May 2025
Books read:
- Death’s End by Liu Cixin (translated by Ken Liu)
- Adventures in Memory: The Science and Secrets of Remembering and Forgetting by Hilde Østby and Ylva Østby
- Dream State by Eric Puchner
- Orbital by Samantha Harvey
Trails walked:
- Camping trip at Rustic Creek Ranch near Bailey (May 3-4)
- Old Fall River Road in Rocky Mountain National Park (May 8)
- Dinosaur National Monument near Vernal, UT (May 20-22)
- Estes Cone from Longs Peak ranger station near Allenspark (May 27)
Song(s) of the month: Grace Potter
- I’d Rather Go Blind
- We’ll Be Alright
- Eachother (with Jackson Browne, Marcus King, and Lucius)
- Mother Road
- Ready Set Go
- Love is Love
- Lady Vagabond
May Summary:
Back in my April 2024 blog under things my grandkids say, I had this gem from my oldest grandson: "If your favorite color is blue then why do you have a white car?" My next car is definitely gonna be blue now...Well, I finally got my blue car. You can see it in the photos of Dinosaur National Monument below. I could have waited a few months as my old car was still just under 200,000 miles, but I feared that the tariff clown car was going to increase the prices of cars. A few weeks after getting the car, Subaru announced price increases of up to $2,500 due to the "current financial climate." Whew, just in time purchasing. My son and daugther thought the same thing and made the same decisions.
A few sports reminiscings. This is the last year of TNT's Inside the NBA show with Ernie Johnson, Charles Barkley, Kenny Smith and Shaq. I'm no longer an NBA fan but we were back in the mid 80s when that show was born, right about when our kids came along. If you watch our home videos from this period, there was always some sports program on in the background, much of it Inside the NBA. The Athletic had this nice article on the program they declared to be the best sports talk show ever. Even though I'm no longer an NBA fan, I definitely still am a Major League Baseball fan. The Athletic also recently had a really fun article on the greatest baseball games of the first quarter of this century. Most of them are playoff games, but there are a few late season games scattered in there as well. I was pretty sure I knew which game they were gonna pick for #1 because I remember that game like it was yesterday. Game 7 of the 2001 World Series. My Diamondbacks against what was arguably the greatest Yankees team in history; they had won 4 of the last 5 World Series and they had the greatest shortstop (Derek Jeter) and greatest closer (Mariana Rivera) of all time; plus a few Cy Young award winners thrown in. The Dbacks won the first two games in Arizona to take a 2-0 lead. Then the series headed to New York City. This was a little over one month after 9/11. They weren't even sure if they should stage the series at all. The city was still on edge and they needed a good story. The Yankees won all three games at home, all in dramatic fashion. The 12-inning game 5 was also included on the list of the 25 best games of the past quarter century. The New Yorkers got their temporary joy. The Dbacks blew out the Yankees in game 6 in Arizona to force the memorable game seven. I can vividly picture our entire extended family jumping up and down in my sister-in-law's living room when Luis Gonzalez got that championship-winning walk-off hit. Tim Carver had made a prescient statement just before the hit, saying the Yankees should not be playing their infield in close with Rivera on mound because he gets so many broken bat easy flyouts to the infield. Luckily Joe Torre disagreed, and the rest is history with the Dbacks only World Series victory. This video replays that entire bottom of the 9th inning in case you wanna relive it too.
This month's "hikes" included two camping trips with grandkids, a stroll up Old Fall River Road and a workout hike up to one of the best views in Rocky Mountain National Park. By the way, May camping is the best. It's not yet too hot in the tent and there are no bugs! My reading took me from the brilliance of science fiction to studies on the brain's memory, an incredible story about life, and an ode to the Earth and humanity. Enjoy!
Things My Grandkids Say: My first two grandkids first started calling me “Mike” because it was way easier to say than “Grandpa Mike”. Well, leave it to the girl to be different because my granddaughter is now calling me “gra pa” without the “Mike” part. She is also calling her mother by her volleyball nickname (juju) before she’s even uttered “mama”. This one is definitely gonna travel to the beat of her own drum.
Yet another musical artist with tons of talent that I'd never heard of until now. What a voice! She’s been recording music since 2002, initially with her band Grace Potter and the Nocturnals and more recently as a solo artist. She’s recorded country, rock, soul, and folk songs. As a matter of fact, when I was wandering around in her treasure trove of music, I added songs of hers to many of the different playlists that I have created over the years (first on cassette tapes, then CDs, then iTunes/iPod, then Pandora, then Amazon Music, and now Spotify). Below is a list of some of her songs I liked the most along with the playlist I put it in. There are several I had to leave off this list because it would take up too much of the blog. Enjoy!
I’d Rather Go Blind – Love Gone Bad playlist. A bluesy and soulful look at the end of a relationship. Potter writes most of her own music, but some of her covers, like this one, are really good. Etta James had a hit with this song and Grace Potter gives her a pretty good run.
We’ll Be Alright – Close Eyes and Sway playlist. This playlist is self explanatory. When I find myself closing my eyes and swaying to a song, it goes on this playlist. The swaying starts at the one minute mark on this song. Sample lyrics:
To rock me like a baby, hold me like a child
Show me peace of mind for a little while
Pull me from the shadows, remind me how to smile
Remind me
Streets are all empty
Shelves are all bare
The world is holding its breath
Like it's running out of air
And I don't really know if the day will ever come
When I'll find that peace within
But as I roll down this rugged highway
I'm closer than I've ever been
I saw a little girl standing by the side of the road
With a blue dress on and a voodoo doll
I pulled over, I said, "I'll give you a ride"
And she vanished right before my eyes
Love is Love – Love Songs playlist. A great love song with a beautiful sound. Sample Lyrics:
Love is love, it takes a hold
It'll change your life, make you lose control
You can't explain the things it does
But hearts are hearts, and love is love
When I came into this world
I cut the silence with my howl
I was forged in the mountains
'Til the wheel brought me on down
The world never saw me coming
When it did it started running
That's why time flies whenever I'm around
OK, here’s my attempt to describe the indescribable: When we last left book two (The Dark Forest), the Trisolaran ships were approaching Earth to claim it as their own since their planet was no longer habitable. Earth’s scientists find a way to deter the ships from invading by something very similar to the mutually assured destruction doctrine developed during the Cold War. A Swordholder role is established whereby one individual is chosen to “press the button” which assures the destruction of both Trisolaris and Earth if the Trisolaran’s ships try to attack. The current Swordholder is over 100 years of age, and a new one is chosen. Fifteen minutes after she takes over, the Trisolarans attack. She doesn’t press the button (the Trisolarans knew she wouldn’t because they knew she cared too much about people). The Trisolarans take over Earth. All humans are placed on a reservation in Australia or killed (there are a few thousand in outer space on space stations). There is no way for the population of Earth to live on Australia; not enough food. The Trisolarans just basically said “look around you, there is food in the bodies of your fellow humans, good luck and goodbye.” Yikes. One of the distant space stations containing humans finds a way to “press the button” from afar. They discover how to press the button after encountering the fourth dimension in space (don’t ask, too complicated to describe). Trisloaris is destroyed immediately, and Earth will eventually be next, but time is relative, so they have maybe 500 years? Nobody knows. The Trisolarans leave, not wanting to be destroyed. Earthlings leave Australia to repopulate Earth and to start figuring out how to survive the imminent attack coming from some god-like entities that control the universe (I’m just gonna keep writing because nobody is reading this anymore). Hundreds of years have passed, some people had hibernated, including the two Swordholders, hoping a solution would be found. The solution was to build new Earth spaceships hiding behind Jupiter so that they would be protected if/when the Sun is destroyed. Wrong. The destruction of the solar system takes place and includes all those Earth spaceships. The destruction takes place by swallowing the entire solar system into a two-dimensional plane (I know). There are a few humans left in distant spaceships that were able to escape the two-dimensional plane. They end up hundreds of years later (after hibernation of course) on a planet next to the star that the 2nd Swordholder had been given as a gift from an admirer. That planet ends up being destroyed, but not before a micro universe is discovered within the main universe. The remaining people live in this micro universe (think The Truman Show) until the powers that be call them out of those micro universes so that another Big Bang can occur to “reboot” the universe (still with me? I thought not). Here are some lines:
Humanity’s tendency to focus on the here and now reasserted itself, and concern for events that would not take place for four centuries gave way to thoughts about life in the present.
Tianming let out a long sigh. All right. If you want me to die, I’ll die. He thought of “The Judgment” by Franz Kafka, in which a father curses his son and sentences him to death. The son agrees, as easily as someone agreeing to take out the trash or to shut the door, and leaves the house, runs through the streets onto the bridge, and leaps over the balustrade to his death.
As modern biology advanced apace, people began to believe that death’s end would be achievable in one or two more centuries. If so, those who chose hibernation were taking the first steps on the staircase to life everlasting.
“You’re one of those people from the past, like my dissertation advisor, torn by conflict between two ideals. But, in our age, conscience and duty are not ideals: an excess of either is seen as a mental illness called social-pressure personality disorder. You should seek treatment.”
With both hands, Luo Ji handed over the switch. With both hands, Cheng Xin accepted this heaviest object in the history of the Earth. And so, the fulcrum upon which two worlds rested moved from a 101- year-old man to a 29-year-old woman.
The room quieted. Everyone started to read these three fairy tales that might save human civilization.
according to string theory, space, like material objects, was made up of many microscopic vibrating strings. Van Gogh had painted these strings: In his paintings, space—like mountains, wheat fields, houses, and trees—was filled with minute vibrations. Starry Night had left an indelible mark in her mind, and she was amazed to see it again four centuries later on Pluto
How could Van Gogh have painted such a thing in 1889? Did he, having suffered a second breakdown, truly leap across five centuries and see the sight before them using only his spirit and delirious consciousness?
Nearby there was a mother who lifted her baby overhead as she fell into the plane, all so that the baby would survive for an extra tenth of a second.
 |
| Middle grandson and I hangin' out on a log |
 |
| Bridge crossing |
 |
| Watching the pony and her baby get a drink |
 |
| Little brother always wanting to do what big brother is doing |
 |
| Deep in conversation |
 |
| The cutest little axe thrower |
 |
| Roasting marshmallows |
 |
| The whole gang |
 |
| Pony and baby |
 |
| Group camp |
A breakthrough came in 1953 when Henry Molaison, a man with debilitating epilepsy, was aggressively treated by removing his entire hippocampus (previous treatments had only removed half). For his remaining 55 years he was unable to form new memories (although his epilepsy was cured!). He remembered events prior to the surgery but couldn’t store any more thoughts for the rest of his life (interestingly, he didn’t remember anything 3 years prior to the surgery, but before then, no problems). His short-term memory was OK, so he could learn new tasks, but he had no idea how he learned them. Can you imagine? On the other end of the scale, we are introduced to memory champions who are able to remember ungodly amounts of data, and to the cab drivers in London who are required to memorize all the streets of London before they can have a cab (no GPS allowed). The Henry Molaison case showed scientists that the hippocampus certainly plays a role, but there has been little agreement since then on exactly what role that is, and how it relates to all the other parts of the brain that seem to be involved in memory. Functional MRIs (fMRI) have been used to track people’s brains as they perform memory tasks. This has helped point out other areas involved, but it’s just so complex that nobody has been able to fully wrap their arms around it. Even though there weren’t many answers, the search to get to the answers was a very fun read. Here are some lines:
Solomon Shereshevsky’s astonishing memory was partly due to something called synesthesia. This is a condition in which all sensations are accompanied by another sensation, such as sight, sound, smell, or taste.
Our memories cannot all remain in the hippocampus, so they spread out across the cortex. It takes time before a memory matures and all the complex connections it requires to store all that makes a memory—smells, tastes, sounds, moods, and images—are established in the brain.
memory is composed of thousands of connections between neurons; it is not one connection that makes a memory.
“When the memories are still fresh, they are more easily accessible; we can easily picture the episode and how it happened. In the beginning, it is readily available within the hippocampus. As a memory ages, the pieces are stored in other parts of the brain and it takes more effort to reconstruct it and bring it back. The hippocampus puts all the pieces together in a coherent scene.”
Long before there are other symptoms, people with Alzheimer’s experience spatial navigation problems
Even in the human brain, the so-called olfactory bulb is situated close to the hippocampus, pointing to the fact that smell is the sense most closely tied to memory
“We remember best the period from our early teenage years into our twenties. During this period of our lives, many of our experiences are new and startling; there are so many firsts, and they stay with us for the rest of our lives.”
our memories are also seen through a filter: our emotions. The fate of a memory is mostly determined by how much it means to us.
Each and every one of our memories is a mix of fact and fiction. In most memories, the central story is based on true events, but it’s still reconstructed every time we recall it. In these reconstructions, we fill in the gaps with probable facts.
“In one of our latest studies, we tried to make people admit to crimes they didn’t commit, after depriving them of sleep. It turns out that people’s memories are more malleable when they lack sleep,” she says.
The most widespread kind of forgetting, the kind that affects our personal memories to the highest degree, is the one we all experience after childhood. Researchers call it childhood amnesia (or infantile amnesia). Most of us have a boundary, somewhere between the ages of three and five, that marks the beginning of life as we remember it.
Getting wrinkles and liver spots, needing a walker, having a hunched back, losing muscle mass—those are things we can live with. But to lose our memory, and thus lose our grip on existence, is scary.
Through several experiments, they have pointed to a striking similarity in brain activity when people reminisce and when they imagine the future.
 |
| Young male elk hanging out and shedding his winter coat |
 |
| Raining down in the valley |
 |
| They're gonna have to move this rock before opening the road |
 |
| Curious marmot getting an early start to the season |
 |
| Skiers probably think it would be a good idea... |
 |
| Great scenery up here |
 |
| Getting too deep to be fun |
 |
| Great sky before the rain |
 |
| Weird snowshoes? Nah, snowshoe hare prints |
 |
| Chasm Falls |
Let’s see, other than the love triangle/family/friends/climate change angle, you will also read poignant stories about drug addiction, wolverines, backcountry skiing, avalanche safety, career messiness, college friendships, small town realities, doomsday cults, depression, dealing with Alzheimer’s, growing old together as a couple, watching your parents get old, and I guess life. I laughed out loud several times relating to the things that were written. I sent texts of things that happened in the book to family members because they resonated so deeply. Here are some lines:
Someone had taped a hand-drawn sketch of a mallard to the lintel above the stairs, reminding you to duck.
Depressive psychosis, they’d diagnosed it as—or psychotic depression, one of those fun terms you can reverse like a belt.
“Is there something right now—a weird quirky habit of his—that you find endearing?” “Well, sure,” she said, playing along. “What is it?” “He shakes his sandwich before eating it. Between bites, I mean. Like he’ s weighing it in his hand.” “Three years from now, that’s going to drive you up the wall. You’ll see Charlie shaking his sandwich and be like, Eat your f$%&ing lunch already.”
“And then, let’s see, the babies will start coming, and you’ll be too wiped out to do anything. You’ll never be able to travel or see a movie or read a real book. I’ve seen it happen to my friends from college— Charlie’s friends. You know how you’ll spend most of your time on earth? Trying to get your kids to stop fighting. Conflict mediation. There’s your great adventure for you. You’ll be so bored inside from devoting your life to babysitting that you’ll do something pointless, like remodel your kitchen. Just to distract you from your boredom. Maybe you’ll remodel it over and over. And you’ll have a big fat mortgage, you’ll have to send your kids through college, you’ll sacrifice Life at the altar of your children. It’s the American dream.”
The things that had seemed so irresistible to her—Garrett’s tragic sadness, his distrust of pieties, his gimlet-eyed way of looking at the whole American project—were less alluring when you had to live with them on a daily basis
At dinner, she set up a booster seat for little Téa, who proceeded to calmly suck peas from her fingers. She had to be the mellowest two-year-old Cece had ever met. Lana, at her age, was flying around like a pinball, breaking things left and right
Lana, who did not realize mothers played Monopoly—or board games at all, really, except under duress— was delighted. It was like she’d discovered a new kind of life-form.
A well-rested father is maybe the best thing in the world.
one of those competent women who wasn’t averse to flouncy shirts but could split wood and replace an engine filter and maybe even kill something with an arrow.
This was the real sacrifice: giving up your own joy, the thing you maybe loved to do more than anything else on earth, so that your kid might experience it someday too.
They’d been married twenty-four years, to the day, and yet these spaces still widened between them, ones they didn’t have the energy to cross. Why did they happen? There was no cause to them, really— they were just a feature of living together, like leaky gutters or joint tax returns.
Everyone knew these things would happen, smart people had been predicting them for years, and yet the world—or at least the assholes running it—seemed uninterested in stopping them. So she’d given it up: the news. She wouldn’t even listen to it in the car.
If you look for a meaning, Tarkovsky once said, you’ll miss everything that happens.
Thanks to all the promenading, the do-si-do–ing and right-and-left-granding, the norovirus was passed from guest to guest, infecting every last person at the wedding. There would be projectile vomiting on several planes back to LA and New York.
In the morning, I cooked up some sausage and eggs while grandson pounded stakes in the ground with a hammer. We enjoyed watching the many different birds flit in and out of trees trying to grab food from our stores and bugs from the windshield. Once we had eaten and cleaned up, we headed over to the visitors’ center and took the shuttle up to the Dinosaur Quarry. Millions of years ago there was a drought in this area; many dinosaurs died in the drought. Soon a flood washed all those dinosaur bones downriver to this sight where over 500 bones from 10 different species were encased in the mud of the flood until they were discovered by paleontologist Earl Douglass in 1909. He had the brilliant idea of preserving this jumble of bones sticking out of a cliff face so that ordinary folks could see it as he saw it. They built a building around the cliff face to protect it and voila, the highlight of Dinosaur National Monument was born. It’s almost eerie seeing all these bones sticking out of the rock, including a full skull! There is a small section on the lower floor that can be touched. Grandson took this opportunity to get his junior ranger badge while learning all about fossils. It was a very fun visit. Afterwards we drove to see some cool petroglyphs left by ancient civilizations from up to 10,000 years ago, and then went to see an old cabin, and took a short walk up a box canyon where grandson discovered his echo. Many times. We headed back to camp for a late lunch and to rest a bit and then headed out to see one of the pictograph highlights, a six-foot lizard drawn on the base of a cliff. It was a bit of climb to get up there, but chasing real lizards helped make the walk easy. It’s an impressive pictograph! There are several in this area I think due to the nearby confluence of the Yampa and Green Rivers. It was a communication hub evidently. We headed back to camp where the evening fare was roasted hot dogs and potato chips. We got a good fire going and enjoyed this now rare camping experience until it was time for bed.
After another good night’s sleep “we” broke down camp, which means one of us folded everything up and put it away and the other one of us pounded the black wood coals with a hammer, eventually looking like a coal miner. Breakfast was cereal this morning, then a big clean up before heading home for Big Adventure Day #3. Grandson wanted to do one more hike in the park, so we started up the fossil trail that goes from the visitors’ center to the Dinosaur Quarry. It’s a 1.5 mile walk uphill and includes some dinosaur bones in the rocks and lots of live lizards and caves. Grandson made it the entire way after a couple of leisurely hours, and we took the shuttle back down to our car. Since this took longer than I thought, my plan for many stops on the way back was scuttled; I wanted to get home in time for dinner. So we only made one stop for gas and one stop for a picnic lunch along the Poudre River outside of Fort Collins. We made it home for dinner where his mom and dad tried to pump him for information on his trip, but like most five-year-olds, it’s tough to get anything concrete from them after a three-day trip.
It was a fun time. We only visited a tiny portion of the monument, and I’d love to visit other parts in the future. The scenery is beautiful, and we saw lots of birds, including bald eagles and ospreys.
 |
| Dinosaur in Dinosaur, Colorado |
 |
| Welcome to Utah! |
 |
| Our view from camp |
 |
| Lots of other kids camping |
 |
| We spent time on this bench |
 |
| Hot chocolate while grandpa has his coffee |
 |
| View of our campground from above |
 |
| Dinosaur bones! |
 |
| ...so many of them |
 |
| Iris-bordered trail |
 |
| Zen in the box canyon |
 |
| Junior ranger checking out rock art |
 |
| Heading back down |
 |
| Camp at sunset |
 |
| Little spelunker |
what’s a day? They insist it’s twenty-four hours and ground crews keep telling them so, but it takes their twenty-four hours and throws sixteen days and nights at them in return.
Nell wants sometimes to ask Shaun how it is he can be an astronaut and believe in God, a Creationist God that is, but she knows what his answer would be. He’d ask how it is she can be an astronaut and not believe in God.
Is Shaun’s universe just the same as hers but made with care, to a design? Hers an occurrence of nature and his an artwork? The difference seems both trivial and insurmountable.
She expects that her mother was one of a kind. How many others have lain in a cot while an atomic bomb detonates? Not many. How many others lost their mother to that bomb on a terrible August day?
so I am saying to you Chie, my first and only child, that you might regard in wonder these men walking on the moon but you must never forget the price humanity pays for its moments of glory, because humanity doesn’t know when to stop, it doesn’t know when to call it a day, so be wary is what I mean though I say nothing, be wary.
before you know it you’ll be back in your landing capsule with its heat shield and parachute and you’ll crash through the atmosphere engulfed in fire and down you’ll go in a trail of plasma, and you’ll land God willing on a plain vaster than vision and be pulled from the capsule with pipe-cleaner legs and spluttering monosyllables where once was language
They were warned in their training about the problem of dissonance. They were warned about what would happen with repeated exposure to this seamless earth. You will see, they were told, its fullness, its absence of borders except those between land and sea. You’ll see no countries, just a rolling indivisible globe which knows no possibility of separation, let alone war. And you’ll feel yourself pulled in two directions at once. Exhilaration, anxiety, rapture, depression, tenderness, anger, hope, despair. Because of course you know that war abounds and that borders are something that people will kill and die for.
maybe against all the odds we’ll migrate to Mars where we’ll start a colony of gentle preservers, people who’ll want to keep the red planet red, we’ll devise a planetary flag because that’s a thing we lacked on earth and we’ve come to wonder if that’s why it all fell apart, and we’ll look back at the faint dot of blue that is our old convalescing earth and we’ll say, Do you remember? Have you heard the tales?
It's another half mile to the Moore Park backcountry campsites that are just a few yards from a beautiful meadow with great views of Battle Mountain and Estes Cone. Just past the meadow I turned left onto the Estes Cone trail, and here’s where it got steep. It was a 1,500-foot climb in about 1.3 miles. Good workout! The last third of a mile to the top of the cone is pretty scrambly, but following the cairns eventually gets you to the right place. There is a bit of a maybe class 2 or 3 scramble up the side of a cliff to reach the top where it was cold and windy! But I had the place all to myself. I hung around up here a bit until I got tired of the wind and then headed back to the trailhead. I passed a group of teenaged girls on horseback enjoying themselves. I guess they may have been part of the YMCA up here. No big animal sightings today, just a bunch of chipmunks. I think this area is too close to the cabins along highway 7 to see many animals.
 |
| Pretty Inn Brook |
 |
| Eugenia mine site |
 |
| Old boiler near the mine |
 |
| Estes Cone from Moore Meadow, that's my goal |
 |
| Battle Mountain |
 |
| Top of the Cone with Longs Peak in the background |
 |
| Great views from up here |
 |
| Rocky Mountain National Park |
 |
| Shadows on the hillside |
 |
| The last bit of scrambling |