Here’s an interesting video of a group of friends off-roading in the Nevada desert. Three of the guys bring Gen2 Monteros to the party. Another brings a Gen3. The last brings a G-wagen.
A couple of things interest me about it. For one, we get to see how two generations of Montero stack up against each other and the G-wagen in tricky, slippery, sometimes off-camber, terrain. And two, it reminds me that skills count as much, if not more, than equipment. Practice makes perfect.
Watch Top Gear’s James May take on an autonomous, 6×6 military truck at a Nevada proving ground. James’ wields the new Range Rover in this automotive desert duel.
Those Top Gear guys do know how to make entertaining TV.
Canadian video editor Luc Bergeron sampled almost 180 clips to create this 4-minute trip around the world. He mated the fast-paced, quick-cutting footage to a haunting song called “Wolf” by the Swedish sister duo, First Aid Kit.
The resulting piece, Welcome to Earth, is remarkably beautiful and will almost certainly spark the urge to travel.
Clicking the still image above or the title link will take you to a page where you can watch the video. It’s definitely full-screen worthy.
Photo: Greg MacDonaldWhen we last left Mark Twain he was slaughtering passers-by in the pages of the Territorial Enterprise. He wrote a similar story in the fall of 1863 meant to shame financiers for artificially inflating stock prices—yes, it happened back then too—and to embarrass San Francisco newspapers for their complicity.
Entitled “The Massacre at Empire City,” it told the story of a man who, in seeing no way out of a huge financial scandal (think 19th-century Enron), committed suicide after gruesomely murdering his wife and most of their nine children.
Twain intended it as satire but big-city papers reprinted the piece as fact, too caught up in the grisly details to catch the finer, cautionary tale. When he recanted the whole thing, cries for Mark Twain’s head could be heard up and down the west coast. Shocked, Twain offered to resign from the paper. “Nonsense,” his editor replied, “We can furnish the people with news, but we can’t supply them with sense.”
In making his first real mark on the West, Twain had, to his amazement, discovered the power of the media.
At our camp in the Bodie Hills, Greg had discovered the power of a wonky stomach. Marinated chicken and my lack of ice-chest due diligence had been the culprits. Back at Desert Creek I had grilled chicken. Natalie warned that it might not have survived the thaw. It had tasted fine but I spit it out anyway. Greg passed too, after swallowing a bite. That simple italics made all the difference. Now in the Bodie Hills he made excursions into the sagebrush with shovel in hand. Read the rest of this entry »
Photo: Nik SchulzWhen Clemens arrived in Virginia City in 1862, it was a mere three years old. Its mines, however, had already produced over $400 million dollars in silver, enough to bankroll the building of San Francisco and eventually help the Union win the Civil War. The booming town was lined with businesses, restaurants, saloons, and populated with well-paid miners and dancing girls. After his own hard-scrabble mining stint, Sam Clemens, newly shaved and puffing on his ever-present cigar, must have surveyed the bustling, cosmopolitan scene and thought, “Now this is more like it.”
Here he began to thrive writing stories for the Territorial Enterprise. When the news wasn’t interesting enough for him, which it rarely was, he stretched the facts like taffy, folding and molding them until he had produced a confection that bore little resemblance to the reality from which it was derived. To these colorfully fabricated accounts, he added his colorful new pen name: Mark Twain.
I found one wagon that was going to California, and made some judicious inquiries of the proprietor. When I learned, through his short and surly answers to my cross-questioning, that he was certainly going on and would not be in the city the next day to make trouble… I took down his list of names and added his party to the killed and wounded. Having more scope here, I put this wagon through an Indian fight that to this day has no parallel in history.
My two columns were filled. When I read them over in the morning I felt that I had found my legitimate occupation at last… I felt I could take my pen and murder all the emigrants on the plains if need be, and the interests of the paper demanded it.
Mark Twain, Roughing It, Chapter 42
Our legitimate occupation involved getting to the former town of Masonic in the Bodie Hills. First though we had to follow the trail south from our Desert Creek campsite to Jackass Creek and over the Sweetwater Mountains. Read the rest of this entry »
Photo: Greg MacDonaldAs I mentioned in the first “Twain Trip” post, Sam Clemens planned to work as an assistant to his brother, the newly appointed Secretary of the Nevada Territory—a secretary to the Secretary as it were. This notion he abandoned, however, when he learned that his salary would be deducted straight from his brother’s paycheck. Surely seeking to maintain positive fraternal relations, he sought his fortune by other means, first as a timber baron, then as a mining tycoon.
Things did not work out as planned, however. Aside from nearly capsizing in Mono Lake and almost freezing to death near Carson City, a consequence of having spent the night lost in a snowstorm (a mere 50 feet from the nearest stagecoach station), he accidentally burned down a large swath of forest surrounding Lake Tahoe, a feat he bested only by forfeiting a mining claim worth millions of dollars. Not to say that he wasn’t keeping busy—he was. It was just no way to make a living.
Twain, used to doing things on a grand scale, made no exception in failure. He had failed spectacularly. Those weren’t the piddling millions of today’s currency, mind you—they were 1860s millions. And yet, at the end of his short mining career he didn’t have two cents to rub together. The dizzying flight from millionaire to pauper left him lost. A saving grace though arrived in the form of an offer to write for Virginia City’s local newspaper, the Territorial Enterprise for $25 a week. Normally he would have turned it down, work having been antithetical to his nature, but with his back firmly against a wall he accepted and, at 27, moved to Virginia City.
I do not like to work, even when another person does it.
— Mark Twain
For us, Virginia City lay still ahead. We awoke before dawn and watched a serene orange glow bleed into the dark until the sky flooded and pushed the stars out of sight. After breakfast and cups of tea to ward off the chill, we packed up and hit the trail. Read the rest of this entry »
Lately cheap products have been getting me down. I find myself longing for the well-made, the time-tested, the things that last. As it happened Natalie and I came across an antidote to the cheapening of the consumer landscape on our most recent trip to Idaho: Elko General Merchandise in Elko, Nevada. Quality is all they have.
Walking into the store is like walking into another time. Boots, hats, gloves on shelves and tables, no fancy merchandising systems, the whole place is honest, satisfying simplicity. We checked out knives in a display case and the friendly shopkeeper pulled our selections from a drawer. Natalie picked out an Old Timer pocket knife for planned whittling projects and bought me a Dakota #38 folding knife. Both the gift and the shopping experience were such a treat.
I wish the store well. It’s definitely worth a look if you’re passing through Elko.
To read another blog post on this place, and see some photos, follow the link. More on our Idaho trip to come in future posts!
Elko General Store post at One Trip Pass
Nik
