I found this quiz at Karina's Ruminations of an Aspiring Ecologist. The Walk Score quiz takes your address, comes up with how close you are to grocery stores, hardware stores, schools, restaurants, etcetera, and comes up with a number rating based on walkability. It doesn't always show the correct location for everything, it misses a few things, and sometimes shows things that are closed.
For our little house in the Nevada outback, I get a score of 74 - very walkable. It says we have a grocery store within 0.69 miles, though I haven't heard of that particular one - the one we use is 1.25 miles away, a bit farther than I like to walk for groceries. We do have numerous restaurants, cafes, and bars (and a couple casinos) within 0.15 miles, two drug stores within 0.15 miles, a park, a school, and miscellaneous stores - clothing, video, electronics, gift stores, and a pawn shop - within 0.3 miles. I'm also very close to the library (0.3 miles) and the one-movie theatre (0.5 miles). The hardware stores are farther than I'd walk to unless I was just out for a walk and dropped in, at 1 to 2 miles away. I was surprised to find that we are virtually next door to a coffee shop or espresso house that is probably half-way across town (1 mile?), if it even exists with the name they gave. It definitely isn't next door!
It doesn't list several of the very close-by restaurants or bars, possibly because they are inside hotels, and it lists a few things that I'll have to check out, and at least a couple that aren't open currently. It doesn't list how close I am to the red-light district, which is definitely within walking distance but not of interest to me (this could be a selling point for some Nevadans or passers-through staying at nearby motels). Actually - now that I look again - it does show the red-light district: one adult bookstore I'd never heard of and one "ranch" listed under bars.
For our home at the lake I get a walk score of 15 - car-dependent. For sure! Our house is within walking distance of two restaurants (one closed), one coffee shop, a couple real estate outfits, and a defunct gas station selling sundries. The closest grocery store is almost 2 miles away; the one we use is almost 8 miles away. It doesn't list the nearby coffee shop that is sometimes closed in winter, nor does it list the restaurant that is open or the old gas station that has a few groceries. They are within 0.1 to 0.3 miles and would raise the walkability a little, perhaps. It doesn't list the fact that we are within walking distance of voting, the fire house, a heating repair outfit, one or two jewelry shops, and a boat storage and repair place. (It also doesn't list the nearby beach and picnic area or the boat ramp - we walk to the boat ramp for the view.) It does list a school, which is a tiny charter or private school within 0.15 miles. Most stores and all gas stations are 7 to 8 miles away, so we drive, and although one could consider some kind of mo-ped, I wouldn't use one on a two-lane, 55 mph highway with curves, hills, and trees. (MOH will use his motorcycle to get groceries - it's at the other place now, though.)
What's your score?
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Sunday, August 3, 2008
Things to do in Austin, NV
First, settle in at your motel.
Second, look at the geology.
Walk past some old and older out-of-commission bars and remember the bar that isn't there anymore - see the old site next to the Golden Club there? What was it's name? Until it burned down in 1977, that was where CA and I ate every morning. It was a kitchen fire, they said - we woke up that morning to the sound of fire engines and the ruckus of people in the street. After that, the cafe at the International was the only place for breakfast. The tea was lukewarm; the eggs were runny. I ate dry cereal instead. I never have like eating there much, ever since, a kind of leftover bias from the past - the cafe did go through a spell a couple years ago where you could get good burgers. I don't recommend it right now, though: the waitress always seems to be in the bar.
Whereas I can't can recommend eating at the cafe, (This part is simply not true anymore, updated 3Feb2012.) The bar is well worth stopping at. The Amberbock on tap is fine, and the bartender tapped a new keg for us (the old one was empty). I think he said that the old handcrafted wooden bar was made in 1842, or that the wood for it was shipped around the horn to San Francisco that year (stop and ask the bartender - he knows!).
Second, look at the geology.
When you are good and ready, walk uphill from your motel (or across the street depending on which motel you are at and where you are going).
Walk past some old and older out-of-commission bars and remember the bar that isn't there anymore - see the old site next to the Golden Club there? What was it's name? Until it burned down in 1977, that was where CA and I ate every morning. It was a kitchen fire, they said - we woke up that morning to the sound of fire engines and the ruckus of people in the street. After that, the cafe at the International was the only place for breakfast. The tea was lukewarm; the eggs were runny. I ate dry cereal instead. I never have like eating there much, ever since, a kind of leftover bias from the past - the cafe did go through a spell a couple years ago where you could get good burgers. I don't recommend it right now, though: the waitress always seems to be in the bar.
Speaking of bars, here's a live one: The Owl Club. Don't be too confused about this - there's an Owl Club in Eureka, too. This Owl Club here in Austin is the place where Austin Rules were invented: no slop, bank the 8. (At least I think it was this bar. I wasn't around when those rules were invented; didn't find out about them until years later.)
In 1977, this was a good bar to hang out in, as were all the bars including the ones no longer open or no longer extant. In 1977, you could take your beer outside the bar as you headed down the hill or across the street to the next one, and no one minded - unlike in Eureka of the same era when they would practically arrest you. Bar fighting was considered to be a weekend sport, a sport competed in by friends who made up shortly after the fight. I didn't compete, being from out of town. It was a sport just for locals, as far as I could tell.
[BTW, it is a good idea to start at the upper end of town when working your way from one bar to another, and then it's all downhill to the motel from there.]
The Owl Club had the song North to Alaska by Johnny Horton playing on the jukebox in 1977. Every time I stopped back in, I'd check to see if it was still there. Last time I checked, probably in the late 1980's, you could still play North to Alaska on the jukebox. I'd been thinking about this as MOH and I drove through Austin a week before. Would the song still be there?
We walked into the bar, looking for the pool table, which didn't seem to be there anymore unless it was hidden in the back somewhere or under some junk in a back corner. I walked over to the jukebox and examined every song - no North. As we sat down at the bar to await our beers, North to Alaska started playing - on a CD boombox sitting on a small stage in the front corner. We sat and listened - it's still there, just not on the jukebox!
The bartender had stepped out, said he'd be right back. Two guys down at the other end of the bar were arguing about something [maybe they were working up to an old-fashioned fight competition?], the song was over, and there wasn't a pool table to be seen.
So we left. Without any beer. Walked down the street to the only other bar I'm at all familiar with, maybe the only other one open. The bar at The International.
The International Hotel building was built in Virginia City in 1859 and then taken apart and brought to Austin in 1863.
Virginia City then built a new International Hotel, which burned down in 1875. A third International Hotel was then built in V.C., six stories high - it is the International that was supposed to have been the largest hotel east west of the Mississippi. The third V.C. International burned down in 1914. In Austin, only the east side of the current building is from the original International Hotel, as I understand it. Some bits of history here, here, and here.
Saturday, August 2, 2008
Geology on the Road: Austin, NV
Austin, Nevada: Just a little bit of the geology you can see in Austin - either while staying there or when driving through.
At the very far west end of town, right about the time the speed limit is increasing on your way downhill out of town (or decreasing on your way uphill into town), you can see a small powder house in an adit dug into Jurassic quartz monzonite on the north side of the road by old-timer miners. The photo of the powder cache door looks more or less northwest and was taken while heading west out of town. If you are coming in from the west, you will probably have to pull out on the side of the road to even see this.
Above, just uphill from the powder house, toward town and a little to the east: a nice exposure of the quartz monzonite, with its inclusions, pegmatite dikes, and a few small quartz veins. The old-timers reputedly dug on some fairly thin quartz veins for the silver they mined - I haven't knocked around in the hills much to see what the veins actually looked like.
Above, a nice exposure right across the street (Highway 50 or Main Street) from the Pony Canyon Motel, looking north. This exposure shows several fine-grained mafic dikes in the center (dark colored and steeply dipping to the west) with some sub-parallel, light-colored, coarse-grained granitic to pegmatitic dikes. To the left of the dark-light dike zone you can see a brownish, Fe-oxide-stained zone, which is where you can find a narrow quartz vein or two with strike and dip sub-parallel to the dikes and fractures. The mafic dikes can be considered diabasic, and they look similar to Jurassic dikes at Yerington; the light-colored dike to the left of the Fe-oxide zone might be a quartz-eye porphyry.
These dikes, veins, and associated fractures all cut the highly weathered quartz monzonite that is exposed on the east and west sides of the exposure (right and left in the above photo, respectively). On the west side of this exposure, you can see that the weathered quartz monzonite is cut by numerous thin pegmatite dikelets that strike generally east-west and dip shallowly to moderately to the north, also cut by the dikes, veins, and fractures.
And, not being able to resist playing around, I've included a few One Geology overlays on Google Earth. The first one attempts to recreate the scale of the geologic map shown in an earlier post and reprinted below.
The second just shows a nice view of Austin from the south, using a 2x vertical exaggeration as suggested by hypocentre at Hypo-Theses. The One Geology at this scale is simplified compared to the reality of chopped up, ever-widening Nevada (to quote Brian at Clastic Detritus).
Several other geoblogospheric types have played around some with this - go to All of My Faults are Stress-Related and Sismordia - Seismology at Concordia to see a couple more examples of how to use One Geology.
At the very far west end of town, right about the time the speed limit is increasing on your way downhill out of town (or decreasing on your way uphill into town), you can see a small powder house in an adit dug into Jurassic quartz monzonite on the north side of the road by old-timer miners. The photo of the powder cache door looks more or less northwest and was taken while heading west out of town. If you are coming in from the west, you will probably have to pull out on the side of the road to even see this.
Above, just uphill from the powder house, toward town and a little to the east: a nice exposure of the quartz monzonite, with its inclusions, pegmatite dikes, and a few small quartz veins. The old-timers reputedly dug on some fairly thin quartz veins for the silver they mined - I haven't knocked around in the hills much to see what the veins actually looked like.
Above, a nice exposure right across the street (Highway 50 or Main Street) from the Pony Canyon Motel, looking north. This exposure shows several fine-grained mafic dikes in the center (dark colored and steeply dipping to the west) with some sub-parallel, light-colored, coarse-grained granitic to pegmatitic dikes. To the left of the dark-light dike zone you can see a brownish, Fe-oxide-stained zone, which is where you can find a narrow quartz vein or two with strike and dip sub-parallel to the dikes and fractures. The mafic dikes can be considered diabasic, and they look similar to Jurassic dikes at Yerington; the light-colored dike to the left of the Fe-oxide zone might be a quartz-eye porphyry.These dikes, veins, and associated fractures all cut the highly weathered quartz monzonite that is exposed on the east and west sides of the exposure (right and left in the above photo, respectively). On the west side of this exposure, you can see that the weathered quartz monzonite is cut by numerous thin pegmatite dikelets that strike generally east-west and dip shallowly to moderately to the north, also cut by the dikes, veins, and fractures.
And, not being able to resist playing around, I've included a few One Geology overlays on Google Earth. The first one attempts to recreate the scale of the geologic map shown in an earlier post and reprinted below.
The second just shows a nice view of Austin from the south, using a 2x vertical exaggeration as suggested by hypocentre at Hypo-Theses. The One Geology at this scale is simplified compared to the reality of chopped up, ever-widening Nevada (to quote Brian at Clastic Detritus).
Several other geoblogospheric types have played around some with this - go to All of My Faults are Stress-Related and Sismordia - Seismology at Concordia to see a couple more examples of how to use One Geology.Map from: NBMG Report 40 - Sediment-Hosted Precious-Metal Deposits of Northern Nevada - Road log/trip guide for SEG precious metals field trip, fall 1984, by J. V. Tingley, H. F. Bonham, Jr.
Friday, August 1, 2008
Sitemeter Down
For those of you who have sitemeter displayed on your blog page, be aware that currently IE7 will not load any webpages with the sitemeter script. And IE7 won't go to the sitemeter site, either! That will be affecting some geoblogospheroids, whose sites I can't link to right now. (I know I know - get Firefox they all say, but people who don't have it, won't be reading your blog.)
Bugs me when I can't even read my own blog! Took the sitemeter thingy off, at least for now.
Bugs me when I can't even read my own blog! Took the sitemeter thingy off, at least for now.
UPDATE 8/2/2008 4:30 pm PDT: Sitemeter is now working again.
Friday from the Road: Austin, NV
Perhaps by now, you've gotten tired of Middlegate Station and want to move on. Well, here's a place for you: the well-known town of Austin, Nevada, which sits in the center of Nevada, and which used to be the county seat of Lander County (until 1979 when it moved to Battle Mountain, amongst much consternation and outcry by the locals).
There it is above - Austin - sitting on the side of the hill on the east side of Reese River Valley. You can see the old mine dumps and bits of granite sticking out here and there.
Oh, did you miss the Reese River when driving through Reese River Valley? It's easy to do. I just happened to get a picture of it from Highway 50. In the photo above you can see the Toiyabe Range on the east (left) and a bit of the Shoshone Mountains on the west (right). The Reese is not a big river, as you can see - usually you can leap across it with a large step. In places, it can be wide enough to put a canoe in, although that depends on the time of year, the year itself, and the section of river in question. Trust me about the canoe thing. 
MOH and I fell for the long-standing tradition of staying in this motel, and after all, it's the only stick-built motel in town. The long-standing tradition of prefering this motel over the other two dates back to 1977 when the Quito Gold Mine was being discovered by former employees of Former Mining Company, geologists who happened to include some of the very same geologists who discovered the Jerritt Canyon gold mine. (Those former employees did not include me; I was doing Other Things in Austin that year.)
Don't get me wrong, though: Austin is one of my favorite places, ever since I spent most of a summer working there and staying in the Lincoln Motel back in 1977.
There it is above - Austin - sitting on the side of the hill on the east side of Reese River Valley. You can see the old mine dumps and bits of granite sticking out here and there.
Oh, did you miss the Reese River when driving through Reese River Valley? It's easy to do. I just happened to get a picture of it from Highway 50. In the photo above you can see the Toiyabe Range on the east (left) and a bit of the Shoshone Mountains on the west (right). The Reese is not a big river, as you can see - usually you can leap across it with a large step. In places, it can be wide enough to put a canoe in, although that depends on the time of year, the year itself, and the section of river in question. Trust me about the canoe thing. 
Well, here we are in Austin, at the Pony Canyon Motel, the first of three motels, all on the right (south) side of Highway 50 as you come into town from the west. If you happen to drive in from the east, all the motels are on the far, downhill side of town on the left (still the south!!). If you are going downhill at that rapid speed of 25 mph, you might just miss the motels. A higher speed, whether going uphill or downhill, is not recommended, because Austin has long been known as a Speed Trap. Be careful!
From the Pony Canyon Motel sign in the previous photo, going around the parking lot in a counter-clockwise fashion, we come to this little meeting room - I guess that's what it is (just a table or two and some chairs inside).
Then, a nice view off the corner of Room #5.
Coming around a bit farther, we have Room #3, and the front end of a Prius. As you can see, the Pony Canyon sits in the shade of some nice, tall cottonwood trees. Trees are next to nil at the two other motels.
All the way around the lot, and here is a view of the entrance to the office. You will need a charge card to stay here, because it is not cheap (at least by small town Nevada standards, IMO)!
MOH and I fell for the long-standing tradition of staying in this motel, and after all, it's the only stick-built motel in town. The long-standing tradition of prefering this motel over the other two dates back to 1977 when the Quito Gold Mine was being discovered by former employees of Former Mining Company, geologists who happened to include some of the very same geologists who discovered the Jerritt Canyon gold mine. (Those former employees did not include me; I was doing Other Things in Austin that year.)
One can see some nice greenery and a small garden out the back of the rooms, the back being the south and hot side of the building.
Ah, but one can step out on the cool, north side and sit in the shade, getting away from the heat that has built up inside the room. Sit awhile, smoke a cigar (there are ash trays on the table).
Another pleasant view of the office area, through the screened-in, north-side porch and deck area.
But hey, since there isn't any AC in this motel - next time I will forego long-standing tradition and consider staying in one of the other motels! Like the Mountain Motel.
Or the Lincoln Motel.
And because there is no AC in the rooms at the Pony Canyon, you might as well head uptown and shoot some pool somewhere while having a pitcher of beer (if you can find pitchers and pool tables in the same bar, that is!)
Don't get me wrong, though: Austin is one of my favorite places, ever since I spent most of a summer working there and staying in the Lincoln Motel back in 1977.
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