misfortune to be burned down twice.

  

When it was first constructed it was intended to be the western equivalent of Coney Island on the east coast and was one of the very first amusement parks in the USA and for a time was the most popular family destination west of New York.  The Saltair that we visited however was much smaller than the original and had been rebuilt in 1981 following the second fire and was constructed out of a salvaged Air Force aircraft hangar.  To try and disguise it the owners had added turrets at each corner and the entrance, which gave it the rather unusual look of a middle-east mosque and which only served to give it a strange appearance that was amusing rather than impressive.  Soon after opening the waters receded leaving it high and dry and an awful long way from the new shoreline.  The car park was strangely empty and inside the building we were practically the only visitors and the exhibits were both lifeless and tired.  Outside too it was all rather sad with rows of decaying wooden pilings snaking outward toward the lake, all that remains of a railway trestle and a pier which once led to the earlier Saltair resort.

The Lake itself however was a very remarkable sight, a massive expanse of flat deep blue water and as it was early morning there was moody mist hanging over the surface that created an eerie atmosphere.   From where we were on the south shore the lake stretches for a hundred and twenty kilometres to the north and fifty to the west.

Like Loch Ness in Scotland there are stories of a Great Salt Lake Monster which began in 1877 when workers on the north shore salt flats claimed to see a creature with the body of a crocodile and the head of a horse.  They claimed that the monster attacked them one evening and they had to make a quick getaway and hide until morning but sceptics say that this creature was most probably just a buffalo cooling off in the lake.  Either that or they had been drinking moonshine whiskey.   Needless to say, we didn’t see the creature this morning.

A Life in a Year – 1st March, Yellowstone Park and a Super Volcano

Yellowstone was designated as a National Park on March 1st 1872 when President Ulysses S Grant signed a new law ordering ‘the tract of land lying near the headwaters of the Yellowstone River to be set apart as a public park’ and in so doing Yellowstone became the first National Park in the USA and indeed the world.

We entered at the picturesque east entrance and drove through an area of coniferous forest badly scarred by the fire damage of 1988, which had burned down a third of Yellowstone’s forests.  After that we climbed the Absoroka Mountains to the Sylvan Pass and then descended swiftly towards Yellowstone and the largest mountain lake in North America.

Stops to admire the views came frequently as you might imagine and the scenery was truly superb.  Next we turned north towards Tower Canyon passing on the way the sulphur cauldron and the mud volcano and stopping for a while at Canyon Village and taking the steep walk to the lookout point at Inspiration Point for great views of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River, a thousand feet below.  Next we went on to Tower junction and the high falls tumbling spectacularly one hundred and thirty feet into Tower Creek below.  Finally we drove over the Blacktail Deer Plateau and stopped for a longer time at Mammoth Hot Springs.

The park is sensationally beautiful with stately snow capped peaks, lush meadows with herds of grazing bison, rivers and tumbling streams, a magnificent sky blue lake and bounteous wildlife.  But Yellowstone is dangerous because it is a super volcano called a caldera (which is Latin for cauldron) that are so explosive that they just burst open and blow everything away in one almighty blast of truly biblical proportions.

And this event would be so huge that it is the reason why previous eruptions have not left behind a classic volcanic mountain, like say Vesuvius or Mount Etna.  The Yellowstone caldera measures nine thousand square kilometers and the crater is almost sixty-five kilometers across, so as you can probably imagine that would have been one hell of an explosion!

The main attraction at Mammoth Hot Springs were the terraces where underground heat, water, limestone, and rock fracture combine to create multi coloured terraces created by micro-organisms and living bacteria that create beautiful shades of oranges, pinks, yellows, greens, and browns. The springs are constantly changing because as formations grow water is forced to flow in different directions and all of that creates a kaleidoscopic display.  We stayed here long enough to walk around the boiling mud pits hissing and spitting like an old steam engine and to bump into a herd of wild elk feeding on the lush autumn grass.

Yellowstone sits on top of a reservoir of molten rock about two hundred kilometers below the surface of the earth and rises here close to the surface and is the reason for all of the geysers, bubbling mud pots and hot springs that are scattered liberally around the park.  The magma chamber is about sixty kilometres across and about twelve kilometres thick so that is something to bear in mind when you are wandering about leisurely admiring the scenery.

If this thing were to go off you would hear the bang all the way to the North Pole!  Luckily these super volcanoes don’t go off very often, the last time was six hundred and thirty thousand years ago, but if it did explode you would definitely want to stand well back because one thing to be sure is that nothing for thousands of miles around would survive.

Scientists estimate that Yellowstone blows every six hundred thousand years so by my calculation the next one is well overdue!  The last super volcano eruption on earth was seventy four thousand years ago in northern Sumatra and that produced an enormous blast and a long period of volcanic winter that almost destroyed the emerging human race.  It is absolutely certain that a Yellowstone explosion could completely obliterate the world as we know it to such an extent that we certainly wouldn’t have to worry about climate change or Saturday’s lottery result ever again.

In addition to the risk of the volcano there are other natural things that also present constant danger.  There are on average about one thousand earthquakes a year, most are too small to notice but they are always there, rock falls are a constant danger because of all of the seismic activity forever rearranging the geological furniture as it were and then there is always the chance that there may be a serious explosion that would be curtains for anyone standing close by.  Bearing all that in mind it is probably good advice therefore not to go poking around the surface with a big stick!

I mention all this because today we stopped off to see the most well-known and reliable geyser in the park.  Old Faithful is a popular tourist spot where the famous geyser erupts promptly every seventy minutes or so and there are grandstands arranged an appropriate distance away from the boiling steam for the visitors to sit and admire the spectacle.  An eruption can shoot anything from 3,700 to 8,400 gallons of boiling water to a height of fifty five metres and can last from one to five minutes.

The average height of an eruption is forty four metres and that’s about the equivalent of about ten London double decker busses.  Previously the most famous geyser in the park was Excelsior, which used to erupt regularly to a height of a hundred metres but in 1888 it just stopped and didn’t erupt again for a hundred years.  One day Old Faithful will no doubt just stop in exactly the same way.  The biggest geyser in the park and indeed the world is the Steamboat geyser which blows to a height of one hundred and twenty metres but this spectacle is most infrequent and you really wouldn’t want to sit waiting for it because that could waste more than half of your life.

A Life in a Year – 14th February, Arizona and the Rustler’s Rooste

On the 14^th February 1912 Arizona became the 48^th state of the Union.

Before I moved to Lincolnshire I used to work for a French waste management company called Onyx UK that was attempting to take over refuse collection services in the UK and I worked at a depot in Maidenhead in Berkshire and managed the Windsor contract.   One day in February 1997 the Managing Director, a man called Percy Powell, telephoned me to tell me that he had heard of a new type of refuse collection vehicle with impressive labour saving innovations that offered huge operational savings and that he was interested in finding out more.  He asked me if I would be prepared to visit the factory where they were manufactured and give him my opinion.  To be honest I had very little interest in bincarts or how they are made but fortunately, before I could decline, he happened to mention that the factory was in Phoenix, Arizona in the United States of America and as quick as a flash of lightening my lack of interest transformed into complete and total enthusiasm.  Did I want to visit Phoenix to see some dustcarts?  You bet I did!

We had to do some business of course and visit a boring factory but one of the highlights of the trip was a night out to an iconic Phoenix restaurant.  We waited in the bar for our host Mike to pick us up and after a couple of beers he arrived and drove us south for a short distance out of the city to a cowboy steakhouse restaurant called the Rustler’s Rooste.  According to legend the original site of the restaurant was on top of a butte in the foothills of South Mountain and it was a hideout for cattle rustlers and outlaws.   The South Mountain recreational area is claimed to be the largest municipal park in the world and it has a commanding position overlooking the city.  Mike parked the people carrier and we stood and admired the views over the city that was stretched in front and below us like a scene from that Robert DeNiro film Heat.

From the outside Rustler’s Rooste looked disappointingly functional and not especially exciting but inside things were really buzzing.  Through the doors we walked over an indoor waterfall and then to get to the dining room there were two options, the stairs were the traditional method of getting down, but there was also a slide that curved around a central stage area and which was both quicker and more exhilarating.  We took this option of course and one by one were deposited swiftly into the dining area that had two large plate glass windows that provided a magnificent view of the city lights.

Rustler’s Rooste served cowboy food and a sign on the door said ‘Better come hungry’; so it was a good job that we had Dave and his reliable appetite with us!  There was a fabulous menu with an extensive choice of food including rattlesnake as a starter.  None of us had ever had that before so we just had to have some but although it sounded dangerous and exotic I seem to remember that it tasted rather disappointingly like chicken.  After that we had the full cowboy meal that consisted of crispy shrimp, barbecued chicken, cowboy beans, seafood kebabs, fries, barbecued pork ribs, corn on the cob, and a big juicy beef steak.  It was all cooked perfectly and I suspect rather better than a simple cowpokes meal out on the open range and the cowboys wouldn’t have had the nine layer chocolate cake to finish either, I’m certain!

The best thing about the Rustler’s Rooste was the entertainment because there was live music playing all night as two bands took it in turn to play good old country music which had people line dancing and playing cowboy in between the courses.  My favourite part of the evening was when a man brought a live snake into the room and then, in a carefully rehearsed way, dropped it and it slithered about the floor scattering diners in all directions.  We were assured later that it was not a venomous variety and perfectly harmless of course but it did scare the shit out of an awful lot of people at the time.  It turned out that Mike lived out of town on the open range and he knew an awful lot about rattle snakes and he amused us with serpent stories all the way back to the motel.