For as long as I’ve lived here there has been an ugly styrofoam boat in our backyard. The story is that our landlords found a good deal on a boat trailer that happened to contain a decrepit boat, and they dumped the boat here. Here it is in early 2009:
We moved it over along the fence to make room for garden expansion, but it remained an eyesore. The landlords gave us the OK to haul it to the landfill, so we decided to get rid of it today. It weighed 360 lbs according to the landfill scale – too much for us to lift so we hacked it in half and carried the halves to the trailer.
Boat pieces loaded in trailer
The Coffin Butte landfill is about 10 miles north of town. Coffin Butte is a small mountain that used to have a quarry and that is now being back-filled with garbage. Normally people aren’t allowed up at the dumping zone (there are public dumping bins lower down) but since the boat halves were too big for the bins they waved us through.
At the landfill, ready to dump.
Sailing on a sea of trash
Beautiful sunset over the mountains vs. maximum ugliness in the foreground.
One of these years humanity will learn to stop making things that can’t be recycled…
Winter has arrived in the mountains, with over a foot of snow falling in the most recent storm. We drove up Marys Peak after the first snow two weeks ago – the weather at the top was drizzly but we got in plenty of snowball tosses. By now there may be too much snow on the road to make the drive, though I will try it if/when the weather clears.
Elizabeth and friend Kate on Marys Peak, November 6, 2011