Skip to main content

Winter in the Rockies

Blowing snow lit up by the sun, which recently set behind those two peaks
A couple of days ago I went skiing. That's not unusual, because I love to ski. Every year I go skiing quite a few times - usually starting in November, when Arapahoe Basin opens, and ending in June, when the snow melts and they have to close.

When I went skiing, I brought my camera to the ski resort and took a few pictures. I didn't take any videos or photos of the skiing, but I did take some photos of the moon above the mountains.

If I come up to the mountains from Denver, there are two options to get to Arapahoe Basin. One option is to  take the I-70 through the Eisenhower tunnel, continue past Arapahoe Basin until the next exit, drive through Dillon, and then backtrack to the resort. When I go through the tunnel (which I don't very often), I like to hold my breath until I get to the other side. This is especially difficult when I run into a traffic jam halfway through.

A quicker route is to get off the I-70 onto Loveland Pass Road, which is a curvy road that winds over a mountain pass and is much more direct. This road is rather narrow and has a very steep slope on one side of it, so in snowy conditions it can be closed and I have to take the route through the tunnel.


When I was on Loveland Pass Road, I saw some flashing lights up ahead and a scrape-mark in the snow on the cliff. I immediately suspected that somebody had slid off the edge. Sure enough, when I got to the lights, I could see an autorack truck that had fallen off the edge and smashed into the trees below. There were some men climbing up to the road, and some cables connecting the fallen truck to another one which would probably pull it back up. I didn't get a chance to take a photograph, but I knew I'd be coming back that way later, so I decided to take a photo then.

View of Loveland Pass Road from the I-70, with the trucks circled
Unfortunately, the road was closed by the time I got back - probably because they were trying to pull the truck back up - so I had to take the longer route that passed through the tunnel. Then, on the highway, I took some photos of the truck accident from below. You can see my photos in this post. The trucks are on Loveland Pass Road, and the mark is where the truck slid down the cliff. I'm not sure whether the truck got back on the road - it could still be hiding in the trees, or it could be that autorack on the right in the picture.

That day must have been marked for trouble, because on the same road, only a couple of miles from the truck accident, there was another accident that involved two cars that had collided. Glass and chunks of metal were all over the road. And then there was also a 1.5 hour backup on the I-70 because of construction on one of the Twin Tunnels. I wouldn't be surprised if there were a lot of other accidents that I missed. Well, at least I made it home safe!

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dividing Paper Puzzle

When I was young, I would fold a sheet of letter paper in half, for origami projects. It occurred to me that the two halves looked almost the same as the whole sheet of paper - except they were smaller. I could see they weren't exactly the same shape; they were off by a little bit. But the idea stuck in my head. You can use a pen, instead of scissors, to halve the paper. Those rectangles all have the same shape, but are different sizes. One night when I was 12, I thought about my idea. I wondered if it was possible to have a sheet of paper that could be cut in half, resulting in 2 smaller versions of the same paper. That would be neat, to be able to cut a paper in half and get 2 papers that had the same exact shape. If that were possible, then you could cut  those  papers, too; and the resulting papers would have the same shape as all the other papers. You could keep cutting in half forever, and each paper, no matter how small, would have the same shape as all the ot...
6 comments
Read more

Pluto No Longer on the Horizon

This morning, New Horizons became the first spacecraft to make a flyby observation of the Pluto system. During the mission, the spacecraft captured the most detailed photographs of Pluto's surface we've ever had, and possibly ever will have. It also found many new properties including size, mass, atmosphere, and surface composition. In a period of a few hours, we discovered more about Pluto than we've found in the 85 years since Clyde Tombaugh captured its first photograph. Before After  (images credit: NASA) To complete this mission, the spacecraft flew for more than 9 years through the emptiness of space. This may sound like a long time, but it's actually amazingly quick. In fact, New Horizons set the record for the fastest speed at launch, and during the flyby, the spacecraft was moving at a rate of over 30,000 mph, or roughly 50 times the speed of sound. Picture an object twice as heavy as a grand piano moving 25 times faster than a bullet from a gun. Yikes. The man...
2 comments
Read more

Gravity

Imagine the universe is filled with water. Instead of empty space, every inch of it contains pure water. No planets, no stars, only water. What happens? And what would happen if an air bubble formed? The answer to this question requires a basic understanding of gravity. Gravity is very important. It helps hold matter together, bends light, and distorts space-time (which, incidentally, is how it bends light). It also makes it possible to play football, and as Americans are big football fans, they would certainly agree that we couldn't live without it. Unfortunately, many Americans don't understand how gravity works. Admittedly, scientists haven't figured out a lot of things, but we do understand it well enough to make predictions and model physical events. One of the important things about gravity is that its strength is proportional to the inverse of the square of the distance. In other words, it gets weaker as you get farther away, based on the equation: F = c/d 2 where c ...
6 comments
Read more