10th Mountain Huts are a Robert McNamara Legacy

McNamara and Margy's Huts established by the late Robert McNamara

Obituaries for Robert McNamara, who died today, in the national media understandably focus on his years as Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, as the "architect of the Vietnam War" (which he later admitted was a mistake) and as president of the World Bank -- as well as his previous big job as the first president of the Ford Motor Company whose last name was not Ford. These high-profile positions earned him a place on the international stage, but Colorado backcountry skiers also know of him as the benefactor of two early huts in the 10th Mountain Trail system.

Both the McNamara Hut and nearby Margy's Hut, a memorial to his first wife Margaret, were built above Aspen in 1982. They were the impetus for the creation of a larger system that now spiders across the high country in the non-wilderness whose rough periphery is Aspen, Leadville, Edwards and Vail. The McNamara Hut is set in an area between the Hunter Creek Valley and Lenado in a high valley called the Burnt Hole. The McNamara and Margy's huts, which are shown on the map near the lower left corner of the map above, are both owned by 10th Mountain and are only open during the winter season to protect the summer range of a nearby elk herd.

The high-country treasure provided by olorado's 10th Mountain Trail system and its backcountry huts is high in my consciousness these days because I am among a goup of a dozen women hiking up to Uncle Bud's Hut near Leadville, which is open in summer as well as in winter.

Addendum: "McNamara Had Strong Ties to Aspen" was a July 7 memorial feature in the Aspen Daily News with a lot more details than I had known about. I'm not the only writer who made the connection after hearing he news of his passing.

Britain Travel WrapUp

Northern England and Scotland, on a budget but home with an emptier wallet

I've been a negligent travel blogger. I actually started this wrapup of our week a bit in Britain at the Sheraton Skyline at Heathrow Airport, but I didn't get a chance to finish -- but now I am. We took full advantage of the flexibility of our BritRail passes. Our only pre-planned time was in the Lake District, and after that, we tried to go where the rain wasn't. This was easy call, because it rained and rained and rained in most of the British Isles during our time. We had lots of clouds and a few sprinkles and one true sunny day in Edinburgh.

Here's where we went and what we did -- some of which I have posted here or on my Nordic Walking blog and on my food/dining blog:

Windermere/Lake District - April 23 (afternoon) to April 26 (morning)

Walked private trail on property belonging the the Famous Wild Boar Hotel.
Hiked from Ambleside to Troutbeck over a mountain called Wansfell with extremely limited bus service from Troutbeck to the highway at Troutbeck Bridge, we walk an additional 2 1/2 miles down a lovely country road to catch the bus back to Windermere, from where we walked an additional 1 1/2 miles or so back to Bowness.
In the process, explored the towns of Windermere and Bowness -- and a bit of Ambleside.


Carlisle - April 26 (afternoon) to April 28 (morning)

Guild Hall
Tullie House Museum & Art Gallery
Carlisle Cathedral - evensong rehearsal in progress when we visited
Hiked along Hadrian's Wall


Edinburgh - April 28 (afternon) to April 30 (morning)

Edinburgh Castle, including the Honours of Scotland (Scottish crown jewels), National War Museum, the Royal Scots Regimental Museum and
Museum on the Mound (Royal Bank of Scotland museum)
National Museum of Scotland
St. Giles Cathedral
City Art Centre
Ad hoc sightseeing bus ride (public bus, not tourist bus) that including a good look at the Royal Yacht Britannia, albeit from a distance
Sir Walter Scott monument and
The Royal Mile

We spent the last night at an airport hotel, the four-star Sheraton Skyline, which we booked at a good rate via priceline.com ($125 plus assorted taxes and fees). This American-style hotel is complete with expansive lobby, conference facility, swimming pool in a covered atrium, over-priced restaurant and somewhat less overpriced sports bar -- from which we watched Liverpool and Chelsea duke it out to face Manchester United in the upcoming European Football Championship. The Sheraton was the only hotel we stayed at that did not include breakfast. The add-ons: 24 hours of Internet service for £15 (that's almost $30) and airport shuttle for £4 per person (£8 for the two of us -- or more than $15.

Bottom line is that our trip was more expen$ive than we had anticipated. We tried to be thrifty, but due to the dismal state of the dollar, even thrift was not enough. We had a fine time and saw a lot that neither of us had seen before. We're glad we went, but we'll have to think out our destinations more carefully until the dollar begins to rebound against other currencies.

Travel Slogans: Good & Bad

Quest for bad slogans make me think the best one I've heard lately

I've long enjoyed Doug Lansky's irreverent views of travel, but until my colleague Christopher Elliott alerted me (and other readers) to it, I didn't realize that Lansky has a great, also-irreverent blog called The Titanic Awards, subtitled "Celebrating the Dubious Achievements of Travel." Today he posted "a few contenders" for the dubious honor of the worst slogans to promote tourism to countries, states, provinces, cities, travel companies and so on.

My favorite of his nominees is Wales. Lansky spotlighted the slogan, “Wales. The Big Country,” and commented, "No, Canada is a big country. So is China. And India, Brazil, Australia. If you’re going to start making shit up, why not say Wales is a tropical island with white sandy beaches and attractive, well-tanned natives who serve free beer around the clock."

Lansky is inviting readers to nominate other slogans that are lousy, misleading or both. I'm going to try to come up with something, but meanwhile, the first thing that popped into my mind was a long-ago, hopefully tongue-in-cheek proposal for this advertising slogan for Panasonic: "From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor." It famously became the title of a book by Jerry Della Femina about the ad business in the days now dramatized on the TV series, "Mad Men."

Reading bad slogans brought to mind a clever, simple one that I recently encountered. The small city of Manhattan, Kansas, with a population of 51,000 +/- adopted the nickname, "The Little Apple."

Security Procedures at Heathrow

Airport security is so annoying and probably so flawed that all I can do is blog about it to vent. While we were in Britain, we heard the news report about a 73-year-old man who managed to drive through a security gate at Miami International Airport and ended up on one of the main runways, fortunately, not when a plane was using it. Authorities speculated that he may have been disoriented. Duh!

With this in mind, we steeled ourselves for the security gauntlet at London's Heathrow Airport. Fortunately, there were no lines on Thursday morning, because if there had been, the many redundant procedures would have taken forever.

1. Before we could enter United's check-in area, someone examined our passports.
2. The counter agent who gave us our boarding passes and checked our baggage also looked at our passports. She also asked whether we had packed our own bags, whether our bags had been in our control since we packed them and whether anyone gave us anything to take along -- particularly pointless questions that are no longer asked in the US.
3. At the main security screening area itself, where two more people checked our passports and our boarding passes, we were astonished that we did not have to take our laptop out of its case nor did we have to remove our shoes.
4. But wait! There was more. We went from that screening area to a second screening area where we again had to show our passports and also to remove our shoes. We sent them and them alone through another device that might have been another Xray or perhaps some kind of explosives sniffing instrument.
5. Somewhere along the line, someone asked us whether any stranger had given us anything to take on the flight -- airport shop personnel presumnably excepted.
6. When we entered the waiting room for our United flight, we again had to present our passports and relinquish our boarding passes, which only returned to us when the final multi-phase screening took place. We again had to remove our shoes, which a security agent turned over to look at the soles. Was she checking whether we might have stepped into something unpleasant? Then we were frisked, not just a casual wanding but a real, hands-on pat-down. And then screeners unzipped every compartment of our carry-on bags and riffled through them. Finally, we were handed our boarding passes and permitted to wait until it was time to board the plane.

Some of these steps are standard and have been for a long time. Others might be required at all Heathrow terminals, or perhaps only for international flights, but I suspect that the final step is special treatment accorded to passengers bound for the US. I'm trying to remember the details when I flew out of Heathrow on British Airways last fall. I am quite sure that there was no separate shoe screening -- and I don't recall quite so many steps in the final pre-boarding security check. Then, the big deal was that the British Airports Authority was claiming to permit only one carry-on per passenger, but that was not enforced and has since been dropped.

When we landed at DIA, cleared immigration, finally got our bags that were so slow in coming up that they must have been put on the conveyor by a one-armed baggage handler and passed customs, we entered the main terminal. There was that recorded announcement from the Transportation Security Agency alerting everyone over and over and over that "the security level has been raised to orange..." blah, blah, blah. I think it's been perpetually on that announcement since the color-coded system was introduced -- except shortly before the last election when it was raised to red.

Staycationing on Independence Day

We don't tend to go anywhere on Independence Day Weekend, but a lot of people come to Boulder, as well as Denver and the Colorado Mountains. Boulder celebrates its Sesquicentennial this year, with a ceremonies and patriotic music at Chautauqua Park. It is capped off with a great ground show and spectacular fireworks at the University of Colorado's Folsom Field. For a list of free or low-cost daytime events in the Denver/Boulder metro area, click here, and for local fireworks, click here.

Four UK Hotels -- Rooms and Bathrooms

A first-hand report on four three-star hotels in three places: Windermere, Carlisle and Edinburgh

We are near the end of a wonderful but dismayingly expensive trip to northern England and Edinburgh, Scotland. We tried to be thrifty, using trains, staying in three-star hotels, going for long walks, rationing our museum admissions and not going overboard for dinners. But with £1 = $1.90, everything is expensive. I think even backpackers' budgets must be strained.

We knew we wanted to spend a few days in the Lake District, but beyond that, we traveled free-form, going where the weather promised to be non-rainy. After the Lake District, when we were deciding whether to go north (English border towns, Scotland), we went north, and when we were deciding between Glasgow (west) and Edinburgh (east), we went east. We lucked out and experienced little rain, despite dreary Britain-wide forecasts, but traveling without much of a plan does carry its financial costs.

Just as a frame of reference for the modest hotel report that follows, five-star hotels are luxurious by international standards, and four-star properties are luxurious by most people's standards. Three-star hotels should be beyond basic and more than merely comfortable.

All our rooms have private bathrooms (called "en suite"). In all four hotels we stayed at, the plumbing was downright bizarre. Sometimes the hot water is on the right, cold on the left -- and sometimes vice versa. In virtually every hotel bathroom, it takes a turn or two of the handles or knobs for any water to come out of the faucet, Speaking of faucet, every sink has one hot and one cold. The British plumbing industry seemingly hasn't figured out that mixing hot and cold in the tap is a good idea so that people can adjust the water temperature on a cold to hot continuum.

Whether firm or semi-firm, every pillow on every bad was flat. Not lumpy, but flat. Some people ike 'em flat; some like 'em fluffy. Flat-pillow fans will be happy in Britain. Bed linens were generally smooth and seem to have a fairly high thread count. Hot-water heat prevailed, with individually adjustable radiators in all rooms we stayed in.

All properties included breakfast, and both English breakfasts and Scottish breakfasts, which are virtually interchangeable, can fuel a tourist well into the day. The whole cooked-to-order meal consists of eggs, bacon (like our Canadian bacon or grilled ham) and sausages, perhaps grilled tomatoes and mushrooms and toast, toast, toast. In addition to (or instead of) these hot breakfasts, every place offered fruit juice, two or three self-serve cereals with milk, sometimes yogurt and usually some kind of cooked, canned or sugared fruit.

Every room had a small television -- often with very few channels but always with good color and crisp picture. Every room comes with a very efficient electric pot for heating water coffee and tea, generally with small cellophane packets of cookies.

Generalities aside, here are some specifics about breakasts, details about our rooms and bathrooms, how much they cost and how we found the four places where we stayed:

The Famous Wild Boar Hotel, Windermere

Rambling country inn full of warmth and charm. Located on more than 70 acres with private walking paths, skeet shooting, pond and other amenities. Access to spa and pool at Low Wood, a sister property, several miles away. Acclaimed on-site restaurant and bar. Not convenient without a car. Several miles from Windermere and Bowness (£10+ and £6+ each respectively by taxi). The bus only runs past the inn two days a week -- at least at this time of year.

Breakfast: Real breakfast menu with good choice of hot items, plus cold buffet with self-serve juices, cereals, stewed fruits, cheese, pastries, sliced meat. Good selection of hot breakfasts, including English breakfast and other dishes. Toast. Coffee ( including espresso drinks) and tea.

Bedroom: Room 24 is a very small room dominated by a very large bed. Pretty garden view.

Bathroom: Long, skinny and windowless with a fan that made a terrible racket. Open the door, and there's the toilet, next to which is the only shelf in the room (that's where the liquid soap, bath gel and shampoo dispensers are inconveniently placed). Separate soaking tub and shower. When water is let out of the tub, however, it bubbles up through the shower drain. It could be worse. The hotel makes commendable efforts to be green and save water -- but requiring three or four flushes to get paper down is going too far. We used a toilet across the hall for anything more than paper. It didn't have such a restricted flush.

Booked through: Visit Cumbria.

Cost: Starting May 1 and running through the summer, rates for a "house room," which is what I think ours was, starts at £34 nightly per person. If ours was a "classic room," the per person nightly rate will soon start at £39. For anyone not on a B&B plan or not a hotel guest, breakfast is £10.75 additional per person.

Contact: Crook, near Windermere, Cumbria LA23 3NF; 08458 509 508 (reservations within the UK) or +44 (0) 1524 844822 (outside the UK).

Lakes Court Hotel, Carlisle

Great location in the center of town, right next to the railroad station. Gracious public spaces. Very expensive (30 minutes, £3) WiFi in lobby and bar only. Also, restaurant in hotel.

Breakfast: Crisply set tables. Self-serve juice, cereal, stewed fruit, packaged pastry. English breakfast. Toast. Coffee and tea.

Bedroom: Room 119 sized like a regular US motel room, but with long vestibule. Simply furnished. Front of hotel, so noisy on Saturday night when all of young Carlisle is out, about and loud. Promotional literature proclaims "romantic" hotel; our room not one of them.

Bathroom: Functional, but bizarre retrofit. Walk into the bathroom at bedroom floor level and step up onto a platform (about 12 inches high) to tub, sink and toilet. Potential booby trap that in the US would be lawsuit waiting to happen.

Booked through: Walked in.

Cost: Sign outside said "Rooms from £90." I asked while my husband waited with the bags and was told we could have a double for £70. We took it.

Contact: Court Square, Carlisle, Cumbria CA1 1QY; +44 (0) 1228 531951.

County Hotel, Carlisle

Old center-city hotel. Great location. Creaky, quirky and kind of shabby, but picturesque.

Breakfast: Self-serve juices, cereals, yogurt, stewed fruit. English breakfast. Coffee and tea.

Bedroom: Smile-enducing Room 112. Enormous and yet sparsely furnished in sort of a bordello style -- red velvet and all. Floors creak. Small distant TV and small refrigerator.

Bathroom: Booby prize. Inside bath room with neither window nor vent fan. Stale swampy-smelling air. Brackets for shelf over sink, but no shelf. Pretentious but ill-fitting mahagony panel fronting tub. Possibly the worst caulking job I have ever seen with thick, wavy line of bright white caulk between tub and dark red tiles. Do they allow kindergartners to caulk tubs in Britain?

Booked through: Walked in.

Cost: Double room, £50.

Contact: 9 Botchergate, Carlisle, CA1 1QP; +44 (0) 1228 531316.

Sonas Guest House, Edinburgh

Charming, whistle-clean B&B on a quiet south-side street, just a few doors from an arterial well served by many buses, including routes directly from the old city and the railroad station. Free WiFi.

Breakfast: Serve-yourself juices, cereals and (hooray!) fresh bananas and apples. White and brown toast. Selection of several hot breakfasts, including Scottish breakfast. Coffee and tea. Fresh flowers on the breakfast table.

Bedroom: Room 4 is lovely, bandbox near but very tiny (about 8x10), plus a small vestibule and a bathroom that is just about 5 feet square.

Bathroom: Tub/shower combination. Nicely tiled. Clean and modern. No window. Good, clearing tilting mirror that accommodates all heights. Vent fan a tad noisy.

Booked through: VisitScotland's Edinburgh tourist information office on Princes Street, above the railroad station.

Cost: "Special rate" of £27 nightly per person in a double. Booking agent said it's normall about £35. Booking fee of £4, but most convenient for afternoon arrival in a large city, where the only hotels near the railroad station are luxury leaders, way beyond our budget.

Contact: 3 East Mayfield, Edinburgh EH9 1SD; +44 (0) 131 667 2781.

Summary

Best Room: Sonas.
Smallest room: Sonas.
Biggest Room: County Hotel.
Best Ambiance: Famous Wild Boar.
Most Convenient: Lakes Court and County Hotels, both in the center of Carlisle, steps from the railroad station.
Least Convenient: Famous Wild Boar -- unless you have a car.

Conclusion

Three-star lodgings bring cost of a trip from the stratospheric to the affordable (with prices, if not plumbing, comparable to a high-end motor inn or even a good hotel booked via priceline.com or other discounter in the US).

Exploring Hadrian's Wall

Note: Because this is a walking as well as a travel topic, I have posted this same item on my Nordic Walking blog.

English prehistory is daunting. After all, it goes back to Neolithic times (from around 4,000 B.C.), Celts (800 B.C.), Romans (around 53 B.C. to 313 A.D.). Teutonic Anglo-Saxons (roughly 5th century to 7th century, by which time they had evolved into Englishmen), Vikings (beginning in 865 A.D.), Norman (beginning in 1066) and on through the reigning families: Plantagenet, Lancaster, York, Tudor, Stuart, Commonwealth & Protectorate, Restoration, Hanover, Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and Windsor – and in the north, the Scots. Of the cathedrals, castles and other landmarks from each era, from the Neolithic stone circles (think Stonehenge) to the Millennium Wheel (erected along the Thames for the Bicentennial), the one that most captivates walkers is Hadrian’s Wall.

The wall, begun in 122 A.D. under the reign of the Emperor Hadrian, was built to secure the northernmost reaches of the empire from the Scots. It runs 73 east-west miles parallel to the A69 highway between Carlisle and Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Much of the wall was dismantled, the stones used by later peoples for other building purposes, but some remains – in various states of decay or restoration. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, with public footpaths following much of it, including sections atop the wall itself in several places.

From the center of Carlisle, a border town (a small city, really) in northwestern England, we boarded the bus cleverly number AD122 (see above), also called the Hadrian’s Wall Country Bus that makes several multi-stop runs a day between Carlisle and Hexham plus a couple all the way to Newcastle. The Carlisle-Hexham route, in its entirety, takes more than two hours. You can pay per segment, or buy a £7.50 Day Rover ticket that permits travelers to get on and off at will. The first bus leaves Carlisle at 7:35 a.m. and the last returns 8:01 p.m., which leaves plenty of time for sightseeing and walking. A volunteer interpreter rides a couple of the morning buses to tell Hadrian’s story and point out later historic sites in villages en route.

The bus route passes through countryside that is so improbably green and pastoral that it takes imagination to envision it tromped by legionnaires and Scottish insurgents, sometimes running red with combatants’ blood. Stops are at historic sites (including five Roman ones) and in villages with such archetypically England names as Crosby, Brampton, Birdoswald, Gilsland and Haltwhistle.

The last is especially noteworthy for walkers, because the village is in the throes of the 11th annual Haltwhistle Walking Festival. The 2008 festival began on Saturday, April 26 and lasts through Monday, May 5. It includes nearly 20 guided walks of various lengths (1 ½ to 13 miles, including an assisted one of wheelchair users) and various interests (Hadrian’s Wall, woodland bird walk, renewable energy/energy independence and more). Costs range from £3 to £7.

For independent walkers, the two recommended stretches for walking Hadrian’s Wall are from Birdoswald to Gilsland and from Housesteads Roman Fort to Once Brewed, where the National Park headquarters and a large walker/biker-friendly hostel are located.

We encountered legions of other walkers – with one pole, two or none. These included a group on the Haltwhistle Walking Festival “Behind Hadrian’s Wall in Springtime” itinerary, numerous walkers on a British Heart Association fundraiser and so enormous a group of French students that it seemed like another Norman invasion.

The path itself has lots of steep ups and steep downs where it is close to the wall, but there are often milder options in the in the flatter valleys below. Surfaces include erosion-controlling, user-friendly stepping-stones on some of the longer steep sections, gravel, mud and grass. At one point, we followed a sign marked “Old Roman Road” rather than the main footpath and ended up walking through a cow pasture – complete with disinterested cows.

Interestingly to us, in dry Colorado, land administrators urge hikers to walk single file on narrow trails to avoid widening them. Here where it rains a lot, where there are no marked paths, walkers are asked not to walk single file, because regrowth is easier when there has not been much traffic.

One thing we did find is that the distances on told by the guide and even on the map seem to be crow-flight measures, not taking into account the turns in the route or the extra distance added by the ascents and descents. The Housesteads-Once Brewed is always given as 2½ miles. Both of our pedometers and, more significantly, the GPS calculated it to about 4 miles. Mathematical issues notwithstanding, the day was gray, cool and threatened rain that never came. It was a magical route into history almost two millennia ago.

Another option in this region are the Northern Railroad’s guided walks through the Dales and the Eden Valley several times a month from directly from railroad stations on the Leeds-Settle-Carlisle line.