A recent trip through Alamosa reminded me that I'd never written about
my trip to see the gators. High time!
As you drive up Colorado highway 17 north of Alamosa, you pass a
series of old, faded, hand-painted signs saying things like
"Alligators? In Colorado?" and "COLORADO GATORS Discount Tickets sold HERE!"
I'd seen them for years, and chuckled a little but didn't ever give them much thought.
The desert is full of signs for roadside attractions that were
abandoned fifty years ago.
But five or six years ago, someone told me
that Colorado Gators actually was quite an interesting place, too bad it had
recently closed. Darnit — why couldn't someone have told me that
before it closed? Oh, well.
Then last year, we were heading up 17 on our way to visit the
relatives, and I couldn't help noticing that there were really quite
a lot of signs for an attraction that was supposedly gone.
And some of the signs looked fairly new. We had some time to spare, so we
took the detour and found Colorado Gators still very much open for business.
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Tags: travel, nature, alligators, roadside attraction
[
11:04 Aug 09, 2024
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I was talking to a friend about LANL's proposed new powerline.
A lot of people are opposing it because
the line would run through the Caja del Rio, an open-space
piñon-juniper area adjacent to Santa Fe which is owned by the
US Forest Service.
The proposed powerline would run from the Caja across the Rio Grande to the Lab.
It would carry not just power but also a broadband fiber line, something
Los Alamos town, if not the Lab, needs badly.
On the other hand, those opposed worry about
road-building and habitat destruction in the Caja.
I'm always puzzled reading accounts of the debate. There already is a
powerline running through the Caja and across the Rio via Powerline Point.
The discussions never say (a) whether the proposed
line would take a different route, and if so, (b) Why? why can't they
just tack on some more lines to the towers along the existing route?
For instance, in the slides from one of the public meetings, the
map
on slide 9
not only doesn't show the existing powerline, but also
uses a basemap that has no borders and NO ROADS. Why would you use a
map that doesn't show roads unless you're deliberately trying to
confuse people?
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Tags: mapping, GIS, programming, python, Los Alamos, openstreetmap
[
12:14 Aug 01, 2024
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]