Demolition!

Kitchen after the demo, at night.
The kitchen, after the demo and door to rear porch.
The pantry is gone. On the left, hall to front of house.

Looking in to the kitchen from what was the third bedroom on the first floor. Looking through the former pantry.

Living room.

Old dining area.

Master bedroom.

Area of new master bath:

January 25 update:
This is a close-up of the new bathroom floor, which is the lower right corner from the above photo . . . transformed!

The 1970s wood paneling and drop-ceiling need to go . . . now. Note location of left window in room.

Note location of right window in room, you can also see inset where I am planning to add a door into what was a door in the past.

Built circa 1857.

A new house for me. The city paperwork says the house was built in 1898, but strong oral history from the previous owner (a historian with the predominant local church) make a compelling case for 1857 as the year of construction.

It's a cute house with good bones in one of Salt Lake City's best neighborhoods--known as the Avenues. I am in the lower Avenues on an excellent block that has surprisingly little traffic given the proximity to downtown.

The place needs a major facelift!

Jake over Salt Lake City.

The snow of August. Enjoying summer in Utah.

My best Mad Men look

Photographed in Salt Lake City, May 17, 2011.

How much do you know about the West and its unquenchable thirst for water?

If you think the story of water in the American West is dry and boring, you haven’t read Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert, a meticulously researched narrative told with humor and sarcasm. The book opens with Reisner describing a flight back to California. Looking out the window of a commercial jet traveling over western Colorado and eastern Utah—here’s what he saw:

“Emptiness. There was nothing down there on the earth—no towns, no light, no signs of civilization at all. Barren mountains rose from the desert floor, isolated mesas and buttes . . . . You couldn’t see much in the moonlight, but obviously there were no forests, no pastures, no lakes, no rivers, there was no fruited plain.

“I counted the minutes between clusters of lights. Six, eight, nine, eleven—going nine miles a minute, that was a lot of uninhabited distance in a crowded century, a lot of emptiness amid a civilization whose success was achieved on the pretension that natural obstacles do not exist.

“Then the landscape heaved upward. We were crossing a high thin cordillera of mountains, their tops covered with snow. The Wasatch Range. As suddenly as the mountains appeared, they fell away, and a vast gridiron of lights appeared out of nowhere . . . Salt Lake City, Orem, Draper, Provo . . . most of the population of Utah.”

Reisner describes the arrival of Brigham Young and the Mormons in 1847 and how they unwittingly began building the modern West when they immediately began irrigating the Salt Lake Valley to grow food.

The West as we know it is a land that is an engineering marvel based primarily on the movement of water from a few rivers to irrigate the desert and supply western cities and industry. The desert civilization created by Americans in the western United States is a civilization of unparalleled prosperity, and the manipulation of water made it possible. Understanding what we’ve done is a first step toward finding a way to sustain the civilization we’ve created.

Reisner’s description of arriving over Salt Lake City from above 30,000 feet could apply to most western cities—sprawling urban metropolises surrounded by a lot of empty space. These cities are beachheads of civilization—beachheads that many of us love and call home.

Read Cadillac Desert, a fun and informative read, to fully appreciate the predicament of the West and our water—something that has been hitting home more than ever in recent years here in California.

Who’s ready to STAND FOR LESS water wasted?

Jim Breitinger

This post originally appeared at STAND FOR LESS.

My trip to Patagonia, November 2010--Part one.

Southern Chile, the end of the earth:

Glaciated Lake at Torres del Paine National Park, Chile. This is one of Chile's most visited national parks with 80% of the visitors being foreigners--mostly Europeans it seemed.




At Puerto Natales, Chilean Patagonia.




Abandoned buildings at a sheep estancia (sheep station or sheep farm)--Tierra del Fuego, Chile.




We were hours from anything when our fuel filter was knocked off by gravel from the road. With pluck and luck we were back on our way in about 30 minutes.




Repairing the Chevy Aveo--on a road it never should have been on.

My trip to Patagonia--Part two.

The sheep outnumber people by over a thousand to one on Tierra del Fuego.




Crossing Rio Grande in Chilean Tierra del Fuego, not far from the Argentine border. This was near the end of a long, and in retrospect a magical and mystical drive where we ended up somewhere we never expected to be going (more on that in another post).




After selling my Dodge truck earlier in the year, I felt an affinity for this one at an abandoned Chilean lumber camp on Tierra del Fuego.




Tom being goofy with the southernmost mountain range in the America's behind him--the Darwin Range. This was also the southernmost point of our trip. Cape Horn is about 30 miles to the south, but hard to get to as this was the end of the road.



In the center of Santiago, Pedro Gutiérrez de Valdivia--Spanish conquistador. We had 12 hour layovers in Santiago at the beginning and ending of the trip.

Patagonia, one of the last great frontiers.

With geographic features including remote and stunning rivers, lakes, glaciers, mountains, bays, inlets and two oceans, Patagonia is a magnet for ecotourists hoping to see a part of the planet with a low population density and breathtaking beauty.

But Patagonia is threatened by humans and our need for more and more and more. Non-native beavers and minks are wreaking havoc to native flora and fauna. Large Chilean salmon farms are being devastated by disease due to unsanitary and overcrowded conditions (at the same time the salmon farms have been overtaking formerly untouched fjords). Proposed new dams, with associated hydro-electricity projects, threaten to flood vast areas of streams and lakes that are among the most pristine in the world.

The need to STAND FOR LESS is often most obvious along human frontiers. The lands of Patagonia have already been altered by man, but Patagonia retains much of the wildness of the pre-modern era. Preserving and protecting natural ecosystems is vital for the survival of our species. (Read more about the importance of biodiversity.)

The Patagonia Times is an English-language online publication covering issues affecting one of the final frontiers of the Americas. We recommend that you add this excellent online resource to your reading list. It’s important to be well-versed in issues affecting our planet beyond our own backyards.

Jim Breitinger

Chile's Cuernos del Paine is one of the many iconic landmarks of Patagonia:



I wrote this post for STAND FOR LESS where it originally appeared on November 24, 2009.

Park City Mountain Resort, Sunday February 27

A stunning day skiing with Pippa and Tom.

Return to the mountain

From 1991 through 2002 I skied at Park City every season. Yesterday was my first time back in nine years! It didn't seem like I'd been gone that long. We spent most of the day skiing Jupiter Bowl on a day when Utah lived up to its reputation for having the greatest snow on Earth.

An Op-ed in the Salt Lake Tribune

Read my Op-ed in today's Salt Lake Tribune: "Discouraging violent rhetoric". It was written about ten days ago, and is not what I would write today, but I stand by it. In a weak moment I let a particular woman from Alaska get under my skin. It reminded me of another guy that got to me last year. These people are way out of bounds.

Jon Stewart on Gabby Giffords and the situation in Tucson

A message of hope in a time of despair:

"I refuse to give in to that feeling of despair. There's light in this situation. I urge everyone: Read up about those who were hurt and or killed in this shooting. You will be comforted by just how much anonymous goodness there really is in the world. You read about these people and you realize that people that you don't even know, that you have never met, are leading lives of real dignity and goodness. And you hear about crazy, but it's rarer than you think. I think you'll find yourself even more impressed with Congresswoman Giffords and amazed about how much living the deceased packed into lives cut way too short. And if there is real solace in this, I think it's that for all the hyperbole and the vitriol that's become a part of our political process, when the reality of that rhetoric, when actions match the disturbing nature of words we haven't lost our capacity to be horrified. Please let us hope we never do. Let us hope we never become numb to what real horror, what the real blood of patriots looks like when it's spilled." -Jon Stewart

The winding down of America's manned space-flight program . . .

Astronaut Steve Bowen during the final flight of space shuttle Atlantis.

March 2011 update: NASA has scheduled one additional flight for Atlantis, with a current launch target of June 2011.

Jim Range lives through the National Casting Call in Washington, D.C.

Tomorrow in D.C. the annual Jim Range National Casting Call is taking place. They renamed the event in honor of Jim. 

 

I met Jim in 1987 and was fortunate to have him as a major part of my life until he died in January of 2009 from an aggressive form of cancer. Talk about a loss--this man had so much heart, if you didn't know him it's impossible to describe. He was bigger than life--a genuine and wonderful character. His life's work was to protect and restore habitats for all of the wild things he loved, especially fish and birds. 

The Casting Call is an annual opportunity to "provide government decision makers with the opportunity to fish for shad in the Potomac River and learn about the importance of collaborative fisheries conservation."