Ashfall State Park

Part 2 of our Memorial Day Extravaganza was a visit to Ashfall State Historical Park, about 1/2 hour south of Niobrara. This is the coolest place in the complete middle of nowhere that has hundreds of excavated fossil skeletons still in place where they were found.

The Rhino Barn is the central hilight of the park. It's a large barn that was built over the excavation and lets visitors see how the bones are arranged. Each bone was left in place and the remaining ash was dug out down to the underlying sandstone that formed the original ground surface.

This area was a watering hole similar to those you see on National Geographic full of rhinos, camels, and deer. A gigantic volcano in southern Idaho erupted 12 million years ago and blanketed the area with 10-20 inches of ash. The watering hole filled in, animals came here seeking water, died, and were buried by more ash. There are unborn Rhinos still in the womb, big rhinos, baby rhinos, etc. The whole thing is very cool.

We got a special treat and got to meet Dr. Voorhies, the guy that runs the whole thing and has been here forever. He was busy digging out some bones and took a few minutes to talk geology with me and the boys. He made the mistake of giving each boy a handfull of volcanic ash to inspect - GP unloaded it from him upwind and gave him a facefull of ash. Sorry Dr. Vhoorhies!

Niobrara St. Park - Memorial Day Weekend '07

This weekend we hit the road and saw some parts of Nebraska we had never seen. We drove north to Niobrara State Park where the Niobrara and Missouri Rivers converge.

This is a panorama of the Missouri River taken from the South Dakota side. The boys were fired up to learn that we were in South Dakota. They have fond memories of our trip to the Black Hills last year.

JP scoped out an awsome campsite that was secluded, out of the wind, and overlooked the Niobrara. We were afraid that we would not be able to find a campsite on Memorial Day weekend, but there were plenty to be had. It's a little different than being around Chicago on a holiday weekend.

Our campsite sat on some bluffs 30 feet above the river. The wind from the east carried bugs over the river and wetlands and then up the bluffs. All day until dusk swarms of Martins and other fly-catchers flew around the campsite and kept the air free of bugs. Too bad they could not eat ticks. On the other hand, if they could eat ticks, that would mean that ticks could fly and that would be nearly as bad as if spiders and scorpions could fly.

We went for a short hike from the campground down to the river. On the way we came across a flag that Lewis & Clark raised.

At the bottom of the bluffs runs a rails-to-trails trail, complete with a bridge over the Niobrara.
Our campsite is in the trees about half-way between the cleared grassy area and the left side of the picture.
This is the view from our campsite. The Niobrara train trail bridge is in the foreground, and the highway bridge to South Dakota is visible in the distance. The main channel of the river ran under the bluffs we were on and we could hear the gurgle of the water - very relaxing.

The park was half short grass prarie and half wooded with a mix of hardwoods and red cedars. It had an out-west feel to it with the cedars and cool dry air.

After our hike, we returned to the campsite and cooked up some dinner. JP started finding ticks on everyone and from there it turned into the beginning of what felt like a horror movie. The boys had ticks, the dog had ticks, the tent had ticks, etc. Bug spray and frontline did not seem to offer any protection. We pulled 30 or so off the dog before bed, but were uneasy letting her in the tent knowing that she still had more in her fur. I went to bed an hour after JP and the kids and was pleased to find the dog sleeping on my pillow when I entered the tent.

Saturday we went for a horse trail ride around the park. The boys enjoyed the independence of being able to ride by themselves. The ride was only an hour, but we sure felt it when we dismounted and then spent 6 hours in the car.

NGPC Fishin' Day

May 19th was Nebraska's Game & Parks Commision's Fishin' Day where the game wardens come out and provide free fishing licenses, poles, & worms for the day to city folk that have never fished. We took advantage of the beautiful (but windy) day and hit Wagontrain lake for some exciting bluegill action.

The water was still high and murky from the rain we have been getting, but the little bluegills and sunfish were hungry and ready to feast on our wiggly worms.

Alex from next door came along and had a good time. The NGPC guys handed out some nice fish ID books and the boys had a good time pointing out to us that there are fish called "Suckers" for at least an hour.

The lake was ice free and the boys enjoyed getting their feet (and everything else) wet.

Cub Scout Promotions

This year's end-of-year cub scout Pack 15 picnic was double exciting - GP became the pack's first Tiger Cub for next year. CP earned his wolf badge and is now on his way to becoming a Bear. GP got his blue shirt and could not be more excited.

I cannot believe that CP is now wearing the blue neckerchief. When we started scouts only two years ago, he was such a little guy and the bear scouts seemed so mature. He has grown up since then and is now one of the (somewhat) mature kids. Next year at this time he will be getting his Webelos neckerchief.

We are looking forward to the annual "Fun with Son" campout, as we will all be able to attend.

Mothers' Day Weekend

As usual, Saturday morning rolled around and I woke up at 5 AM instead of sleeping in. I siezed the day and made it out to Stagecoach Lake for some sunrise fishing. The lake was a sheet of glass. The water was still churned up from the previous week's rains. I think the fish are overstuffed as a result of eating all the bugs that washed in the lake.

The Grammas drove out for the weekend and had a great time.

We had an extra e-fence collar for Daisy, the Grammas' dog. Whe figured out the whole fence thing in only two shocks and was able to roam free with Maggie. The two of them played and ran around with the kids all weekend.

We had the second non-windy day since we moved here two years ago so we treated the Grammas to an air show. The boys shot their rockets, flew a rubber-band balsa plane, and demonstrated their skills at flying the bungee launched RC glider.

Busy Weekend Part 2

Gramma & Grampa provided some babysitting for GP while we ran CP up the far north edge of Lincoln for a Cub Scout tennis outing at the Nebraska Tennis Center. All the scouts got a nice taste of tennis from the drill Sargent instructor that was able to keep all the boys in check.

The morning after another night of heavy rains, we drove around the neighborhood to check out the damage. The normally artificial rivers at Wilderness Ridge had turned into real rivers with waterfalls and rapids. Too bad we do not have a kayak.

GP rode around with Maggie & Gramma in the back seat.

This is the Big Blue river in Beatrice on the Monday following the big rains. It's normally 20' below the bridge and only a few inches deep most of the year. Shortly after I took this picture the city closed the bridge (highway 136).

The flood overran the city's sewage plant, so the town just dumped all their raw sewage into the river for a couple days. This underscores the point that rivers are not a good place to swim or drink from.

Busy Weekend Part 1

Gramma & Grampa stopped on their way back from Florida. I'm not sure how it works out that Lincoln lies on the line between Florida and Southern Utah, but I'm glad that it does and we were happy to see them. Grampa got a Husker sweatshirt for his birthday. The boys did a pirate theme for the cake to match the funny card they got him. The front of the card showed some pirates and said something about getting some pirate booty for your birthday. Inside when the card is opened, all the pirates dropped their drawers and gave grampa the full moon. Nothing could be funnier to two boys!

In keeping with their recent tradition, Gramma & Grampa brought a mess of bad weather with them. We got around 5" of rain in a day. All the creeks and rivers jumped out of their banks. Below is Salt Creek, a small creek near us that is normally 4 feet wide and only inches deep. Here where it passes under 14th stret at Wilderness Park, it's now 15 feet deep and over a hundred feet wide.

I have always wondered about the flood debris I've seen hanging way up in the trees. What sort of flood does it take to raise such a small creek 15 feet? Now I know.

During a break in the rain, we drove out to Yankee Hill Lake, which until this rainfall had been dry due to reconstruction. It's the closest of the Salt Creek lakes to us and I have been sad that it did not have water. Now it is full (from one storm) and just needs to grow some fish. Until then, it's a great place to take the boys to shoot BB guns.

Cub Scout Trout Fishing Expedition

Yesterday we went on our second Cub Scout fishing trip to Two Rivers state rec area. The park has a stocked trout pond that gives the kids a guaranteed chance to catch some fish. The only problem is that it is catch and eat - not catch and release like we normally do with bluegills. The boys enjoyed catching some fish, but they still have no interest in eating them. The cat, dog, and I ended up eating the four trout. I tried cooking them on the grill - not bad.

The in the video, GP reels in a keeper and then JP lands a whopper with her bare hands. The audio is bad - JP's big concern is the size of the trout's teeth. The other scout mom and I lend her words of encouragement.

It Did Not Come Out!

GP has had a loose tooth for the last two months. Last week he finally put together enough courage to yank out the wiggly thing. His plan: attach the tooth to a dart and shoot the dart out of a gun. We tried and tried, but the floss we used to secure the tooth kept coming off the tapered tooth. One time it held on the tooth but came off the dart. On the final try it stayed attached but lacked the energy required to separate tooth from boy.



A few days later, the tooth fell out during the bus ride home from school.

Nebraska as Art

When Grampa was here last time, he said that he had read a story in National Geographic about a meteor crater here in Nebraska. It's called Merna Crater and is located in Custer County right next to BFE. It looks like it's probably not an actual crater, just a nice round depression.

Anyway, one thing led to another and I ended up downloading digital elevation models (huge text files) of the state from UNL and wrote a LabView program to process the data into images. I posted Adams thru Gage Counties in a web album. I used different colormaps to represent elevations. In the image above, blue is the highest and black is the lowest. Some of the county images could pass for art.

Carolina Bays in Nebraksa: Before moving to Nebraska, I was entertaining thoughts of moving to South Carolina and working for a big forklift company. While doing research on S. Carolina, I found some information on the Carolina Bays, some oval depressions that line the east coast. They are called bays because many of them are filled with Bay trees. There's quite a bit of internet stuff out there about them and some believe that they are impact craters from a big slushy comet, as their central axes all sort of point to a central origin. It makes for spectacular sci-fi reading.

When I started browsing through my first attempts at visualizing the DEM's, I was shocked to see some large oval depressions in some of the counties. Turns out that these are the same as the Carolina Bays, but located here on the prairie in Nebraska. Most lie south of the current Platte River and are oriented perpendicular to the continuous winds. Filmore and Clay counties are full of them.

New Mower

This week I brought home an old prototype mower to tinker with. We were going to scrap it, and I figured that it might be nice to get some use out of it instead. It was barely running when I took it home, and after a couple hours of working on it it still barely ran. My diagnosis is that the camshaft gear jumped a tooth - I need to tear it down to be sure, but that is for another day. Fortunately, we had another engine with only 400 hours on it at work. It only took an hour to swap engines, and another hour to figure out how to route the belts on the front of the engine. It has a serpentine hydro drive belt and twin double-sided v-belts for the PTO and blower. Once the belts were routed the engine fired up first time and we were cutting grass.



The boys are wanting like crazy to drive the thing, but I have visions of them driving straight into a basement window well. JP did very well and mowed the entire back yard with an ear-to-ear grin.

Today we went to Campell's Nursery which was closed for a year due to road construction. I think they are making up for the lost revenues with their prices. We bought and installed two yellow shrub roses on the back of the house. Here in Lincoln, roses grow like weeds and we are excited about having some nice flowers around the house.

This morning I finished off staining the Rainbow. It was a year overdue due to our move. It's amazing what a gallon of waterseal can do for weathered wood. Out neighbor got in the spirit and gave his swingset a coat as well.

Hobbytown Model Contest

This morning we ran over to Hobbytown to check out their model contest. I thought that the contest started at 10am, but when we got there at 10:30, there were barely any entries, so we decided to enter. We raced home and CP speed-built his first glue-together plastic model - a 1/72nd scale Corsair. Alex from next door brought over a Junkers Ju-88 bomber that he and his dad had worked on and was 90% complete. GP helped CP and Alex paint their models.

Alex's bomber had a billion teeny tiny parts that I could barely hold, much less cut them free of the sprues undamaged. We glued on most of the pieces, but skipped the super-tiny parts like the front radio antennas. We quickly put on a few decals (called "detals" by CP and "decoys" by Alex) and then raced over to hobbytown to enter by 1:00 pm.

I expected to see a lot more models at hobbytown than there were, but the quality of those there made up for quantity. There were several planes that were detailed down to the seatbelt stiching and instrument panel gages. I knew we didn't have a chance, but I was promoting the contest as a good family activity and a fun way for the kids to expand their obsession with WW-II planes.
Alex had to leave for his piano lesson, but we stuck around to watch the judging. During our wait, GP exploded a squishy juice ball all over himself with bright pink juice. He cried and cried because I had told him the entire way to the store that morning that he (and the others) were to touch NOTHING in the store. We waited and waited and finally went home to recharge with a snack.

We returned to Hobbytown at 3:00, thinking the contest was over, to collect our planes. Wrong. The judge was still judging. Finally at 3:30 he started laying out ribbons. All day we had been coaching the overly confident boys and telling them that they probably would not win, as they were up against some nice models by 15-year olds in the Junior category.

We watched the judge place a red 2nd place ribbon next to Alex's bomber. He was ecstatic! CP was happy for him, until he realized that there was no ribbon next to his Corsair. After all the 2nd place ribbons, the judge started with the 1st place ribbons. We watched in awe as he put one next to CP's plane. I was so happy for CP! Now Alex was bummed that he didn't win a blue ribbon. I was just fired up that they both got ribbons. The judge had a big stack of ribbons and split the junior category into cars and planes. Very niiice. He also split the adult planes into plastic and balsa, which gave me a 1st place ribbon as the only entry in the balsa category with my Me-109! We entered 3 planes and came home with 3 ribbons!

What a day! It's now 8:30 pm and the boys are still playing out some dogfight over the Pacific which will resume promptly at 6:00 am tomorrow morning.

Spitfire

Last night we finished up the latest plane in our WW-II airforce: the Supermarine Spifire Mk-II. I built this one sans landing gear, machine guns, and antennas. Instead of tissue paper, I used sheets of balsa wood. I am anxious to see if it lasts longer than the others.
We have continuous air battles raging throughout the house. Right now the combatants are debating the proper sound to make for the machine guns on the Spitfire. Last night we watched "Dogfight" and all of us were very engaged. The show was about the battle of Leyte and how we took out the Japanese super-battleship, the Yamato, which was featured on Nova this last week. Very Exciting!