Showing posts with label Colorado. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Colorado. Show all posts

October 30 - On the Auction Block: a Charming Get-away, an Homage to Fiction, and the World's Largest Key Collection

Posted October 30, 2018

The world's largest key collection...is in a small town in Colorado???



"The Key Room" of Baldpate Inn, in Estes Park, CO, has more than 30,000 keys, including some super special ones:

A key to a White House bathroom 
A key to Frankenstein's Castle 
A key to Mozart's wine cellar 
A key to Hitler's bunker 
A key to some door (not sure which one!) in the Pentagon 
A key to Westminster Abbey

Then there are a few surprises:

A key to a Peruvian monastery 
A piano key 
Several keys to the dressing rooms of Hollywood actors 
Instead of a key to seclusion, a key to occlusion - six-year molars!

And of course the ordinary:

Loads of keys from every corner of the U.S. and quite a few corners of the world

Why does the Baldpate Inn, in Estes Park, CO, have the world's largest key collection?

There's a book of fiction about a fictional Baldpate Inn. A man who visits the inn needs peace and quiet, total seclusion, and he is so happy to have the key to the inn so that he can achieve the alone time he needs.

Buuuutttt...it turns out that the title of the book is The Seven Keys to Baldpate. And, sure enough, the main character doesn't realize that six other characters also have a key. And the book concerns what happens when they use their keys and break the man's solitude...

The owners of an inn in Estes Park built it in 1917 with hand-hewn timber cut from the property and massive stone fireplaces to provide heat and hot water. When the author of the mystery novel about Baldpate visited the Colorado inn, he declared that it looked just like his imaginary inn, and the owners decided to name their inn Baldpate.

In order to honor the story line of the novel, the owners gave each guest their very own key to the room they'd stayed in - and they got a reputation and a lot of return customers from this unusual tradition. 

But then there was World War I, and the price of metal became so high that the Baldpate Inn could no longer afford to give keys away.

Their loyal return guests were disappointed. But a famous lawyer had a clever idea - he decided that if guests couldn't take a key, they could instead BRING one. And other loyal guests decided to get into the action and bring the inn a key, as well. And somehow a competition grew up to give a key from farther and farther-away places...or from more and more exotic sites.





It got so interesting to have so many keys from so many special places, the Baldpate Inn owners realized that they had to display this growing collection...

...and so, the Key Room!

The Baldpate Inn is located in a beautiful
town in the drop-dead-gorgeous Rocky Mountains!

The family that originally owned the Baldpate Inn sold it to another family in 1986, and then the inn was sold at auction on this date in 2017. I checked, and apparent the Key Room is still intact, and the new owners have added a Key-thedral Theater in an outdoor space during the summer months...




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October 27 – Meteor!

Posted October 27, 2018

A lot of debris from space falls onto the Earth.

And when I say "debris," I MOSTLY do not mean human trash / junk. Space junk like lost equipment, dead satellites, and upper stage boosters is definitely a concern, but most of it is circling the Earth; stuff that gets bumped out of orbit and falls on us often burns up in the atmosphere. Of course, some larger pieces do survive the friction of plunging through our protective layer of air, and NASA claims that an average of one catalogued piece of debris falls somewhere on Earth each day - and has for 50 years now!


But....so far there has been zero big-time problems for people down on Earth from the human-made debris. No significant property damage, no deaths or injuries.

But in space, there is a lot of debris that humans didn't make. I'm talking about all the dust, bits of rock, pebbles, larger chunks of rock and ice, and even boulders or small planetoids. All of this debris is either stuff left over from when the solar system formed or stuff created when comets break up or when rocky or icy bodies collide in space. 









 
And any of that dust-to-boulder-or-larger stuff that happens to hit the Earth becomes a meteor (a "shooting star") in our skies - lovely streaks of light that are exciting to see.

Rarely does a meteor make it all the way to the Earth's surface, but the larger bits that do are called meteorites. There are meteorites that are mostly made of iron, some that are mostly made of stone, and some that are a mix of stone and iron.





Now - how many meteors and meteorites fall on the Earth? An astounding 37,000 to 78,000 TONS of space debris rains down on Earth EVERY YEAR!

Most of that would come from dust-sized particles that of course burn up in the atmosphere. Phew!

Still, thousands of teeny bits of space rock make it all the way to the Earth's surface every year. Of course, most of them fall into the ocean (which makes up about 70% of the Earth's surface), and a lot of them fall onto empty sweeps of land like Antarctica, Siberia, the Sahara Desert, the forests of Canada and Africa and South America, and so on... 

Most of the Earth is ocean.
Above, the Pacific Ocean as viewed from space.
Below, even the land portions of the Earth are
only partially inhabited.


On this date in 1973, a 3-pound (1.4 kg) meteorite struck the ground in a city - in Cañon City, Colorado, to be specific - a very rare event. It landed on a garage, tearing a 6-inch hole in the garage roof, and leaving a 2-inch gash in the cement floor.


Notice that it didn't hit a car, or a pet, or a person.

In all of history, apparently, only 35 meteorites have ever hit a human-made structure in the United States. And only one person has ever been hit by a meteorite (at least that we know about): a 34-year-old woman napping in her home in Alabama was struck by a nine-pound meteorite. It gave her a big bruise but that was it! Wow!

This "only one person" I'm talking about is the only person known to have been hit by a meteorite anywhere in the world, throughout all of recorded history. (A man in India who was reported to have died in 2016 from an impact of what many presumed was a meteorite was apparently the victim of some sort of land-based explosion.)

However, being hit by a meteorite isn't the only thing to worry about. A really large meteorite can explode in the atmosphere and create a shock wave. In 2013 a 12-ton meteor entered the Earth's atmosphere and broke apart some 20 miles (30 km) above the Russian city of Chelyabinsk. About 1,000 to 1,200 people were injured in that extremely rare incident - but most of the injuries were cuts from glass broken by the shock wave.

I couldn't find any evidence that bits of the meteorite itself struck anyone. I read that 75% of the meteorite evaporated, but 9,000 to 13,000 pounds of meteorite (in varying sizes of chunks) fell onto Earth. The largest fragment was 1,400 pounds, and it broke through ice that was more than two feet thick to fall into a lake, leaving a 23-foot-wide hole in the ice!


But apparently no pets or people were struck by meteorite pieces - and nobody died from their shock-wave injuries. Phew!




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