Our Little Solar System

I'm a big fan of road art, and I had an idea in the early summer of a fun road art project. But it was hard to get the time, energy, and materials needed to implement it. I gave myself a deadline: it needed to be up before the Great Basin National Park Astronomy Festival on September 5-7. And fortunately it's up! Here's the newest road art on the park road.

The solar system has arrived! We begin with the sun (which later blew over so is now oriented slightly differently.)


Mercury, the closest planet to the sun. My helpers were enthusiastic for the inner planets.


Venus, our nearby neighbor. Wow, it looks small!

Go, Earth!

Oops, Mars is a little blurry. Must be a telescope error.

Intermission to drill holes in the boards!

What's after Mars? Well, we did put up Jupiter, but then we came back and put up five dwarf planets, including Ceres, which is located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.



Then comes Jupiter, the biggest planet in our solar system!

Saturn, Desert Girl's favorite planet. Our Saturn keeps losing its ring, though.

It's a long way to the next planet, Uranus (which should be bluish, but I had lost energy by this time, so if anyone wants to paint it blue, go for it!).

And what's the last planet in our solar system?

Neptune! (which should also be bluish)

But wait, what about Pluto? Most of us were taught that we have nine planets in our solar system. Those days are gone. In 2006, the International Astronomical Union came up with a definition of planets, and Pluto just didn't meet it. So now it's a dwarf planet.

 

Little Pluto, a cold rocky planet far, far away.

The good thing about Pluto becoming a dwarf planet is that we also got a few more dwarf planets, with more probably to be discovered.

Meet dwarf planet Haumea (which is slightly oversized in the model, but we had run out of little, tiny balls).

And here's Makemake (which we have a lot of fun pronouncing).


Finally there's Eris, the largest of the dwarf planets. (And maybe the hardest to find in our little solar system, since we had to switch to a different fence.)

To space these planets, I found Dr. Jerry Galloway's website that had both a 100 foot backyard model and also a four-mile model. I made adjustments to make it about two miles long. It was a nine-planet based system, so then I looked for information about the dwarf planets and fitted them in. They might not be exact, but neither are their orbits. Several of the planets and dwarf planets change order depending on where they are in their orbit (for example, Neptune and Pluto).

Here are the distances if you're interested, along with diameter sizes scaled for a four-mile long course (I chose to make my planet diameters not to scale, as I wanted them to be visible while driving 60 mph along the road, but wanted to give you an idea in case you want to make your own solar system model):

Astronomical body	distance	diameter (inches)
Sun	0	60
Mercury	105 feet	0.2
Venus	185 feet	0.5
Earth	271 feet	0.6
Mars	413 feet	0.3
Ceres*	~600 feet	<.1
Jupiter	¼ mile	6.2
Saturn	½ mile	5.2
Uranus	1 mile	2.2
Neptune	1 ½ mile	2.2
Pluto*	2 mile	0.1
Haumea*	2.1 mile	<.1
Makemake*	2.2 mile	<.1
Eris*	2.5 mile	0.1
*dwarf planet

Running or biking on the park road will now have some new landmarks--can you make it to Jupiter in ten minutes? How about Uranus?

I consider the road art as community art, so anyone who would like to improve on the art (for example, making better planets or a ring that will stay on Saturn) or add to it (e.g., asteroid belt, other celestial objects) is welcome!

The State Quarters Games

When I was a kid, I had a penny and nickel collection. I had a lot of fun looking for coins with dates to fill in the missing slots in my coin collection book. 

Then I got older and needed every nickel and dime to pay for grad school. I didn't pay attention to any coins except how they paid for my tuition, room, food, and books.

Fast forward to working, starting a family, and other hobbies. Coin collecting didn't fit in my schedule.

I didn't totally ignore our currency. I remember hearing about the state quarters, but figured that was a clever gimmick to get a lot of quarters out of circulation, and I just wasn't interested. 

However, now I've had a change of mind. It occurred to me that the state quarters would be a great way for Desert Boy to learn some geography. So we sorted through our change bowl and pulled out the state quarters.

 Oh my goodness, that writing and those images on the quarters sure are small! We pulled out a magnifying glass to get a better look.

 Of course Desert Girl wanted in on the action. Her first job was to sort the eagle quarters from all the other quarters. She did a fine job of that.

Then Desert Boy started looking at the quarters and finding where they belonged. We used our game board from Where in the USA is Carmen Sandiego (a wonderful thrift store find at $1!), but any large USA map would do.

 After we had gone through our change bowl, we found that we had quarters for 24 states.

I looked up some information about the state quarters and found it fascinating. The U.S. Mint issued the 50 state quarters from 1999 to 2008, with five a year. They made varying numbers of quarters, from 416,000 for Oklahoma up to 1.59 million for Virginia. The U.S. Treasury was against the project, citing the "Disneyfication" of the currency. But it's estimated that nearly half of U.S. citizens collected the quarters, with $3 billion made in profit, due to coins taken out of circulation (Wikipedia).

The quarters were issued in the order that the states ratified the constitution, and you can see illustrations of them all on Wikipedia.

As we were going through the quarters, I noted one from Puerto Rico. What? That's not a state! It turns out that after the 50 states, quarters were issued for the District of Columbia and the U.S. Territories: Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, U.S. Virgin Islands, and Northern Mariana Islands. We don't even think about the territories much, so these quarters (which were issued in relatively small numbers) are a little reminder of where U.S. money is going (and perhaps where you should plan a vacation if you don't want to get a passport?).

We also found some quarters with places like Mount Hood, Chickisaw, Gettysburg, and my favorite, Great Basin. These are part of the America the Beautiful quarters, which started in 2010 and issues five quarters a year, one of a beautiful place (often a national park) in each state or territory.

You can find out more about all these programs, plus access curriculums at the U.S. Mint website.

In the meantime, we raided a piggybank and found even more state quarters, so we're now up to 45. Desert Boy can't wait to find the Texas quarter. And he knows where on the map it goes.

We like to play different games with the state quarters.

1. Race to put five quarters on the map. (2 to 10 players) Each player gets five quarters, and then when the time starts, puts the quarters on the correct state as fast as possible. First player wins.

2. Locate the state in order of joining the U.S. (one or multiple players, one person to read the order).  Using information from the Wikipedia website, have the player(s) find the states in the order they ratified the Constitution, picking up the quarters as they find them. Do you know which was first? (Hint: this state quarter has Caesar Rodney on it.)

3. Locate the states in alphabetical order. (one or multiple players, one person to read the order).
Using information from the U.S. Mint website, have the player(s) find the states in alphabetical order, picking up the quarters as they find them.

4. Find how many state quarters have horses on them. Or airplanes. Or ships. Or flowers. Or birds. Or words in other languages. Or people. Or outlines of states. Or their state nicknames. Or their state mottoes. This is a great game to really look at the different quarter designs and study them.

5. Pick your favorite quarter design and explain why you like it! Everyone is a winner in this game!

If you'd like to play some more games, the U.S. Mint has a game page!

Putting Up Hay During Monsoon Season

 The past few weeks have been the stormiest weeks I can remember in the desert, with thunderstorms almost every day. All us desert denizens have had to make some adjustments to deal with the elevated humidity and strange stuff falling out of the sky! It's really nice not to have so much dust on our gravel roads, and Desert Girl absolutely loves jumping in all the puddles. However, trying to harvest the third crop of alfalfa has been a little tricky. (If you'd like to learn how many crops of alfalfa we grow a year, how long this plant can grow, and how it's harvested, check out this post.)

 My husband is flipping some of the hay to check the moisture content. It has to be quite dry in order to put into bales, otherwise it will get moldy.

Do you notice a darker cloud in the background? It's a smoke column from one of the many wildfires the lightning has started. As we continued with monsoons, we got enough rain that the fires have dwindled--it's wet enough that the little fires are put out, often before they are even noticed.

My husband's allergic to hay, so he likes to shower soon after checking hay. The ragweed is usually really bad this time of year, but the wetness has made it a little better this year.

In the meantime, we're looking for a dry window to get the hay put up while it still has a higher protein content and is worth more. It seems ironic to be wishing for a little dryness out in a place that gets less than seven inches of precipitation a year! Any farmer will tell you, though, timing is everything. Well, they'll probably tell you a lot more than that. Farmers know a lot about the land and the weather!

Our Newest Pet

 We have a new pet. Desert Girl is the instigator. How can I resist when she asks for a new pet?

 This time around it's a "caterpilly." Or rather, two of them (although only photographed above).

When we explained to Desert Girl that her pets had been eating our corn, she started calling them "bad caterpillies." It was pretty funny.

This "caterpilly" is a corn earworm. Fortunately quite harmless (to hold, not so great for crops). Some caterpillars can give you quite a rash just touching them.

Most likely these pets won't last too long, but I love how Desert Girl is so excited about exploring the natural world around her.

What's your favorite non-traditional pet?

Destination: Angel Lake near Wells, Nevada

 One of Nevada's many mountain ranges is the East Humboldt Range, a 30-mile long range in the northeastern part of the state near Wells, Nevada. We decided to make it part of our July trip, largely because the 12-mile Angel Lake Scenic Byway (Nevada Highway 231, seasonally open) goes right up to Angel Lake in the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest.

 The stormy weather didn't deter us as we climbed several thousand feet from the valley to the 8,379-foot elevation lake. Before the road gets really steep and windy is the Angel Creek Campground, which would be a good destination for those with bigger vehicles (like RVs). The Angel Lake Campground awaits those with smaller vehicles at the end of the road. There's a $5 parking fee at the end of the road for those who want to get out of their vehicles and check out the lake and/or picnic.

Lake Dimensions. The road takes you to within fifty feet of Angel Lake, named for Warren M. Angel of nearby Clover Valley. The lake covers 13 acres with a maximum depth of about 35 feet. A dam was added to the lake by early settlers to increase its capacity for irrigation.

Fish. The lake contains brook trout, rainbow trout, tiger trout, and speckled dace. According to the Nevada Department of Wildlife website about Angel Lake, about 4,800 rainbow trout are stocked during the summer. Creel surveys show anglers catch about 1 to 2 trout per hour, with a limit of five per day. Fish size is generally 8.5 to 11 inches.

My husband and kids decided to try their luck fishing, which is one of the most popular activities at the lake. I was ready to stretch my legs after the long car ride and set out for a hike around the lake.

Glaciology. Angel Lake is a tarn, otherwise known as a mountain lake formed in a cirque. A glacier once stood hundreds of feet high here, flowing down towards the valley below. (On the day we visited, the sky was hazy and the storms made it gray, so it was hard to see down to the desert below.)

One of the coolest things about visiting Angel Lake was thinking about the glaciers. The last glaciation in the Great Basin was called the Angel Lake glaciation, with the type locality being right where we were standing. Researchers Ben Laabs, Jeff Munroe, and others have conducted cosmogenic ¹⁰Be surface-exposure dating of boulders in the area. By studying the dates of how long boulders in moraines have been exposed, they've concluded that the end of the Angel Lake glaciation was 19,300 years ago, give or take 1,000 years. This was the same time that the Laurentide Ice Sheet was retreating. This was also before glaciers in the Sierra Nevada and Wasatch mountains retreated, and before the huge pleistocene Lakes Bonneville and Lahontan had reached their zenith. What does this timing mean? The researchers say that more research is needed.

Wildflowers. What comes after the glaciers leave? Pioneering plants like the bright fireweed (Chamerion angustifolium),  one of my favorite flowers. Fireweed likes to grow in areas that have been disturbed by  fires, avalanches, glacial retreats, and more. It likes lots of sun and can grow quickly.

Many other wildflowers were in abundance. The flora in the East Humboldts and nearby Ruby Mountains are similar to that in the Wasatch Mountains in Utah.

 And with plants come animals, like this beautiful blue butterfly.

 Wildlife. A couple rock wrens hung out with me as I took photos.

Probably the best-known birds on the mountain range are introduced Himalayan Snowcocks. They apparently are most-often found around Hole-in-the-Mountain peak, the highest peak of the range at 11,306 ft. The range also has bighorn sheep (with 20 reintroduced in February 2013), introduced mountain goats, mountain lions, mule deer, bobcat, coyote, and more.

Lakes and Hiking. Although Angel Lake is the most easily accessed lake in the East Humboldts, it's not the only lake. I was a bit surprised to find that the range has many more lakes, including Smith Lake, Greys Lake, Winchell Lake, Boulder Lakes, Lizzie's Basin, and Steele Lake. You can access some of them on the two main hiking trails: a four-mile hike to Winchell Lake that begins at a trailhead below Angel Lake on the paved road; and a 25-mile hike that begins at Angel Lake, goes around the north end of the range to Greys Lake 5 miles away on the west side, and then continues along the west side to Ackler Creek (11 miles) and Boulder Lake (18 miles).

To find out more about hiking to some of the other lakes, check out the details on this informative website about hiking in East Humboldts (and Rubies).

As often happens in the mountains, the storms passed and the sun came out, brightening the carpet of wildflowers. I was particularly impressed by the display of wildflowers, even though we were just at 8300 feet. The latitude and higher precipitation allows for a lower timberline and overall lower elevation for wildflowers that I expected to see at higher elevations.

Wilderness.  A quick note on wilderness: although you can drive to Angel Lake, most of the rest of the East Humboldt Range is accessible only by foot or horseback. In 1989, 36,000 acres were designated as the East Humboldt Wilderness.

Geology. The mountains rising above Angel Lake look beautiful, with Greys Peak at the top of the photo above at 10, 674 ft. The East Humboldt Range is a metamorphic core complex, meaning that the older rocks have been pushed up and are exposed instead of being overlain by younger rock layers. This allows you to look up from Angel Lake and see some of the oldest rocks in Nevada: 2.5 billion year old gneiss. How cool is that to see rocks so old from a lake that is not so old (at least geologically speaking!).

Lake core. The sun also beckoned an angler to go out in his float tube. That would be a really fun way to visit the lake! Researchers have taken a raft out on the lake to retrieve a sample of the bottom (a sediment core) to study the past climate of the area over the last 7,000 years. They were able to see ash from the Mount Mazama explosion (the one that created Crater Lake in Oregon). They also learned quite a bit more, which you can read about here.

 When I got back to the dam (probably a leisurely 45-60 minutes after I had set out around the lake), I found the angling success wasn't so good for my family.

 But the kids sure did have fun getting in the chilly water!

I'd like to go back to Angel Lake and the East Humboldts and check out more of the beautiful scenery.

 And if we time it right, we may make it again for the drag races in Wells.

Ah, you've got to love the desert!

I couldn't find much information about Angel Lake when we set out to go there. Hopefully this compilation will help those who desire to know more. And if you know of other websites about Angel Lake, please leave a comment! Thanks!

Early Morning View

Have you noticed the days getting shorter? And cooler nights? They've become apparent to me in the last couple weeks, and I have to admit I like them. More down time, more pleasant weather for exercise. We've also been experiencing lots of afternoon thunderstorms, monsoons. We've even had a little flash flooding, which is more typical of southern Utah and Arizona. The feel of fall is in the air.

The photo above is on my early morning bike ride. I have to squeeze it in from when it's light enough to before my husband leaves for work. That means I have long shadows and great light. This particular morning the clouds were already forming, letting us know we had a very high chance of rain for the day. The morning light bathes the ocean of sagebrush, the characteristic plant of the high desert.

I'm working on a long post, but it's taking awhile to find all the links I want, so it might be a couple days before I get up. So in the meantime, have a great day (or days)!

p.s. And don't forget to enter the Hallmark Card giveaway. You can enter with the Easy Entry every day!

New Food: Chia Seeds

Last fall I read the book Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen by Christopher McDougall. The book engrossed me, with fascinating accounts of long-distance runners--I even imagined for a bit that I could be one! The book helped me get motivated to train for and run the Take It To The Lake Half Marathon. And while running 13.1 miles, I decided that might be a long enough race for me.  Although I might not be cut out to run 100-mile long races, the book did introduce something more accessible: chia seeds. 

Chia seeds (Salvia hispanica) are tiny seeds, a magical food from the Mint Family that is native to Mexico and Guatemala. Local endurance runners in Copper Canyon in Mexico, the Tarahumara, drink a concoction made with chia seeds before they go out to do a barefoot run of 50 or a 100 miles. The seeds fuel them during these grueling runs over steep trails.

Fortunately chia seeds aren't limited to Mexico and Guatemala anymore. I found chia seeds are now available in a variety of places in the U.S.: health food stores, Azure Standard, Amazon, and even more mainstream stores like Costco. This "superfood of the Aztecs" was once reportedly as common as maize (corn) in parts of the Aztec culture. Although I don't think it will become quite as popular as corn in today's culture, it is definitely a growing food item, even though it generally costs $8 to $16 a pound. (Hmm, how can we grow some?)

Why are chia seeds a raising star? 

* Chia seeds can help fight diabetes by slowing the conversion of carbohydrates to sugars in our stomachs.

* Chia seeds can help reduce the risk of heart disease and lower blood pressure.

* Chia seeds can help hydrate athletes, as they can hold 10 times their weight in water.

* Chia seeds are full of healthy omega-3 fats (30%) and omega-6 fats (10%).

* Chia seeds have more fiber than bran.

* Chia seeds have more antioxidants than blueberries.

* Chia seeds have more calcium than milk.

* Chia seeds don't really have much taste, so you can add them to anything (salads, yogurt, smoothies, cereal, baked goods, etc.).

* Soaking chia seeds in water before you eat them makes them even more effective.

Source

Well, the first few times I tried chia seeds I didn't notice any superhuman effects, but I decided to go ahead and let my kids give them a try. (And maybe superhuman effects are not desirable, considering that Desert Boy wanted to try and parachute with a plastic bag held over his head the other day.)

I put some chia seeds in a bowl, gave the kids some fresh fruit, and they were off.

They thought pushing their fruit into chia seeds was about the equivalent of using sprinkles. I was doing a little happy dance in my mind.

I couldn't believe how much they liked eating chia seeds!

We'll continue to eat chia seeds and see if they make us feel any different. It's certainly an easy food to add to our lifestyle, and with so many benefits, it's one I want to try to get in the habit of using daily.

Have you tried chia seeds? What ways do you like to eat them?

p.s. If you have an old chia pet around, you can also eat the sprouts.
And the state of Chiapas in Mexico is named after chia seeds. "Chia" means strong!

Disclosure: I have affiliate links to Amazon in this post. Clicking to them allows you to purchase the product for the same, normal price, but if you buy it (or other items) within 24 hours of clicking, I get a small commission that helps me keep up the great content of Desert Survivor. Thanks for your support!