Browsed by
Category: Travel

Nuclear Tourism in New Mexico

Nuclear Tourism in New Mexico

Comments 0 Comment

A lot of nuclear world firsts happened in New Mexico. The difficulty is that due to the nuclear and secretive nature of the events, they can be hard to visit. It is possible – here’s how.

First, there is all the activities that happened at Los Alamos – a military site that didn’t even exist at first. It has since become Los Alamos National Laboratories – a government research site that continued the early nuclear work. Believe it or not, some of the original buildings are still on the site, and you can even visit them.

Dubbed “Behind the Fence” tours, you can actually visit some of the original buildings in which the first bombs were assembled and tested. You have to be lucky though. You need to be one of the 30 people picked for one of the 6 annual tours.

Next up, there is Trinity site itself – where the first nuclear bomb was detonated. You can visit it twice a year when the site is opened up on the first Saturday in April and third Saturday in October.

Climb high on Xenon gas – Climb Everest in 3 days

Climb high on Xenon gas – Climb Everest in 3 days

Comments 1 comment

Don’t have time for pesky weeks of acclimatization when you want to climb Mt Everest? How about doing the whole thing in under a week. All through the wonders of Xenon gas.

A small group of Furtenbach Adventures clients plan to fly to Kathmandu this spring and try out a new climbing method. After arriving, they will receive xenon therapy in a clinic before flying to Everest Base Camp for an immediate summit push. The plan is to climb Everest in three days, with full oxygen and sherpa support.

How? Xenon, an inert gas occasionally used as an anesthetic, has been observed to have the side effect of radically increasing the body’s production of EPO (erythropoietin, a hormone that regulates a healthy level of red blood cells). Xenon helps red blood cells multiply without acclimatizing or injecting a synthetic version of the hormone. Furtenbach became a believer in xenon therapy after it was suggested by Michael Fries, a German anesthesiologist. It was tried by Furtenbach to great success on a climb of Aconcagua in 2000. Medical studies show it doesn’t have any of the harmful side effects of other similar medications.

The hope is to reduce HACE and HAPE deaths, reduce the dangerous up and down traversals through the Khumbu ice sheet, as well as reduce the life-threatening effects of frostbite and high altitude degradation. It is causing a stir in the climbing community that believes this just reinforces the idea of a more tourist-like behavior of bagging a summit for Instagram over demonstrating real climbing skills or embracing the hard-fought values of the climbing community.

The method may be fast, but it won’t be cheap. Furtenbach will charge his xenon climbers $154,000. Xenon gas treatment is extremely pricey: A 30-minute session costs $5,000 per person.

Articles:

New Mexican Christmas

New Mexican Christmas

Comments 0 Comment

The glowing brown paper bags that adorn Southwestern walkways, churches, and homes during the Christmas holiday season are called luminarias. They’re also sometimes called farolitos, or “little lanterns,” and date back more than 300 years. The New Mexican tradition began when Spanish villages along the Rio Grande displayed the unique and easy-to-make lanterns to welcome the Christ child into the world.

I loved seeing these when I lived in Albuquerque. They’re largely only found in the dry winters of the southwest as they would be buried in East coast snows, blow 100 miles away in Midwest winter winds and snow, or would be rained into a soggy mess in the Pacific Northwest.

Visit Albuquerque has a little write-up on them that’s pretty cool on how to make them yourself.

Free plane wifi via PySkyWiFi

Free plane wifi via PySkyWiFi

Comments 0 Comment

Software engineer Robert Heaton posted the entire story behind his open-source PySkyWiFi project— or how he achieved free Wi-Fi on an airplane by painstakingly subverting the existing firewall.

The process started when he realized that his Airmiles account page, not blocked by the firewall, was still connected to the broader Internet, and this gap could be exploited.

After a lot of funny hacking, he got it working to the tune of “several bytes per second.” Yeah – BYTES per second.

So right now it’s probably still best to just pay for the wifi, take a nap, or read a book.

Links:

Inflatable Camping Shelter

Inflatable Camping Shelter

Comments 0 Comment

Gear Patrol reported on a new four-season capsule tent that assembles in under five minutes, can sleep four, and fits into a backpack. It’s called the Air Station Pod-01 and it’s made by Exod – a company that also makes the Monolith inflating tent.

The shelter supposedly takes just five minutes to assemble with the included hand pump, and once set up, it offers a self-standing design with 4.2m² of floor space. The exterior of the capsule has two tunnel doors, a pair of windows and multiple ventilation points. All four walls can also be easily lifted up to create an open-air shelter. It weighs 18.7 lbs and can be disassembled by one person in five minutes, including the time it takes to stuff it into the included 25 x 35 x 64cm carrying backpack.

It’s claimed to be rigid enough to stand up in four seasons – but I’m curious how it would do with 3″ of snow on it (4.2m² = 6430in² * 3″ of snow = 19,440in³ or 11.25 cubic feet. Snow weighs about 12 pounds per cubic foot, so 3″ snow would weigh roughly 135lbs); or if its tie-down system could stand up to 20-35mph winds on a ridge.

At $2,679 (now $1930 at their website) it’s not cheap, but it certain is cool looking and would likely be right at home at a Burning Man style festival where wind/snow might not be a problem.

Links:

Meow Wolf Santa Fe secrets

Meow Wolf Santa Fe secrets

Comments 0 Comment

I recently enjoyed a trip to Meow Wolf in Santa Fe. Here’s some links for Easter eggs and secrets to be found in Meow Wolf Santa Fe.

Some people might like to explore blindly, but I found the trip much more enjoyable having some background knowledge before going. I still spent 3 hours there even knowing much of the story. There’s just too much to see and read if you wanted to go in blind. It would easily take half a dozen 1-2 hour trips just to read through the materials in each of the sections and piece it all together.

Links:

Adventure travel companies

Adventure travel companies

Comments 0 Comment

Going on a vacation is one thing, but how about an adventure? There’s been a rise in adventure travel companies that can help you adventure through some of the most amazing places in the world in a way you’d never experience in a tour bus.

The market is definitely delivering some amazing, affordable deals – and it’s been driving some of the more overpriced companies like REI Experiences out of business. Companies like Much Better Adventures and Explore! are setting the pace by offering 5-15 day adventures for under $1500. You need to get yourself there and handle an amount of the logistics yourself but once there they cover most accommodations, transport, food, and activities with a distinctive local flair – often giving you time to explore on your own.

To be clear, you’re not getting a curated western experience at the Hilton and air conditioned bus transport. It’s probably not for families with younger kids. You’ll likely be working with local guides and staying at affordable, but safe local places. This almost exactly what I would have loved in my 20’s and 30’s – let me save money by doing the parts I can do, then let them handle the local stuff that would be difficult. Instead of a carefully packaged experience, you get to see how people live in the country you’re visiting.

I’m definitely looking into this for my next sabbatical.

Visitors guide to finding Noah’s Ark

Visitors guide to finding Noah’s Ark

Comments 0 Comment

Dr Irving Finkel the world famous philologist and Assyriologist of the British Museum, discussed in a recent video a Babylonian cuneiform tablet which he called “the oldest map in the world”.

What makes it so interesting is that it proports to show exactly where Noah’s ark can be found.

The translated text on the reverse of the tablet describes the steps in a traveler’s journey to discover the location of the Ark, describing “seven leagues,” which they must pass through to arrive at the remnants of the ‘parsiktu-vessel’. The map leads to ‘Urartu,’ which was named in an ancient Mesopotamian poem as the Ark’s landing place and is the Assyrian equivalent to “Ararat,”, the mountain location named in the Hebrew Old Testament as the resting place of Noah’s Ark. A location close to Ararat’s summit has long been the speculated location of the Ark’s resting place, as researched by Noah’s Ark Scans. In Finkle’s explanation of the tablet, he explained how ancient travelers taking the path to Urartu may have seen the remains of the mammoth vessel on their journey.

In the Babylonian version of this tale, it is a man named Utnapishtim who undertakes this task. Finkel explained that this tablet demonstrated that “the story was the same … that from the Babylonian point of view, this was a matter of fact thing … that if you did go on this journey you would see the remnants of this historic boat”.

A location close to Ararat’s summit has long been the speculated location of the Ark’s resting place, as researched by Noah’s Ark Scans and the biblical measurements given (“300 cubits, 50 cubits, by 30 cubits,” which is equal to around 515 feet long by 86 feet wide and 52 feet high) match up with the measurements of the site in modern-day Turkey.

This is just one more interesting bit of ancient evidence Finkel has uncovered showing multiple matching cultural references to a great flood event.

If you’re curious to read more, he is the author of the 2013 book The Ark Before Noah, which goes over the ancient artifacts about a flood event believed to have occurred around 5,000 years ago.

Links: