I took my hiking boots with me on this trip. Yesterday, I climbed Smelter Mountain, which sits just across the Animas river from my hotel. The side facing the hotel is pretty much vertical, so I had to walk around it a bit where I found a trail leading up. It was still pretty steep, gaining about 1,500 feet in a mile or two. There are many antenna towers on top, and a service road/trail for the antennas goes down the backside of the mountain. I knew I could get back to town that way, and figured I’d take a different way down. It was a lot longer than I expected.

It’s been a long time since I’ve hiked alone, and I forgot how much I like it. I only saw a few other people: one older guy was headed down the trail while I was going up, and I saw a couple of people headed up while I was at the first antenna, but they apparently turned around and headed back before getting to the antennas.

During the 5 hours I spent hiking, I thought a lot about infrastructure, history, and the west. I’ve never thought about Colorado the same way after reading Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day. (I should point out that this is not a recommendation that you read Against the Day. It’s an excellent book, but I don’t know anyone that I could possibly recommend it to. I mostly loved reading it, but still worry I was often simply plodding ahead, looking for the fun parts, rather than really reading and enjoying it. I loved that I probably only understood an astonishingly small fraction of the detail. It’s the sort of book I would love to read and then have someone explain it to me. I suspect that some day, someone will release annotated version of Pynchon’s work. When they do, I hope I’m still alive. Still, so much of the book was difficult. Sometimes I simply had no idea what he was talking about, or what was happening was so fantastical as to be completely incomprehensible to me. Sometimes things that he’s describing literally (for he’s always talking literally, even when he’s not) are balatant allegories, but I have no idea for what. When there is plot, it’s often non-linear. The hundreds of characters are all related in some way, though it’s often difficult to remember how. There is rarely a story in the classic sense, and when there is, it will not be resolved satisfactorily. I suspect that Thomas Pynchon cannot be read, only re-read, and I’ve never attempted this. Considering that I haven’t read anything good lately, and I have a bookshelf full of good books, perhaps it’s time in my life to start re-reading. Anyway, the point of this parenthetical statement is that Against the Day is wonderful, but if you read it, you do so at your own risk. If you’re Kelsey, you’re simply not allowed to read Pynchon because it will make your head explode, and I really can’t be responsible for that. (I say that because your head will explode because you’ll have to understand everything in it, and I don’t think that anyone who’s ever read it understands even a large portion of everything.)) I look around Colorado now, and I see the mines, the wars, the struggle against the land, and the hard road to where we are now. In most respects, we’ve conquered the West in ways that no one would would have guessed. I’m fascinated about prospectors who came out here hoping to make some money and found that surviving was difficult enough, much less getting rich. Folks who struggled to make a living beneath the earth. Now, even though there’s still money to be had beneath the ground, most everyone comes to see what’s above the ground. The land beneath the mining cabins fetches millions, just for the view. What’s worse is that the only people who can afford a piece of the view don’t have enough time to actually enjoy it.

But I like to think about how we managed to get those antennas on top of the mountain, how we built the road that goes up the mountain to get the antennas there, how we got the power lines up the mountain to power to antennas. I like to realize that while I understand what those antennas are (Radio, TV, and Telephone service primarily), I don’t really know how those things work. I don’t know how to build a radio transmitter. Furthermore, I don’t even know how to build a tower to put that transmitter on. Even further, I don’t know how to build a road to get the equipment necessary to the site to build the tower to put the transmitter on. I don’t know how to string power lines, much less build a power plant. And I wonder how many people do. The people who put power plants together don’t know how to make the parts. The people who know how to make the parts don’t know how to make the machines that make the parts.

And I walked down the road and thought about the natural gas pipelines and fiber optic cables that ran next to the road. Not only do I not know how to bury fiber optic cable, I don’t even know what the cable is for. I don’t know why the natural gas needs to go from one place to another. And what’s astonishing to me is that I know more about these sorts of things than most people.

None of this is earth-shattering thought. I’m sure there are zillions of books written on how specialization of knowledge makes us all clueless. Certainly Neal Stephenson discusses it in Anathem, and perhaps that’s why I was thinking about it. Mostly it just bothers me that most people aren’t thinking about it.

It also made me think that if I can’t fly planes anymore, then I want to learn how to build infrastructure. I want to learn how to pave roads, string power lines, bury fiber optic cable and so on.

Anyway, there are photos from the hike up at the gallery. Does anyone know what the antenna with a hat is? I’m not really interested in rampant speculation. My own ignorant guess is Digital TV, but I really don’t know, and a brief search of the internet revealed nothing. Also, there’s theoretically an RSS feed for the gallery now. I have no idea if it works, or if it’s of any interest to anyone.

I want to add a field guide for antennas to Wikipedia.