Report from Sun Valley, Idaho

Here’s a report on last month’s trip to Sun Valley, Idaho.

We changed planes in Denver, surrounded by Scientists, to get a regional jet to KSUN, one of the nation’s most dangerous airports (see U.S. local and federal governments respond to an urgent safety situation (2016), regarding a safety problem recognized by the Feds no later than 2009).

I talked to the pilots after the flight and learned that special sim training is required to operate at this airport. Here’s a best-case instrument approach plate for an aircraft that can climb at 420 feet per nautical mile (might be tough after an engine fails in an airliner):

Notice that the aircraft can’t land unless the lowest clouds are no lower than 900′ above the runway (minimum descent altitude (MDA) without seeing the runway is 6180′ and the runway is 5289′ (TDZE at the top)). That’s essentially visual flying conditions. “What if you’re at 200′ above the runway and a vehicle or another aircraft drives onto the runway?” I asked. “That becomes an ‘extraction’, not a missed approach,” the pilot responded. “Can it be done on one engine?” was my follow-up. “No.” (i.e., there are no good options for a go-around once close to the runway in the event of an engine failure). You can see from this plate that an airport built at JUNOL, just 10 nm south of KSUN, would be idiot-proof.

The downtown hotel recommended by the lawyer with whom I was working, a coronapanic refugee from San Francisco who never did go back to the office, was quoting $1,700 per night. I decided on the budget option of one of the last rooms at the venerable Sun Valley Lodge for $750 per night. While the elites swan around in their G-Wagons, Grenadiers, Ferraris, and restored classic cars, the local post office reminds the peasants how to renew their Medicaid:

(Why don’t the peasants get rich working in town and become ineligible for Medicaid? Most of the servers and cleaners in the village seemed to be from Eastern Europe, here in the U.S. on temporary work visas.)

Returning to swanning around, here are the resident swans in front of the Sun Valley Lodge:

The restaurant at the lodge isn’t abusively expensive, but if you want to save some $$ and honor Maryland’s leading citizen you can zip over to El Niño Y Pupuseria in downtown Ketchum for the inexpensive snack (pupusas) that purportedly resulted in Kilmar Armando Ábrego García being targeted by unspecified gangs in his native El Salvador. The restaurant is quite smoky inside so don’t go unless the weather is nice enough for dining at the outdoor tables.

For soups, sandwiches, and salads at breakfast and lunch hit Bigwood Bread Bakery & Cafe instead (recommended by a local). Grumpy’s was the recommended hamburger joint, but we didn’t try it.

Make reservations in advance for the Thursday night barbecue at Galena Lodge, which features good company at big tables and live music. Drive beyond Galena to the Galena Summit Overlook (8,440′ above sea level according to my phone), if not all the way to Stanley (next town north after Ketchum). Do some hiking on side trails before coming back to Galena Lodge and the easy trails that begin right from there. It would be great to have a Tesla full self-driving car for this journey so as to appreciate the scenery on both sides of the road.

Downtown has an interesting free museum on the opposite corner of an intersection from the library. Part of the museum features Ernest Hemingway. Note the #Truth that the Spanish Civil War was against Fascism. The progressives who traveled to Spain were definitely not fighting for Stalinism, forced collectivization, and the killing of roughly 7,000 Catholic priests.

Stickers in the gift shop remind patrons that the library and the museum are united under the sacred Rainbow Flag:

The Library has an awesome treehouse plus the usual books:

If you’ve got a lot of leftover climbing rope, the library stocks BDSM 101:

They’d just begun to run the lift up to the top of “Baldy” (just over 9000′):

It’s unclear why a 1940s or 1950s car is the right choice for mountain roads, but we saw quite a few beautiful classics in and around town. 1959 Cadillac Coupe de Ville:

1948 Buick Roadmaster in front of the (unimpressive) supermarket (drive 20 minutes south to Hailey to get to an Albertson’s):

And we found the same car later at the National Ballet of Canada performance in the Sun Valley Village:

Sun Valley is an awesome place to spend the summer, but it desperately needs a better airport. It’s not as offensively ritzy as Jackson, Wyoming (maybe because Idaho imposes a state personal income tax rate of over 5 percent vs. 0 percent in Wyoming?). It’s reasonably flat and easy to walk around. The access to trails and outdoor activities is as good as anywhere in the U.S.

What about as a year-round home, either in Ketchum or in Hailey (probably more practical)? Aside from the skiing opportunities, one big plus for young people seems to be college admissions. The kids I talked to who’d gone to high school in Idaho had been admitted to all of the colleges where they applied whereas the kids I know in Maskachusetts, except for one bizarrely superhuman half-Asian boy (admitted even to Harvard, the gold standard for Asian hate!), were rejected almost everywhere.

Related:

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Craters of the Moon National Park

Loyal readers may remember that I’m an advocate for increasing the number of National Parks as the U.S. population is expanded via immigration. From 2020, Do we need some more national parks?:

Our National Park system was set up in 1872, i.e., for a country with a population of roughly 40 million. Today there are 330 million residents of the U.S. (or 350 million maybe?). Mobility, even in coronashutdown, is greater than it was in 1872. This leads to what I would have previously called “Manhattan-style crowding” in some parks (but now Manhattan has been de-crowded!).

(Note that, due to the population collapse and near-term extinction of the human race cited by Elon Musk, the official Census population right now is over 342 million, up more than 12 million from 2020; we’ve added humans comparable to Metro San Francisco and Metro Miami during humanity’s march to oblivion.)

Back in June, I visited Idaho’s Craters of the Moon National Monument, which could easily become a full National Park with a bit of development. Due to the lack of facilities, it’s certainly much more relaxing than the current slate of National Parks! I think this place could handle the construction of a lodge. There is a jet-capable airport a 15-minute drive away in nuclear-powered Arco, Idaho that is, wonderfully, named after our next President: AOC (6600′ runway, which is a little tight considering the 5,335′ altitude, but it looks as though it could be easily lengthened).

Some snapshots:

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Why isn’t Cleveland gentrified?

Some photos from a recent trip to Cleveland. Here’s some signage from the Cleveland History Center:

By 1920, according to the local history nerds, Cleveland was rich in precious immigrants, had achieved a dream level of diversity (30 different ethnic groups), and was “progressive”. Just a few years later, though, the economic and population growth was over. It doesn’t seem as though Cleveland per se has ever recovered even as many of its suburbs have prospered and even though Cleveland is home to one of the world’s most successful health care enterprises, the Cleveland Clinic.

Nearly every other American downtown has become gold-plated. How did Cleveland manage to fail?

Across town at the Aquarium, the scientists say that immigrants “cause harm to the habitat”:

Back to the history center… It’s free to anyone who wisely refrains from work (EBT card) and they’ve preserved their COVID signage and mask-wearing habits:

The museum reminds those who are buying Cirrus SR22 G7s at $1.4 million (now fully deductible in Year 1 due to the recent One Beautiful Bill) that we live in an inflation-free society. A P-51 Mustang that could take off at 12,000 lbs. and cruise at 315 knots cost $50,000 brand new or $3,500 lightly used:

If Tesla can get Optimus to work, how about a return to wood-sided cars? The robot can apply polish to the wood every week:

The museum’s collection is especially strong in hybrid and electric cars, some more than 100 years old. Visitors are reminded that Cleveland was at one time a close second to Detroit in mass production of automobiles (which raises the question of why Cleveland auto manufacturing faded into insignificance).

The museum was hosting a special show of Islamic-American fashion:

A temporary exhibition featured Black photographers and, as it happened, all of the photographs on display were of Black subjects (i.e., there weren’t photos of architecture, landscape, or nature taken by Black photographers, but only pictures of Black people by Black people):

(More than half of the money for any museum like this comes from taxpayers, either through deductibility of donations or from direct grants from the government. So taxpayers are funding exhibitions from which some artists/photographers are excluded due to skin color, apparently contrary to the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution.)

In a similar vein, the museum had a show devoted to women and politics, ignoring the other 73 gender IDs recognized by Science.

I wonder if nonprofit orgs are, after government and universities, principal sources of division in American society.

Circling back to Cleveland, though, why is this waterfront city such a spectacular failure?

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Bridge the divides in American society by giving immigrants more free stuff

American Haters falsely assert that native-born Americans are being replaced by migrants and that migrants are enjoying taxpayer-funded housing, health care, education, food, and smartphones.

The progressives behind the Boise Art Museum came up with a plan to silence these haters. Membership is $60 for native-born Americans and free for immigrants. Dividing patrons into a group that must pay and a group that need not pay will “bridge perceived divides across cultures”.

What else goes on at the art museum? The sculpture park is nice! Note that admission is also free via reciprocity for those who are members of Florida’s Ringling museum.

We also checked into the Basque Museum, which explains how Basque men came to Idaho to raise sheep on free federal land. Fifteen of them would share a modest-size house (i.e., they did not receive the “dignity” that is a migrant’s right today in the form of a 1BR or 2BR apartment). According to the museum, as soon as the Feds shut down the offer of free land, the Basques stopped coming to the U.S.

One of the restaurants in the Warehouse Food Hall combines Basque and Vietnamese. I can’t figure out why. (We had some great food, conviviality, and Basque language instruction at Ansots (shared a table with a lady who runs the local Basque immersion preschool for 20 kids; two teachers come over every year for 13 months from the Basque part of Spain).)

It looks as though Boise has had at least one immigrant from San Francisco…

Also, Elizabeth Warren was visiting at the same time that we did:

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Pride Parade and Children’s Drag Show in Bar Harbor, Maine

With a 9-year-old in tow, I traveled to Bar Harbor, Maine for this year’s Pride Festival:

We missed the Friday “All Ages Drag Show” due to a wedding rehearsal dinner, but managed to make it to the parade itself and the subsequent Pride festival.

The parade began with speeches on the Village Green.

Shortly before receiving an official government escort from two police cars, several speakers talked to the crowd about cruel official government oppression of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community.

Child’s sign: “I get my cardio running away from heteronormal”.

Due to rain, the Pride Festival was moved to the YWCA, which explains that the “Christian faith” motivates it to “empower women” and “believe in science” (i.e., that some of the best “women” didn’t start out with a female gender assignment on their birth certificates).

Once inside, Queers for Palestine merchandise was available to purchase.

It’s a right-wing conspiracy theory that the 2SLGBTQQIA+ are targeting children. It’s just that there was a drag show for kids with free cupcakes and other sweets provided by Hannaford, the local supermarket that started in Maine and is now owned by Ahold Delhaize, the Dutch-Belgian conglomerate. Here’s the Hannaford table:

Happy kids watching the first drag queen:

We left as the second drag queen started her performance:

Don’t forget to #MaskUpToSaveLives

It’s too bad that we didn’t bring Mindy the Crippler (our golden retriever), though perhaps they’re using “dog” in the strict AKC sense and bitches are excluded:

We swung by the Hannaford supermarket on the way back to the hotel and had the chance to save our beloved planet via a reusable Pride-themed shopping bag:

We sadly missed the evening drag show due to the need to spend 6 hours huddled in a tent while rain poured down outside in 60 degree temps (an average summer wedding in Maine):

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Should El Salvador sell tours at CECOT prison?

El Salvador is one of the world’s safest countries, according to one part of the U.S. government (State Department, which says it is safer than France or Sweden). The murder rate is less than 1/30th what Americans risk in what we’re told are our greatest cities. El Salvador is also one of the most dangerous countries on Earth, according to a different part. In fact, it is too dangerous for anyone to live in and that’s why any Salvadoran here in the U.S. is immune from deportation (“Temporary Protected Status” that is permanently extended).

I’m wondering if the El Salvador government should operate tours at its Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT). This should appeal equally to Democrats and Republicans. To Democrats, the tour can be marketed as “Visit the folks who formerly embodied all that is best about the United States” (extra $5,000 fee to drink margaritas with Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the most precious and important human ever to reside in Maryland). For Republicans, it can be marketed as a Fantasy Law & Order experience with an extra $5,000 fee to attend a morning briefing with CECOT guards, do physical training, and then practice on the rifle and pistol ranges.

What else is there to do? TripAdvisor:

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Justifying our total war against Japan

It’s the 80th anniversary of a bombing raid on Tokyo in which the American military killed 100,000 Japanese civilians in one night (Wokipedia). Did the Japanese attack on our military installations in Hawaii justify our attacks on their civilians?

University of Alaska in Fairbanks runs a beautiful museum and it answers the above question to some extent.

Right now, about one fifth of the core exhibit space at the Museum of the North is devoted to the victimization of 220 Japanese-Alaskans whom President Franklin Roosevelt ordered interned (with Supreme Court approval) and also the evacuation of 800 Native Alaskans from islands thought vulnerable to Japanese attack.

The PhD scholars explain on a sign leading into the exhibit that the Japanese were on track to conquer interior Alaska, western Canada, and Seattle:

If we hadn’t waged total war on this enemy, including killing 100,000 civilians in one night (pre-atomic bombs), folks in Seattle would to this day be forced to live a Japanese lifestyle. Certainly, it wouldn’t have made sense to engage in the settlement negotiations that the Japanese expected after Pearl Harbor.

What else goes on in the museum? First, visitors are reminded of the irrationality of W-2/1099 work in the American Welfare State (admission is $20 for chumps; free for EBT cardholders):

The PhDs in charge of the museum use native languages whenever possible (Troth Yeddha’ is apparently not, as I’d thought, a location of one of Jabba the Hutt’s branch offices) and also note that the noble indigenous themselves don’t want to use these languages anymore (consistent with John McWhorter’s explanation of how humans converge toward a single language in a media- and telecommunications-rich world)

Compare your level of patience and attention to detail to Cynthia Gibson’s, who sewed salmon vertebrae into a dress:

The Into the Wild bus will be on display here soon:

Looking for decorating ideas?

Even without indoor plumbing you can have a beautiful home:

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Ayn Rand’s Antique Car Museum in Fairbanks

Last month, I spent 1.5 hours at Alaska ComiCon in Fairbanks, which isn’t quite the jam-packed experience of the San Diego Comic-Con, but included the world’s largest balloon costume (Godzilla, of course!):

My friends picked me up for the short drive to the Fountainhead Antique Auto Museum, which seems to be indirectly named for Ayn Rand, ironically famous for not having learned to drive despite living for a time in Los Angeles. (The connection seems to be that Tim Cerny, a real estate developer, liked Rand’s novel The Fountainhead and named his company after her and then the museum is named for the company.)

Despite the founder’s apparent free market orientation, the museum has an Elizabeth Warren section:

My favorite car was the Owen Magnetic, spiritual heir to the Chevrolet Volt, in which the internal combustion engine is a generator. It even had regen braking:

Here’s a 1932 Cadillac…

After 90 years of evolution, the ugly duckling 1932 Cadillac was transformed into the beautiful Escalade:

Americans 110 years ago hadn’t discovered the joys of helicopter parenting and, therefore, brothers aged 10 and 6 were able to ride on horses from Oklahoma to the East Coast, buy a car and learn to drive in NYC, and then drive back to Oklahoma (the horses went home by train). They met two presidents and both Wright brothers:

State-sponsored PBS did a show about them (I recently learned about this from a Facebook friend; it aired in April 2020, just as coronapanic was in full swing, but it is tough to imagine a lockdown strict enough that I would have the patience to watch PBS).

The museum covers the challenge of building a practical snowmobile, which didn’t happen until airplanes were into their second generation (most of the invention seems to have occurred first in Russia; Wokipedia).

I knew that Carl Fisher, the creator of Miami Beach and the Indy 500, had developed a gas-based “Prest-O-Lite” headlight, but didn’t realize that it involved a tank of acetylene right next to the driver!

For fans of the old Bell 47 and Hiller helicopters… the Franklin company that made their engines was produced cars with air-cooled engines back in 1905:

After the museum, we went downtown to Soba for Moldovan food.

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Aurora Borealis viewing in Fairbanks, Alaska

The Iditarod starts at 3 pm Eastern today. As has happened 3 times before (2003, 2015, and 2017), the sled dog race begins in Fairbanks rather than near Anchorage. This is due to a lack of snow.

As we all get set up to watch the puppies run, here are some tips on traveling to Fairbanks, Alaska, one of the world’s best places for seeing the Northern Lights due to (1) reasonably clear skies, (2) reasonably easy travel, and (3) perfect latitude (coincides with peak aurora activity).

A tour operator says that April 11-20 is the best time to see the aurora because it is the driest period and also close to an equinox, which is typically a peak for activity. 2025 is right near the peak of solar activity (on an 11-year circle) so maybe April 2025 is the time to go! (I went Feb 20-27, 2025, which coincided with the World Ice Art Championships that was a nice bonus, but it probably would have been better to go in April so as not to suffer as much from the cold!)

Except in the summer, you’ll probably have to fly through Seattle. Unless you live in Seattle, Delta Airlines might be a better choice for the total trip than Alaska Airlines because Delta has more overall network capacity to recover from a staffing or maintenance issue.

Spend the first day at the University of Alaska Fairbanks’s Museum of the North and watch the movie about the aurora ($20 if you’re foolish enough to work; free if you show your EBT card). Stop by the Morris Thompson Cultural and Visitors Center in downtown and pick up a guide to aurora viewing that includes a map of good locations. Inside the visitors center try to refrain from shouting out “Like Jeffrey Epstein, that Piper PA-22 didn’t hang itself”.

My Lyft driver (Uber pays a lower percentage of the revenue to drivers and is, therefore, so disfavored by drivers in Fairbanks that Lyft is the only service available in winter), who was also an aurora tour operator, explained that moisture/clouds tend to hang over the city but that as soon as you get to the first ridge going north the weather tends to clear. This also has the advantage of getting you away from the city’s light pollution. We had great luck at the Cleary Summer, about 30 minutes from downtown:

There are some cabins with skylights to rent right there, The Overlook at Cleary Summit, and that might be the smarter way to do a trip (watch the aurora while lying in bed; splurge by also renting a hotel room in downtown Fairbanks and bouncing back and forth depending on weather and desire to be close to restaurants and museums). Some friends organized a trip based at Pike’s Waterfront Lodge, which is right next to the end of the big runway at Fairbanks International Airport! The Overlook has Starlink Internet that should be better than what we had at Pike’s Lodge (Alaska is plagued by a telephone/Internet monopoly (“GCI”) that will make you take back all of the bad things that you said about Xfinity, AT&T, and Verizon). Getting up the hill to Cleary Summit wasn’t too challenging. We had a full-size van from Avis with studded tires. A regular AWD SUV with good winter tires would have worked as well.

Our first night of aurora viewing wasn’t that exciting. We drove 30 minutes up to a turnout on the Elliott Highway. With our naked eyes we saw what looked like white-gray thin vertical clouds. Photographed with an iPhone 16 Pro Max steadied via Ulanzi/Gitzo, however, a spectrum of colors emerged (exposures of about 5 seconds on the left and 30 seconds on the right; it probably would have been smarter to download and use Halide or a similar “pro camera” app that would have allowed more bracketing):

On the second night, we went to Cleary Summit (a big parking lot with the challenge of retaining one’s night vision as cars came and went with headlights on):

About 15 minutes later (pretty much fully automatic, with the iPhone choosing to expose for 5 seconds):

We never did see the red/pink colors in the above photos with our eyes, but we did see green, albeit not as saturated as in the above photos. Our hotel had an aurora chaser’s movie on permanent repeat in its library. The filmmaker gets very excited when he can see red with his naked eye and points out that he hadn’t seen that color for years. Unless a scene is bright you’re going to see it with your rods, which are monochrome, rather than your cones. The most common aurora frequency is green and our visual systems are very sensitive to green, which means you have a decent chance of seeing green. Partly because nobody has built a camera that works like the human visual system at night, the aurora industry is based largely on fraud. Here, for example, is a tour operator’s example of what you’ll see after paying $9000+ for two people:

Maybe an Alaska resident does occasionally see something like this, but a tourist is unlikely to see a color other than white or green on a one-week tour. Two perspectives:

  • “the Northern Lights are one of the few things that look better in a photo than in real life”
  • “looking at pictures of the Northern Lights before going on a trip is like watching porn movies to figure out what married sex after 10 years will be like”

The tradition of overselling the lights goes back at least to 1865 when Frederic Edwin Church painted the following (based on sketches and descriptions from Isaac I. Hayes, who did not sing but who spent years in the high Arctic):

If you are going to visit in the winter pack as though you were going ice fishing. I thought that I’d be okay with clothing that I wore for walking a dog in Maskachusetts in 10F temps. The temperature north of Fairbanks was closer to 0F, however, and watching the aurora involves minimal movement. Wool socks and insulated snow boots were useless on the first night so I stopped at Prospector Outfitters and got battery-powered socks for the second night. Felt boots such as Sorel or Baffin would have been a smarter choice (I had Sorels back in the Boston area, but I left them in the garage and squirrels used them as a house/outhouse). Electrically heated gloves would be the smart way to go for finger comfort. I was using an Apple Watch as a remote trigger (to minimize camera shake) for the iPhone camera and I don’t think that could have been done without exposing bare fingers for every photo. Maybe a remote shutter release with a physical button would have been usable with gloves kept on.

Would I go again? Sure, but I would want to have some kind of anchor activity in Fairbanks, either seeing friends or doing an exercise program or taking a class or something. Alternatives include Iceland, but it is surrounded by water and, therefore, seems likely to be much cloudier than Fairbanks. Arctic Norway (e.g., Tromsø) is a possibility, but it might be more challenging to travel to for an American and probably more expensive (Fairbanks has a McDonald’s, a Walmart, gasoline at just over $3/gallon, etc.). I would go back for the experience, not to try to compete for best picture with the people who live in the Arctic and are likely to be there on the 20 best nights of the past 10 years.

Crash course in Aurora #Science from Pike’s Lodge:

Related:

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A visit to Casa Bonita

Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park, grew up in Denver. When Casa Bonita, their favorite childhood restaurant, went bankrupt during the coronapanic lockdowns, they bought it and spent a rumored $40 million restoring it to its former glory. It’s tough to get a reservation so book as soon as you think you might be going to Denver!

Your visit to Mexico begins in a downscale strip mall (Dollar Tree) in Lakewood, a downscale part of the Denver metro area:

There are a variety of theme park-style environments that have been created inside. Here’s a village that houses the restaurant’s museum, for example:

You eat first and then wander. The $6.75 combination plate offered below is a pre-Biden price. Today it is $30 at lunch or $40 at dinner for one of about 9 choices. You won’t be introduced to the subtleties of regional Mexican cuisine, which has resulted in some people complaining about the price, but it does include soft drinks, dessert, and a 15 percent tip. It wouldn’t be easy to get out of Five Guys for much less.

After the meal, one can take in the Acapulco diving show:

They also have live musicians in various locations, a puppet show, a magic show, free face painting, balloon sculptures, etc. It would be easy to spend another 1.5 hours after the meal here. My one complain is that the arcade doesn’t include a South Park pinball machine (2,200 were made; Sega is a predecessor to Stern so the South Park guys could probably persuade Stern to do an updated version).

A few photos:

There are cave and mine sections for dining, but the premium seats are around the cliff diving lagoon:

Inside the cave…

It’s an experience, for sure, and I’m grateful to the South Park guys for preserving and revitalizing it. I wish that more restaurants were like this, but the cost of paying live performers is just going to go higher as health care costs inflate.

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