Prague and Seminole, Oklahoma

First timer? In this formerly once-a-day blog (and now pretty much a once-a-week blog) I use an app that provides a random latitude and longitude that puts me somewhere in the continental United States (the lower 48).  I call this “landing.”

I keep track of the watersheds I land in, as well as the town or towns I land near.  I do some internet research to hopefully find something of interest about my landing location. 

To find out more about A Landing A Day (like who “Dan” is) please see “About Landing” above.  To check out some relatively recent changes in how I do things, check out “About Landing (Revisited).”

Landing number 2604; A Landing A Day blog post number 1049

Dan:  Today’s lat/long (N35^o 17.511’, W96^o 54.067) puts me in central Oklahoma:

Here’s my local landing map:

I labeled “Rabbit Lakes” for what I think is a pretty obvious reason.  I’m quite sure this is the only map in existence that labels these lakes thusly.

Moving over to Google Earth, you can see that I landed in the watershed of Squirrel Creek, on to the North Canadian River (20^th hit):

You can also see where the Orange Dude went to get a look at the North Canadian.  Here’s what he saw (looking east):

The OD could get quite close to my landing:

And here’s his view (Oh all right; he didn’t see the big yellow arrow):

As I discussed at length in a February 2021 post about a landing about 30 miles southeast of today’s landing, a huge swath of central Oklahoma experienced an enormous oil boom in the 1920s and 1930s, including all of the towns near my landing.  For a fascinating look at Oklahoma’s oil boom, type “Seminole” in the search bar. 

But this time, I decided to check out Prague (and then pay a quick visit to Seminole.  Wiki mentions that Jim Thorpe was born near Prague.  I quickly found that Mr. Thorpe was quite the fascinating character.  From Wiki:

Thorpe was born near Prague, Oklahoma.  His parents were both of mixed-race ancestry. His father, Hiram Thorpe, had an Irish father and a Sac and Fox Indian mother.  His mother, Charlotte Vieux, had a French father and a Potawatomi mother. Thorpe was raised as a Sac and Fox, and his native name, Wa-Tho-Huk, is translated as “path lit by great flash of lightning.”

In 1904 the sixteen-year-old Thorpe attended Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. There his athletic ability was recognized and he was coached by Glenn Scobey “Pop” Warner, one of the most influential coaches of early American football history. 

Later that year the youth was orphaned after his father Hiram died from gangrene poisoning, after being wounded in a hunting accident.  The young Thorpe again dropped out of school. He resumed farm work for a few years before returning to Carlisle School.

Thorpe began his athletic career at Carlisle in 1907 when he walked past the track and, still in street clothes, beat all the school’s high jumpers with an impromptu 5-ft 9-in jump.  He also competed in football, baseball, lacrosse, and ballroom dancing, winning the 1912 intercollegiate ballroom dancing championship.

Thorpe first gained nationwide notice in 1911 for his athletic ability playing football.  As a running back, defensive back, placekicker and punter, Thorpe scored all of his team’s four field goals in an 18–15 upset of Harvard, a top-ranked team in the early days of the NCAA.  His team finished the season 11–1.

In 1912 Carlisle won the national collegiate championship largely as a result of Thorpe’s efforts: he scored 25 touchdowns and 198 points during the season,

Carlisle’s 1912 record included a 27–6 victory over the West Point Army team.  In that game, Thorpe’s 92-yard touchdown was nullified by a teammate’s penalty, but on the next play (after the 5-yard penalty) Thorpe rushed for a 97-yard touchdown.  Future President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who played against him in that game, recalled of Thorpe in a 1961 speech:

“Here and there are some people who are supremely endowed. My memory goes back to Jim Thorpe. He could do anything better than any other football player I ever saw.”

In the spring of 1912, he started training for the 1912 Olympics, to be held just a few months later in Sweden. He had confined his efforts to jumps, hurdles and shot-puts, but now added pole vaulting, javelin, discus and hammer throw. In the Olympic trials, his all-round ability stood out in all these events and so he earned a place on the team that went to Sweden, competing in pentathlon, decathlon, javelin, high jump and long jump.

He won four of the five pentathlon events and placed third in the javelin, an event he had not competed in before 1912. Thorpe won the gold medal.  That same day, he qualified for the high jump final, in which he finished in a tie for fourth. On July 12, Thorpe placed seventh in the long jump.

Thorpe’s final event was the decathlon, his first (and as it turned out, his only) decathlon.  He placed in the top four in all ten events, and his Olympic record of 8,413 points stood for nearly two decades. Even more remarkably, because someone had stolen his shoes just before he was due to compete, he found a mismatched pair of replacements, including one from a trash can, and won the gold medal wearing them. Overall, Thorpe won eight of the 15 individual events comprising the pentathlon and decathlon.

He went on to a remarkable career:

• He played outfield for the New York (baseball) Giants for several years.
• In 1915, he signed with the Canton Bulldogs (a professional football team playing in the American Football League, a precursor to the NFL).. They paid him $250 a game, a tremendous wage at the time.  The team won titles in 1916, 1917, and 1919. Thorpe ended the 1919 championship game by kicking a wind-assisted 95-yard punt from his team’s own 5-yard line, effectively putting the game out of reach.
• In 1926, he played for the “World Famous Indians,” (WFI in the photo to the right), a traveling basketball team.

After his athletic career, Thorpe struggled to provide for his family. He found it difficult to work a non-sports-related job and never held a job for an extended period of time. During the Great Depression in particular, he had various jobs, among others as an extra for several movies, usually playing an American Indian chief in Westerns.

Apart from his career in films, he worked as a construction worker, a doorman/bouncer, a security guard, and a ditchdigger. He briefly joined the United States Merchant Marine in 1945, during World War II.

Thorpe was a chronic alcoholic during his later life.  He ran out of money sometime in the early 1950s. When hospitalized for lip cancer in 1950, Thorpe was admitted as a charity case.  At a press conference announcing the procedure, his wife, Patricia, wept and pleaded for help, saying, “We’re broke … Jim has nothing but his name and his memories. He has spent money on his own people and has given it away. He has often been exploited.”

He died in California in 1953 of heart failure at age 65.

Residents from the Shawnee Oklahoma area paid to have his body returned to Shawnee by train from California.  After Thorpe’s funeral, local people began a fund-raising effort to erect a memorial for Thorpe at the town’s athletic park. Local officials had asked state legislators for funding, but a bill that included $25,000 for their proposal was vetoed by Governor Johnston Murray.

Meanwhile, Thorpe’s third wife, unbeknownst to the rest of his family, took Thorpe’s body and had it shipped to Pennsylvania when she heard that the small Pennsylvania towns of Mauch Chunk and East Mauch Chunk  were seeking to attract business.  [“Mauch Chunk” is pronounced Maw Chunk.]

 She made a deal with officials which, according to Thorpe’s son Jack, was made by his wife for monetary considerations.  Hoping that Thorpe’s grave would become a tourist attraction the towns “bought” Thorpe’s remains, erected a monument to him at the grave, merged, and renamed the newly united town in his honor as Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. Thorpe had never been there. The monument site contains his tomb, two statues of him in athletic poses, and historical markers recounting his life story.

In June 2010, Jack Thorpe filed a federal lawsuit against the borough of Jim Thorpe, seeking to have his father’s remains returned to his homeland and re-interred near other family members in Oklahoma. Citing the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, Jack argued that his father’s remains be buried on Indian lands near those of his father, sisters and brother, a mile from the place he was born. He claimed that the agreement between his stepmother and officials from Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, was made against the wishes of other family members, who wanted him buried in Native American land.  Jack Thorpe died in 2011.

In 2013, other of Jim Thorpe’s children began a series of legal challenges.  The District Court ruled in favor of the Borough of Jim Thorpe.  On October 5, 2015, the United States Supreme Court refused to hear the matter, effectively bringing the legal process to an end.

Here’s a quick personal story: Back in July 2017, Jody and I met a Lafayette College buddy of mine, Frank Sugrue, at the Mauch Chunk Opera House (of course, in Jim Thorpe) to go to a David Bromberg concert. I hadn’t seen Frank since 1972. We met at a restaurant before the concert. I can still picture our meeting, where we kind of shrugged and nodded. “Greg?” “Frank?”

I’ll briefly head down to Seminole, which is the hometown of musician Joe Liggins.  From Wiki:

Joe Liggins,1916 –  1987), was an American R&B, jazz and blues pianist and vocalist who led Joe Liggins and his Honeydrippers in the 1940s and 1950s. His band appeared often on the Billboard magazine charts. The band’s biggest hit was “The Honeydripper”, released in 1945.

Here’s a video of Joe doing his hit, “The Honeydipper.” I thoroughly enjoy watching his relaxed piano style . . .

As is my wont, I search GE for some nice scenery pictures posted there.  All I could find is this shot of a cool cloud, posted by Robert Campbell, 3 miles west of my landing:          

That’ll do it . . .

KS

Greg

© 2022 A Landing A Day

Gunnison and Crested Butte, Colorado

First timer? In this formerly once-a-day blog (and now pretty much a once-a-week blog) I use an app that provides a random latitude and longitude that puts me somewhere in the continental United States (the lower 48).  I call this “landing.”

I keep track of the watersheds I land in, as well as the town or towns I land near.  I do some internet research to hopefully find something of interest about my landing location. 

To find out more about A Landing A Day (like who “Dan” is) please see “About Landing” above.  To check out some relatively recent changes in how I do things, check out “About Landing (Revisited).”

Landing number 2603; A Landing A Day blog post number 1048

Dan:  Today’s lat/long (N38^o 22.528’, W106^o 56.730) puts me in southwest Colorado:

But before I get into the meat of this Colorado landing, I have some old business associated with my most recent landing (Valley, Wyoming).  If you haven’t read it, do not pass Go, do not collect $200, go directly to my previous post (simply scroll down).  If, on the other hand, you read it (and remember it), you are allowed to read on:

The ink had hardly dried on my Valley post, when I stumbled on some information that I couldn’t ignore.

As you no doubt recall, I googled “town of Valley Wyoming” and found a humorous Yale class of 1915 write-up about their first reunion, featuring one Win Brooks.  Win was touted as being the “mayor, sheriff and accepted wit of the prosperous town of Valley, Wyoming.”  I speculated that Win was originally from Valley, and then went back home after he graduated from Yale. 

I went on:

 “Just for the record (in case you’re not convinced that Win is actually from this particular Valley, Wyoming), I found the index for an obscure collection of telegraphs and letters associated with the Valley Ranch, located along the South Branch.  The index contained dozens of references to neighbor Win Brooks.”

I noticed that the owner of Valley Ranch was a gentleman named Larry Larom, and that he was a Princeton grad.  I toyed with adding that information to my post, but didn’t bother.

After posting (and evidently with nothing better to do), I idly googled Larry Larom, and discovered he had his own Wiki page, which contained this salient information about Win Brooks:

Born in New York City, Larom’s father was a prominent merchant there. Larom attended Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in Madison Square Garden in New York City and became inspired to travel to Cody in northwestern Wyoming the following year for a summer vacation on Valley Ranch (owned by Jim McLaughlin). After three more summer visits there, he decided to become a dude rancher.

He persuaded a fellow New Yorker, Winthrop Brooks, to become his partner in the purchase and operation of Valley Ranch on the south fork of the Shoshone River, located 40 miles down a dirt road from Cody.

Larry and Brooks, scions of wealthy New York families and educated at Princeton and Yale Universities, had an advantage in selling the concept of a dude ranch vacation to members of their social class.

As mentioned above, I speculated that Win was originally from Valley, WY.  Wrong! 

So Larry and Win were a couple of rich New York City kids whose families likely moved in the same social circles.  Larry was hooked on a western lifestyle and the idea of owning a dude ranch.  They probably stayed in touch while in college (at least connecting during breaks from school), and Larry needed a partner to share in the cost of buying and running a dude ranch. 

Here’s a picture of Larry at the gate to Valley Ranch:

And this, of some New York City rich kids all duded out at the dude ranch.  (OK, so I don’t know if they’re from New York City):

Of course, I googled Winthrop Brooks, and found that he was a direct descendent (great-great-great grandson) of Henry Sands Brooks, who, in 1818, founded the clothing store that became Brooks Brothers.  I suspect that most of my readers are familiar with Brooks Brothers.  If not:  it is (actually, it was) a top-drawer men’s clothing store, with a reputation for conservatively-oriented business and business-casual attire. 

Anyway, Win left Valley, Wyoming (and his partner Larry) in 1926 and went on to serve as president of Brooks Brothers from 1935 – 1946.  He was the last family owner, and he sold the company in 1946.

I seemed to remember that I owned a Brooks Brothers shirt (passed down from my deceased father-in-law).  The shirt’s at least 30 years old – it must be high quality, and I continue to wear it fairly frequently.  Anyway, here’s a picture of the tag:

So the cotton was “woven in Italy” – that sounds classy. But then, the shirt is “Made in Hong Kong.” Boy – it has been a long time since “Made in Hong Kong” was common on a tag.

I had never noticed the critter on the tag.  A little research indicates that the picture is of a sheep suspended by a ribbon.  In the fifteenth century, this image came to represent fine wool, and has been the Brooks Brothers logo since 1850.

OK.  Now that that’s all cleared up, it’s time to get back to Colorado.  Here’s my local landing map:

I’ll head over to Google Earth (GE) for my watershed analysis:

I landed in the watershed of Corral Creek; on to Sugar Creek; on to Willow Creek.  Willow Creek discharges in the Blue Mesa Reservoir, which is a dammed-up portion of the Gunnison River (7^th hit).  Moving over to Street Atlas:

The Gunnison makes its way to the Colorado (198^th hit).

The Orange Dude found a bridge over the mouth of Willow Creek:

He looked upstream:

And downstream (the Reservoir):

He went upstream to the town of Gunnison, and found this view from a bridge over the river:

Speaking of Gunnison, Wiki had this point of interest:

Gunnison residents isolated themselves from the surrounding area during the Spanish Influenza epidemic for two months at the end of 1918. All highways were barricaded near the county lines. Train conductors warned all passengers that if they stepped outside of the train in Gunnison, they would be arrested and quarantined for five days.

This served as partial inspiration for the novel The Last Town on Earth (2006) by Thomas Mullen. The isolation was ultimately unsuccessful, as townspeople became restless after a few months, and the isolation was lifted in February 1919 only to have the flu arrive a month later, killing several.

I just downloaded The Last Town on Earth to my Kindle; it’s my current read.  The historic novel is about a town in the State of Washington that, during the 1918 pandemic, also decided on a draconian isolation.

I found an interesting disconnect between the Wiki article, and other references about the Gunnison Spanish Flu isolation.  All of the articles I could find (including the primary two used by Wiki) talk about the success of the isolation policy!  The Wiki piece implies that the policy was an abject failure.  Well, check this out from two of the articles referenced by Wiki.

One was from The Guardian; it was entitled “ Gunnison, Colorado: the town that dodged the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic.”  The other was from 9News.com, and was titled “”The 1918 Spanish flu killed 8,000 people in Colorado, but Gunnison only had 2 cases. Here’s why.”

Wow.  Quoting from Wiki:  “The isolation was ultimately unsuccessful . . .”  It seems inexcusable that Wiki put such a negative spin on the story!  Bad Wiki; bad Wiki; bad! bad!

From the Guardian article:

In late 1918 the world’s greatest killer – Spanish flu – roared towards Gunnison, a mountain town in Colorado.

The pandemic was infecting hundreds of millions of people in Europe, Africa, Asia and across the United States, overwhelming hospitals and morgues in Boston and Philadelphia before sweeping west, devastating cities, villages and hamlets from Alaska to Texas.

Gunnison, a farming and mining town of about 1,300 people, had special reason to fear. Two railroads connected it to Denver and other population centers, many badly hit. “The flu is after us” the Gunnison News-Champion warned on 10 October. “It is circulating in almost every village and community around us.”

Here’s one of the Gunnison News-Champion articles – mentioning the town of Sargents, just 30 miles east of Gunnison:

What happened next is instructive amid a new global health emergency a century later as the world struggles react to the emergence of a new coronavirus. Gunnison declared a “quarantine against all the world.” It erected barricades, sequestered visitors, arrested violators, closed schools and churches and banned parties and street gatherings, a de facto lockdown that lasted four months.

It worked. Gunnison emerged from the pandemic’s first two waves – by far the deadliest – without a single case. It was one of a handful of so-called “escape communities” that researchers have analyzed for insights into containing the apparently uncontainable.

“Gunnison’s management of the influenza situation, one hallmarked by the application of protective sequestration, is particularly impressive when one considers that nearly every nearby town and county was severely affected by the pandemic,” the University of Michigan Medical School said in a 2006 report for the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency. “The town of Gunnison was exceptional.”

I’m not very far into my book (the one about the fictional town in Washington State that enacted a quarantine like Gunnison’s), but the opening chapter followed a couple of townspeople who were posted as guards at a felled tree that blocked the main road into town.  A soldier they didn’t know approached the roadblock.  He was filthy, his uniform was in rags, and he was clearly ill.  The guards warned him away, but he kept on coming.  They didn’t want to take him into custody, for fear of infection.  “Stop right now, or I’ll shoot,” said one.  The soldier kept on coming, claiming that he was starving and exhausted and couldn’t walk the 15 miles to the nearest town.  The guard aimed for the man’s chest, but he kept coming.  He pulled the trigger. . . .

I hope that such drama did not happen in Gunnison.

Time for a quick visit to Crested Butte.  The town of Crested Butte is nestled between two significant mountain peaks:  Crested Butte (no surprise, there), and Mount Emmons:

There’s a ski resort on Crested Butte, but more importantly (for me) is the fact that there’s a huge molybdenum ore deposit under Mount Emmons.  From Wiki:

The molybdenum deposit under Mount Emmons is one of the largest in the United States. Jason Blevins from The Denver Post wrote an article about the deposit, starting with this picture of Mount Emmons looming over downtown Crested Butte:

Some excerpts:

This end-of-the-road village has spent nearly 40 years transforming itself from a mining town into a thriving tourist destination despite the threat of a huge molybdenum mine on the hill overlooking downtown.

For decades, every time molybdenum prices peaked, locals raised money and filed lawsuits to fight a proposed 1,000-worker mine digging 25 million tons of high-grade moly from the belly of beloved Mount Emmons. The crusade was at times so pitched that residents pledged to lay down in the middle of Whiterock Avenue to block ore-hauling trucks.

“This fight has defined our community for so long and has been an amazing sort of rally cry for what it means to be Crested Butte,” said Glenn Michel, mayor of the 1,500-resident town where a new economy is anchored in tourism and outdoor recreation in some of Colorado’s most pristine playgrounds.

Freeport-McMoRan — the world’s largest moly producer and owner of moly mining claims on Mount Emmons — has inked a preliminary deal to permanently remove these claims and return about 9,000 acres to the Forest Service.

Excellent news for the town; although the mine would have been an economic boon of sorts.

One of the main reasons I decided to talk about molybdenum and Mount Emmons is because of the mining comany Freeport-McMoRan.  Our company – Hill Environmental Group – performed an environmental clean-up project at a Freeport McMoRan’s copper product manufacturing plant in Elizabeth NJ – now shut down and abandoned.  I was the safety guy on the project, and drove to Elizabeth every day for a couple of months.  Anyway, there were some old industrial buildings around the copper plant, and the doorway into one abandoned buildings caught my eye.   I took a picture of it, and shared it with my wife, Jody.

Here’s the picture (actually, a picture of a print; I couldn’t find my original):

Jody has turned into quite the watercolor artist.  Here’s her rendition of the old door:

I’ll close with this shot of the Blue Mesa Reservoir posted on GE by Wolfgang Staudt:

That’ll do it . . .

KS

Greg

© 2022 A Landing A Day

Valley, Wyoming (South of Cody)

First timer? In this formerly once-a-day blog (and now pretty much a once-a-week blog) I use an app that provides a random latitude and longitude that puts me somewhere in the continental United States (the lower 48).  I call this “landing.”

I keep track of the watersheds I land in, as well as the town or towns I land near.  I do some internet research to hopefully find something of interest about my landing location. 

To find out more about A Landing A Day (like who “Dan” is) please see “About Landing” above.  To check out some relatively recent changes in how I do things, check out “About Landing (Revisited).”

Landing number 2602; A Landing A Day blog post number 1047

Dan:  Today’s lat/long (N44^o 10.728’, W109^o 25.912) puts me in northwestern Wyoming:

Here’s my local landing map:

The above map is over sixty miles across. The city of Cody is just off the northern edge of the map. I could have included it, but liked the empty-looking map.

My local streams-only map:

I landed in the watershed of good ol’ Stream Perennial, on to Piney Ck, to the Greybull River (3^rd hit).  Zooming way back:

The Greybull flows to the Bighorn (23^rd hit); to the Yellowstone (62^nd hit); to the Missouri (458^th hit); to the MM (1009^th hit).

I landed 10,874 feet above sea level, way up in the mountains.  Here’s a Google Earth shot of my landing looking west:

Look closely, and you can see that I landed near the top of a dramatic ridge.  The ridge marks a watershed divide between the Greybull (my river) and the South Fork of the Shoshone (on the other side of the ridge). The titular town of Valley is along the South Fork.

Looking north, with the South Fork of the Shoshone River to the left:

Looking east, down towards Piney Creek and the Greybull:

It’s time to move on to the “town” of Valley, the only dot on my huge local landing map.  I put “town” in quotation marks for a good reason.  There appears to be no such town in existence.

The town (if there is one) is in valley of the South Fork of the Shoshone River.  Here’s an oblique GE shot looking upstream:

My landing, although not visible, is in the mountains on the left.  From a higher viewpoint (so we can see my landing), here’s the down valley look:

So what about the town.  Well, let me tell you – from a Google research perspective, “Valley” is a terrible name for a town.  Simply Googling “Valley Wyoming,” even with the quotes, gives a myriad of responses where those two words appear together, none of them having anything to do with this little town on the South Fork of the Shoshone River.

Just for the heck of it, I Googled (with the quotes) “town of Valley Wyoming.” And one, only one, answer came back:

Wow. Sometimes, a search like this gives me a flash of awe about how Google could find this obscure phrase buried in an obscure book. And do it in 0.51seconds . . .

It turns out, this is a write-up of the first-year reunion for the Yale Class of 1915.  Here’s a pertinent portion of the write-up, which is part of the intro:

In all ways, the largest Reunion ever held by the Yale class of 1915 was an unqualified success. 

[Note: The above sentence is totally tongue-in-cheek.  This was the one-year reunion, so of course, it was the largest ever . . .]

Numerically, over a third of the class registered at the Class Headquarters, 114 High Street, where all arrangements had been made for the greatest party of all time, under the able guidance of Al Royce. 

From the lone stretches of the Western Plains, where Win Brooks reigns as mayor, sheriff, and accepted wit of the prosperous town of Valley, Wyoming; from the sun-kissed uplands of the Sierra Madre where Birch Harrison cultivates his lemons and peaches; from the factory smoke of Waterbury and Derby; to New Haven we came to plan new movements and renew old friendships.

So, there’s a Yale grad named Win Brooks, who, just one year out of Yale, became the reigning “mayor, sheriff, and accepted wit of the prosperous town of Valley, Wyoming.”  I can only assume that Win was originally from Valley, and returned there after graduating from Yale.

I couldn’t help myself, so I Googled Win Brooks Yale Wyoming, and I found a “History of the Class of Nineteen-hundred and Fourteen, Yale College.”  Check out this excerpt:

The  guide  of  our  slumming  expedition  asked  us  if  we would  like  to  see  a  real  gambling  den.  We  said  yes,  after carefully  tucking  our  watches  and  other  valuables  into  our shoes.  So  he  led  us  mysteriously  to  a  door  from  behind  which we  could  hear  the  click  of  poker  chips  and  a  low  undertone of  quiet,  gentlemanly  curse  words.  The  intrepid  guide whistled  a  few  bars  of  “Auction  bridge  is  falling  down,”  and we  were  ushered  into  as  select  a  company  of  casino  sharks  as ever  disgraced  a  college  curriculum.  Marshmallow  cans  and ginger-beer  bottles  gave  the  room  an  appearance  of  unspeakable rakishness. 

[Say what?  Marshmallow cans and ginger-beer bottles = unspeakable rakishness?? I wouldn’t be surprised if the author of this piece also wrote the reunion piece. Just another case of tongue-in-cheekness. And here’s the Win Brooks blurb:

Before  we  left  they  told  us  a  story  about  Win Brooks (Class of ’15),  to  show  how  completely  he  is  absorbed  by  his  ruling passion  for  the  devil’s  picture  cards.  One  night  Win  went  to a  party.  He  was  a  bit  sleepy,  as  the  night  before  he had  sat  up  rather  late  to  call  on  a  couple  of  queens.  (He  lost, by  the  way,  for  the  other  man  had  three  kings.)  At  any rate,  Win  dozed  off  while  a  young  lady  was  strumming  on the  piano.  Presently  she  turned  to Win and  asked,  “What  shall  I  play now?”  And  Win  replied  drowsily,  “I  don’t  know.  Let’s  see your  hand.”

I love it!  Just for the record (in case you’re not convinced that Win is actually from this particular Valley, Wyoming), I found the index for an obscure collection of telegraphs and letters associated with the Valley Ranch, located along the South Branch.  The index contained dozens of references to neighbor Win Brooks. Speaking of Valley Ranch, I found this:

Continuing my search, adding “Park County Wyoming” to my query, I found this:

I’m not the only one unable to find out much about Valley. . .

Although I did find something: somehow I stumbled on the fact that there’s a Valley Elementary School (and yes, it’s located along the South Fork).  And it has its own website!

Here’s the above photo, cleaned up:

From the website, here’s part of the “About Us” section (with my underline for emphasis):

The website had this picture of the teacher with all five students, raising Old Glory:

I don’t think that I mentioned that the only road in the South Fork Shoshone River Valley is South Fork Road. It’s a dead end road – you drive about 35 miles south, and then you have to turn around where the valley becomes too narrow for a road. I Googled South Fork Road Cody Wyoming; there were four You Tube videos that were fun to peruse. I took some screen shots. This one shows an incredible herd of deer:

This one is from the head the valley, looking south:

The next two are at the reservoir located at the far northern end of the valley. Evidently, the bald eagle has a fish, and the crow would love to steal it:

I’ll close with a couple of South Fork Shoshone River Valley pictures posted on GE. First this, by old buddy Ralph Maughan:

And then this hauntingly beautiful shot by Jim Kallinen:

That’ll do it . . .

KS

Greg

© 2022 A Landing A Day

Pilot Mountain and Ararat, North Carolina (with bonus Virginia coverage)

First timer? In this formerly once-a-day blog (and now pretty much a once-a-week blog) I use an app that provides a random latitude and longitude that puts me somewhere in the continental United States (the lower 48).  I call this “landing.”

I keep track of the watersheds I land in, as well as the town or towns I land near.  I do some internet research to hopefully find something of interest about my landing location. 

To find out more about A Landing A Day (like who “Dan” is) please see “About Landing” above.  To check out some relatively recent changes in how I do things, check out “About Landing (Revisited).”

Landing number 2601; A Landing A Day blog post number 1046

Dan:  Today’s lat/long (N36^o 25.735’, W80^o 10.942) puts me in north central North Carolina:

Here’s my local landing map:

More about “Willow’s House” in a bit (and also why I ventured into Virginia for some of this post).

My streams-only map:

I landed in the watershed of the Dan River (1^st hit ever!); on to the Roanoke (5^th hit; making the Roanoke the 184^th river on my list of rivers with 5 or more hits).  The Roanoke discharges to Albemarle Sound, which sits behind the northern part of the Outer Banks. 

Over on Google Earth (GE), the Orange Dude found a bridge over the Dan not too far from my landing:

And here’s what he sees:

While he was in the neighborhood, he went a few miles northeast to get a look at my landing:

And here ‘tis:

While perusing my streams-only map, I noticed that I landed near the headwaters of several rivers.  I thought:  “There might be a triple point nearby!”

As my regulars probably know, a triple point, hydrologically speaking, is a hilltop where three watersheds meet at a single point.  So, if you’re standing on the hilltop, and you have a hose, and you spin around shooting a stream of water, a third of the water will end up in watershedd A, a third in watershed B, and a third in watershed C.   

So, here’s the situation local to my landing:

From the top of the triple point hill, water ends up in disparate locations:

As I’ve mentioned before in this blog, I personally visited a triple point in north central Pennsylvania, where the three watersheds are:

• The Susquehanna River to the Chesapeake Bay
• The Genesee River to Lake Ontario to the St. Lawrence River to the North Atlantic
• The Allegheny River to the Ohio River to Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico. 

What the heck.  While I’m on triple points, here’s a map:

The one I visited is a little off on the above map (it shows it in New York).  Trust me.  I was in Pennsylvania!  And how about the one labeled Triple Divide Peak!  It’s in Glacial National Park in Montana, and from the peak, water flows to Hudson Bay, the Columbia River and the Mississippi River.  Just think about that for a few seconds. Here’s a picture of Triple Divide Peak:

Moving on to Willow’s house.  Family and friends know who Willow is, but for the record, she’s my wife Jody’s daughter (my stepdaughter).   Anyway, she recently moved to southern Virginia, and Jody and I visited her and her three lovely daughters (our grandchildren) not long ago.  Her mailing address is Stuart, and we were in Stuart several times.  Patrick Springs is nearby, and we drove through once. 

Reason enough for me to venture out of my landing state. 

I don’t have much to say about Stuart, except that it was named after J.E.B. Stuart, a confederate general in the Civil War.  He’s often referred to as Jeb, and in fact, he referred to himself as Jeb.  But he’s James Ewell Brown Stuart.

Jeb was born in Ararat (more about that later).  Blue and Gray Education.org had this little tidbit about Jeb:

At West Point, Stuart earned the moniker “Beauty,” although it was anything but a compliment. His “short and retiring” chin was said to be totally distracting to anyone who looked at him. His West Point classmates coined his nickname with tongue fully in cheek. After graduation, Stuart wore a long, well-groomed beard to hide his chin.

Stuart was a man ahead of his time in how he created and maintained his public image. Without a doubt, he dressed to impress, often festooned in a red-lined gray cape with a yellow sash and a red flower in his lapel. His hat, which he always wore cocked to the side, featured an ostrich plume.

He served under Stonewall Jackson, and earned a stellar reputation for skills as a tactician and his wartime leadership.  His reputation was sullied after he failed to communicate with Lee about his location in the days leading up to Gettysburg (July 1863), and he led an unsuccessful charge against the Union Army.  Ten months later, he was shot at a battle defending Richmond, and died soon after. 

Although it took 20 years after his death, in 1884, Taylorsville VA changed its name to Stuart. 

Patrick Springs was originally two towns, one of which was named after Jacob Shough (rhymes with enough), a Methodist circuit rider.  Wiki tells us that the town was named Shuff in his honor.  Obviously, Shuff is the phonetic spelling of Shough.  Or, shood I say that Shuff is the fonetic spelling of Shough.  Evidently, the town fathers wanted to be certain that no one mispronounced the name of the town . . .

So, we have two Ararats – one in Virginia (Jeb’s hometown) and one in North Carolina.  Both towns are named after the Ararat River, which flows between the towns, from Virginia to North Carolina.

From Wiki about the Virginia Ararat:

The community’s name comes from the Ararat River which flows through the area.  The river takes its name from a 1751 map where nearby Pilot Mountain is labeled as part of the “Mountains of Ararat.”  

Pilot Mountain was thought to resemble a bullfrog and the Native Americans named it “Ratratrat,” after the sound they thought the animal made. [Say what?  Everyone knows that frogs say “ribbit.”] Early white settlers thought what they were saying sounded like “Ararat,” which, according to the Bible, was the landing point of Noah’s Ark.

Just a second.  So there are two entirely-independent (and seemingly legitimate) explanations for the name of the river.  Could they both be true, and they simply reinforced each other?

Regardless, a visit to Mount Ararat is in order.  The mountain is in far eastern Turkey, near where Armenia & Iran abut Turkey.  Ararat is an extinct volcano, rising over 16,000 feet above sea level:

I never realized it was this substantial!  Here’s a shot with Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, in the foreground:

The Orange Dude was up for a quick trip to Turkey, so he found a road headed right toward Mount Ararat:

He was delighted to run into some folks (a dad and two sons?) and a donkey walking along the road:

So where does the whole Noah’s Ark thing come from?  From Wiki:

Noah’s Ark landed on the “mountains of Ararat,” according to Genesis 8:4.  Many historians and Bible scholars agree that “Ararat” is the Hebrew name of Urartu, the geographical predecessor of Armenia; they therefore argue that the word referred to the wider region at the time and not specifically to Mount Ararat.  The phrase is translated as “mountains of Armenia” in a fourth century Latin translation of the Bible.  Nevertheless, Mount Ararat is traditionally considered the resting place of Noah’s Ark.

Noah’s instructions are given to him by God (Genesis 6:14–16): the ark is to be 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide, and 30 cubits high (approximately 440 feet long by 72 feet wide by 43 feet high). 

Wow.  That’s a big boat.  Of course, it had to be big enough to hold two each of all of Earth’s critters.  And we sure as heck need a big flood to float this huge boat and deposit it on Mount Ararat.  But as a hydrologist. I mean, really.  Long-lasting torrential rains flood valleys, but will not flood regional landscapes many thousands of feet above sea level (the town of Yerevan seen in the above picture is at elevation 3000 to 3500 feet above sea level).  Don’t get me wrong:  I’m not critical of biblical myths and fables that are meant to enlighten and teach . . .

If a more plausible Noah’s flood explanation is desired, how about this:  there was an epic flood in Armenia (caused by 40 days and nights of rain?) that washed away all of the valley towns and cities (where the most substantial civilizations would be living).  And maybe, after receiving a message from God,  one gentleman built a boat, and managed to put much of his livestock (and maybe a few miscellaneous wild creatures)  on the boat as the floodwaters hit.  When the flood waters receded, his boat was left high and dry on an Armenian hillside . . .

So, I’m left with Pilot Mountain, which is both a NC town and a NC mountain.  First, the mountain (from KidsinParks.com):

Geologically, the peak is composed of very ancient quartzite, which is highly resistant to erosion, and harder than surrounding rocks.  Through the eons, erosion has left it sticking up like a sore thumb (er, I mean bullfrog).

There’s a town of Pilot Mountain, and according to Andy Griffith (who starred in The Andy Griffith Store), the town was the inspiration for the fictional Mayberry.  Andy Griffith’s actual home town was Mount Airy, located just 10 or so miles from Pilot Mountain. 

There’s another mountain even closer to my landing, known as Hanging Rock (in Hanging Rock State Park).  From VisitNC.com, I’ll close with this shot:

That’ll do it . . .

KS

Greg

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