I was hiking
by White Rock Creek
on a summer day
in the bright sun.
It was so hot
and I was all alone.
Lost in my thoughts
my foot struck the pathway
to the cadence
of the music
I was listening to
on my iPod.
By White Rock Creek
there were people
reading signs saying keep right
and a concrete path
with city dwellers walking
to and fro.
Lovers hand in hand
and it all made sense
except for the litter
on White Rock Creek’s banks
while across the way
was a broken down barbed-wired fence.
In the bright sun
not a cloud in the sky
there was sweat on my brow
running down my temples
as an old woman walked by
and she smiled at me showing her dimples.
It was so hot
I drank some water
lots of cool water
and the temperature
was 110 degrees
and that was in the shade.
Lost in my thoughts
my foot struck the pathway
to the cadence
of the music
I was listening to
on my iPod.
While I was hiking
by White Rock Creek
on a summer day
in the bright sun
it was so hot
and I was all alone.
In October 1974, I made my first trip to the University of Texas McDonald Observatory. It was 500 miles one-way from the campus of the University of Texas at Arlington to Fort Davis, Texas. The purpose of the trip was to do the required astronomical labs for my physics class in astronomy.
The trip was a caravan from the UT Arlington campus to far west Texas. We departed about 2 PM on Friday, October 4, 1974. We headed from Arlington west on Interstate 20 (yes it was built way back then). We drove to Lake Colorado City State Park about 3 miles south of Interstate 20 just southwest of Colorado City, Texas. I pitched my tent. I shared the tent with 4 young women and one young man that were fellow cadets in the UT Arlington ROTC program. Three of them were prior service (US military veterans).
The next morning we got up early and headed west. We stopped at a Stuckey’s (remember them?) getting two scrambled eggs with toast and bacon or sausage plus coffee for under a dollar. The journey continued to Pecos, Texas. There we left Interstate 20 and headed south on Texas Highway 17. We crossed Interstate 10 at Balmorhea, Texas and head south to Fort Davis. We camped at the Davis Mountains State Park.
That weekend the park also hosted a retreat for the Odessa, Texas Jaycees. Some of them were concerned that we had males and females cohabitating the same tent. I go a strong morals lecture from a Baptist deacon. It mattered not we were all of legal age.
That Saturday, October 5, 1974 a very good top five ranked Texas A & M football team was upset by Kansas University loosing 28 to 10. We listened to the game on the radio as we explored the city of Alpine, Texas and toured the Fort Davis National Historic site. I’ve actually been there more times than any national park or historic site with the exception of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Why? My brother-in-law is a retired Great Smoky Mountain Park Ranger.
We drove to the McDonald’s Observatory in the early afternoon to check-in and get ready for the night’s observations. Returned that night for one of the most memorable evenings of my life.
I’ll use my narrator voice and tell you about the observatory. An astronomical observatory located just northwest of Fort Davis, Texas, on Mount Locke in the Davis Mountains of West Texas is the McDonald Observatory. It has additional facilities on the adjacent Mount Fowlkes. It is the property of the University of Texas at Austin.
The philanthropy of Texas banker William Johnson McDonald (1844–1926) created it. He left his fortune to the University of Texas to endow an astronomical observatory.
It began operation in 1939. At that time,it was the second largest telescope in the world. The University of Chicago operated the observatory until 1960s, when control was transferred to the University of Texas at Austin.
The McDonald Observatory was the first location on earth to bounce a laser off a reflector left on the moon by Apollo astronauts. I learned this as an astronomy student on my 1974 road trip.
The McDonald Observatory is equipped with a wide range of instrumentation for imaging and spectroscopy in the optical and infrared spectra and operates the first lunar laser ranging station. It works closely with the astronomy department of the University of Texas at Austin while maintaining administrative autonomy.
The high and dry peaks of the Davis Mountains make for some of the darkest and clearest night skies in the region and provide excellent conditions for astronomical research. It is one of the darkest places on earth at night.
The Otto Struve Telescope, dedicated in 1939, was the first large telescope built at the observatory. It is located on Mt. Locke at an altitude of 6,790 feet. The summit of Mt. Locke, accessed by Spur 78, is the highest point on Texas highways. The Harlan J. Smith Telescope, also on Mt. Locke, was completed in 1968.
The Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET), dedicated in late 1997, is located on the summit of Mt. Fowlkes at 6,660 ft above sea level. It is operated jointly by the University of Texas at Austin, Pennsylvania State University, Stanford University, the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich, and the Georg-August University of Göttingen.
As of 2012, the HET is tied with the similar Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) as the fifth largest telescope in the world. However, its cost was about 20% that of other similarly-sized telescopes in use today due to its optimization for spectrography.
Currently, the observatory operates four research telescopes at its West Texas site:
9.2 m (360 in) Hobby-Eberly Telescope on Mt. Fowlkes
2.7 m (110 in) Harlan J. Smith Telescope on Mt. Locke
2.1 m (83 in) Otto Struve Telescope on Mt. Locke
0.8 m (31 in) large format imaging telescope on Mt. Locke
The two peaks also host a number of other instruments:
The 1.2 m (47 in) Monitoring Network of Telescopes (MONET) North Telescope on Mt. Locke is a companion to one at the South African Astronomical Observatory in Sutherland, and was built by Halfmann Teleskoptechnik.
The McDonald Laser Ranging System (MLRS) operates a 0.76 m (30 in) telescope on Mt. Fowlkes to perform satellite laser ranging and lunar laser ranging.
A 0.5 m (20 in) Ritchey-Chretien reflector owned by Boston University on Mt. Locke is used for optical aeronomy.
The 0.4 m (16 in) Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment (ROTSE) reflector on Mt. Fowlkes is used to search for the optical signature of gamma-ray bursts.
I have been back many times since that first trip in 1974. I took my two sons there on dad-son vacation when they were 13 and 10 years old. Since then they have built an excellent visitor center. The Frank N. Bash Visitors Center, located between Mt. Locke and Mt. Fowlkes, includes a café, gift shop, and interactive exhibit hall. The Visitors Center conducts daily live solar viewings in a large theater and tours of the observatory’s largest telescopes. It also hosts evening star parties, every Tuesday, Friday, and Saturday night which allow visitors to look through numerous telescopes of various sizes in the Telescope Park, and enjoy an indoor program.
Special viewing nights, during which visitors can stay on-site (not required for the programs) and view directly through eyepieces on the 0.9 m, Struve (2.1m), or Smith (2.7m) telescopes, are held on a reservation-only basis. Although not available for many years, as of June 2013, the 2.1m has returned to occasional public access.
The trip back to the University of Texas at Arlington was a long one. We drove back on US 67. It was 500 miles on a two lane highway. On the return trip I stopped and visited my parents at their ranch northwest of Brownwood, Texas.
It was on the 1974 trip I decided to ask Benita Breeding to marry me. I proposed the next week and we married on December 28, 1974.
Photo Credits: Jimmie A. Kepler took the photographs in May 2007. The photographs are available for use under the Creative Commons License listed below.
Located just north of the Dallas Convention Center is Pioneer Plaza. It is a large public park in the Convention Center District of downtown Dallas, Texas. The centerpiece of the Pioneer Plaza is large sculptures. It is a heavily visited tourist site. Located next to Pioneer Park Cemetery which features the Confederate War Memorial, the two offer the largest public open space in Dallas’ central business district.
Background of Pioneer Plaza:
The land was once railroad and warehouse property. Built on land cleared as part of the failed Griffin Square development, developer Trammel Crow gets credit for the idea behind the sculptures and plaza. He wanted an iconic “Western” sculpture in the City of Dallas. He assembled a group to give the sculptures. Begun in 1992, the $9 million project started on 4.2 acres of land donated by the City of Dallas. $4.8 million of the cost came from private funds raised from individuals and local businesses.
Sculpture:
The large sculpture celebrates the nineteenth-century cattle drives that took place along the Shawnee Trail. It was the earliest and easternmost route by which Texas longhorn cattle moved to northern railheads. The trail passed through Austin, Waco, and Dallas until the Chisolm Trail siphoned off most of the traffic in 1867.
Artist Robert Summers of Glen Rose, Texas created 70 bronze steers and 3 trail riders sculptures. Each steer is larger-than-life at six feet high. All together the sculpture is the largest bronze monument of its kind in the world. Set along an artificial ridge, man-made limestone cliff the native landscaping with a flowing stream and waterfall creates a dramatic effect.
Maintained by the adjacent Dallas Convention Center, Pioneer Plaza is the second most visited tourist attraction in downtown Dallas.
“The Crimson River” by Donna Westover Gallup is Book Four in the Mysterious Ways series. The publisher is Cladach Publishing.
Donna Westover Gallup does her usual great job of telling a spellbinding tale. It is what I have come to expect from this great storyteller. I was surprised the story went back and forth between the present and the 19th-Century Colorado Territory. While that caught me off guard, the use of flashbacks was a marvelous way to tell the story.
The author wasted no time getting right to the mysteries that kept me turning the pages. I feel she had a good balance of Christian faith without a forced insertion of “the plan of salvation” just to do it. God’s activity in the lives of the characters was apparent chapter after chapter. Well done!
The story progresses well. The inclusion of historically accurate events adds to the drama. The trip to Texas with the mesquite thorn poisoning and then to Missouri with the inclusion of the small pox story line was well told and frighteningly realistic.
The author did a nice job of wrapping up a lot of loose ends as the book concluded. Without spoiling the ending I will say it was more real life than some readers may have preferred. However, I felt it was right on the mark.
I hope Donna Westover Gallup has her next book in the works. I love the way she tells her story, how it includes the Almighty’s activity in everyday life and hope she has more stories to tell.
Read in October 2012 and reviewed in March 2013.
Note: I have read all four books in the series. I read The Crimson River the last week of October 2012, the same week the book was released. I did not have a review copy. I purchased my copy. I had a job change October 29th, a major car accident November 5th that put in in the emergency room via ambulance, and serious injuries after a very bad fall on ice just when I was recovering from the car wreck. All delayed the writing of this review as well as several other projects.
