Ashley Pond renovations?

Photo by 77krc@Flickr / CC-BY-NC-ND

Los Alamos has a little lake in the center of town, Ashley Pond. Its namesake is a fellow named Ashley Pond. Pun intended.

At the moment and for much as long as I can remember, Ashley Pond is a pretty lame pond. It’s basically a large concrete bathtub with ducks — no natural shoreline, water plants (aside from algae slime), or beaches of any kind. Depressing 1950’s suburbia to the max.

Anyway, there is a county project in the works to do some rebuilding. I hope this goes forward and the pond becomes more like a pond and less like a bathtub. As always, they’re taking comments; send yours to anne.laurent@lacnm.us. Be sure to mention robots.

Grand Canyon mini trip report

Just before New Year’s, Erin and I visited the Grand Canyon for a couple of days.

We arrived in the afternoon in time to walk along the rim for an hour or so. Above is a standard Grand Canyon sunset photo. The Bright Angel Trail and Indian Garden are visible in the gloom.

We stayed in Maswik Lodge, which is fine but not super awesome. It’s a bit pricey for what you get. However I might choose it again instead of one of the rim hotels because it’s more secluded and quiet.

The key problem with staying in the park but not camping is lack of food. None of the hotels or cabins have kitchens, and the restaurants are very mediocre. (An exception is the El Tovar, which is quite good if a bit fancy for my tastes.) I think the lack of actual free enterprise is a leading factor here; everything is operated by the Xanterra megacorp and its massive contract with the Park Service, so there’s little space for innovation or passion.

Anyway, in the morning we headed out to Desert View to see some views.

View from outside the Desert View Watchtower over one fork of Tanner Canyon, with Cedar Mountain on the far rim.

Erin and me at Desert View.

The Watchtower was rather crowded.

The Watchtower also appears to be falling down? At least, there are gauges like this one all over measuring the cracks.

View from either Lipan or Navajo Point, looking east towards the Watchtower, which is visible at upper right.

After a couple of viewpoints, we parked at Grandview Point, had some lunch, and headed down the trail.

Looking south from the upper part of the trail.

Much of Grandview Trail is supported by log structures like this one, built by miners.

Erin at the turn-around point, about an hour below the rim in the middle of the Coconino.

Erin, with Grapevine Canyon beyond, at one of the airier sections of the trail.

After we returned, Erin took a nap while I went to the rim to see the sunset.

The following day, we went west to Hermit’s Rest, with the intent of hiking down the Hermit Trail and over to Dripping Springs.

View down Hermit Canyon from the Dripping Springs Trail.

Erin at Dripping Springs.

Dripping Springs is at the head of a pleasant little valley.

Just before rejoining the Hermit Trail for the climb back to the rim, looking up the Hermit Valley.

After the hike, it was dinner at the El Tovar and then back home to Los Alamos in the morning.

New golf course options and a tour of potentially impacted areas

Update 1/26: Craig learned some more concrete information about the plan details, which makes some of the content below a little misleading. I’ve added a few updates in-line.

The golf course improvement/expansion project continues. The result of the meetings two weeks ago is two new options (the previous lettered options are now off the table). Below are sketch maps of the new options, my comments, and some photos from a tour of the potentially impacted areas led by Craig Martin earlier today.

New Option 1

This option more or less rebuilds the course in place. Details matter, of course — there is some encroachment into the forest, both along the edges and into interior islands (for example, I worry about holes 4, 11, 15, and 16). But assuming the above accurately represents the actual tree loss, I could probably live with this.

The problem with this one is that it seems to have limited appeal to golfers, as far as I can tell. So if we do this, will we be having exactly the same discussion in ten years? I think everyone is much better served if we can come up with a true long-term solution. (Of course, if golfers are dissatisfied because it’s only a great community course rather than a “destination”, then I have pretty much no sympathy.)

New Option 2

This option has similar encroachment as Option 1, with two significant exceptions: Holes 4 and especially 17. Considered independently, this option is not acceptable. There is too much tree loss (we’ve just confirmed that some of these trees are 350 years old), and it totally changes the character of a secluded and remarkable viewpoint.

The upside is that the golfers seem to like this one. While Option 2 alone I could never support (simply reducing one’s demands is not a compromise; a true compromise has something in it for both sides), I believe we might make something of it. I do believe there’s a lot of value in an outcome that both sides are genuinely happy with, rather than an outcome which one side only grudgingly accepts. More on this later.

Today’s tour

Earlier today, Craig Martin generously led a tour of Option 2’s holes 17 and 4 to show folks what the impact on the ground might be. Unfortunately, all we had to go on was sketches like the ones above, so we had to do a fair amount of guessing. And there’s another layer of interpretation in my own descriptions below, so please don’t assume these are definitive.

Craig and his wife June spend a few hours flagging and staking before we arrived. Thus, you can go independently and check things out for yourself.

This is the tee area of Hole 17. I’m standing at the edge of what we think would be cleared; more or less all the visible trees from where I’m standing to the canyon rim (about 130 feet straight ahead) would be removed.

Update 1/26: Craig says: “The tee area for hole 17 is further to the south than I guessed, so fewer trees would have to be removed.” So some of the trees in this photo would go, but not all.

Same view point but angled more to the right. I think the two large trees at the right of the photo might be saved, but everything else between here and the rim would go, with perhaps less risk in the right 1/3 of the frame.

View from the tee area to the fairway on the other side of the canyon. It was unclear to us how many of the trees in the canyon would need to come down (the design team has proposed “topping” them, but any meaningful topping would kill the trees anyway).

Update 1/26: Branch removal would have a lighter touch than we thought; no trees in the canyon bottom are targeted for removal, and a couple would have branches removed but not enough to risk killing them.

View from the fairway area of Hole 17. I believe more or less all the trees between here and the canyon rim would go, along with a few more outside the right side of the frame.

Finally, this is the proposed Hole 4 under Option 2. Trees with pink flags would go; basically, count four trees in along the first row of trees and extend something that wide down to where the power lines turn right (hard to see in this photo, unfortunately).

Closing

In no particular order:

• One thing that became very clear during this tour is that details matter a lot. The forest is not amorphous; it’s a collection of individual trees. Thus, trees need to be analyzed for removal or preservation as individuals, and there needs to be room for on-the-ground negotiation regarding individual trees. Forest people must be intimately involved in these decisions, and minimization of tree loss must be a priority at all stages.
• As I mentioned, I don’t like Option 2. But, if there were something added to the deal which was of sufficient value to forest people like myself, I could live with it. Things that have been proposed which are of no value IMO are infrastructure (I don’t need any to walk in the woods) and planting native vegetation (does not replace mature ponderosas). What would be of value to me is additional open space protections in the county. The key is additional — the new protections would have to go significantly beyond the de facto protections currently enforced by public opinion as well as what we could expect to achieve without giving up forest for the golf course.
• One other thing that I think would be super cool, particularly as someone with children on the way, is mini golf. I wonder if there’s a way to fit that in without additional tree loss. That would make the course much more of a community place than a golfer place.
• Finally, I haven’t addressed the financial issues (the cost of these changes may approach $10 million); I don’t personally object to spending the money, but I’ve heard a lot of griping about it. I should also add that I’m still skeptical of the safety argument and completely unconvinced that any realistic golf course in Los Alamos can really be a regional draw.

As always, the county’s project page is here, and they are still accepting comments at cpfd@lacnm.us. Also, there’s another public meeting on Tuesday the 24th at 5:30pm in Fuller Lodge. Please attend and speak.

Goldwater Lake

While visiting my mom in Prescott, the three of us checked out Goldwater Lake, a reservoir not far from town.

Goldwater Lake features two pop machines in the middle of the woods.

Los Alamos Sunrise

Sunrise in Los Alamos a few weeks ago. This is our back yard.

Bandelier hikes with Ben and Katelyn

Today, Erin and I, along with Ben and Katelyn, spent the day in Bandelier.

We met up in White Rock, and the drive in had an unusual and mysterious mood, because the fog level was about 6,300 feet as we approached the monument. This meant that instead of big views, the drive into the park was a spooky journey through thick fog.

Upon arrival, we walked the tourist loop in drizzling rain. Ben tried to walk across the creek on the ice and fell in. We were moderately soggy by the time we got back to the visitor center and had a surprisingly good lunch at the snack bar. Note: The “Sally Fries” use actual cheese. The only problem is that the snack bar has no indoor seating, so it was a little chilly.

After lunch it had cleared up a little and we hiked down the Falls Trail.

Here, Ben is interpreting one of the numbered landmarks along the trail. The quality of these interpretations was rather low, as it turns out Ben was either making it up entirely or reading from a pamphlet for a different trail.

Upper Falls. Sadly, the trail is closed beyond this point due to flood damage. I tried to figure out when it might reopen, and estimates from various Park Service sources ranged depressingly from “still closed” to “never”. Apparently they believe the washed-out section is damaged beyond repair. I’d be very surprised if there really is no possible route for a rebuilt trail, but I’m sure resource limitations and bureaucracy make it a difficult task.

We did not throw any rocks.

New Year’s Day walk

On New Year’s Day, Erin and I walked down Olive street past the site of the old sewage treatment plant and down Pueblo Canyon to the Walnut Street Playlot.

Controlled burn in Los Alamos

The woods around Los Alamos are on fire again — but they’re supposed to be that way. Apparently the Los Alamos wildfire plan (big PDF) calls for continual maintenance of the local forests by several methods, including fire. I think this is super cool; my intuition would be that the community simply wouldn’t tolerate fire in the woods near town.

In this case, what’s happening is that over the past months or years, crews have gathered excess wood and other fuel from the forest floor into piles, and now that there’s snow on the ground, they are burning the piles. The above photo was taken yesterday afternoon, when over 100 fires were burning in Walnut Canyon. The county has a pretty good website explaining the details.