| Its only 100 miles from
Cheyenne to Denver so we stopped at Boulder CO to see what we could find.
Jan has been a drinker of all sorts of teas for many years, so when she
found a tea company gives factory tours, we just had to go. Celestial
Seasonings
This company is the largest packager of speciality teas in the USA and exports all over the world.
Surprisingly, its biggest foreign customer is Canada.
They run the tours every half hour and there were 50 people on our tour.
There were also a number of school trips in. It was amazing to watch 8 and 9
year olds tasting out all the different teas. We sat and sampled teas and
admired the collection of teapots while we waited for our tour to begin. |  |
| Photos are not permitted
in the factory but to be honest, what you really want to be able to capture
is the smells of all the different ingredients. They import ingredients from
all over the world and process the leaves, fruits and flowers in a milling
process which cuts rather than grinds the ingredients to retain more
flavour. The exceptions are mint and spearmint which come from Washington
state and which they buy in ready milled to avoid contamination of the
milling plant. They store the mint in a separate room which we were allowed
to go in. The smell is enough to make your eyes water! They do all the
artwork for all their packaging in house. This dress is made of the paper
packets they put individual tea bags in. |  |
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Since we couldn't photograph the plant, we had to be content with the shop.
They make over a hundred different teas, including white, green, black and
herbal ones. Technically speaking, only infusions made from the leaves of
the tea plant, camellia sinensis, are teas, and these contain caffeine. Some
of the flavours are caffeine reduced, produced by washing most of the
caffeine out of the leaves with liquid carbon dioxide; herbal and fruit teas
are caffeine free. Their top seller is 'Sleepytime' and the factory address
is Sleepytime Drive. |
| The tour centre has a
number of pictures and displays about the company and its products. We liked
this picture particularly because of the clouds. |  |
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Leanin' Tree Western Art Museum
Half a mile away is the Leanin' Tree Western Art museum. Outside is a
collection of sculptures by various (mainly native American) sculptors of
note. Our favourite piece is this magnificent buffalo entitled 'Monarch'
cast by Buck McCain in Santa Fe, New Mexico. |
| There are several
sculptures of Indians in the display including Sacajawea and this one by
John Coleman entitled 'His Honoured Life'. The robe is covered with pictures
of events in the life of this chief. It portrays his life and through that
the life of the tribe since they had no written language. |  |
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Dixie Jewitt created this 'Ironfire' horse completely from metal components,
scrap or not we don't know. I liked the mane created from pitchfork tines.
This is a style of art we have seen elsewhere but this example is
exceptional. |
| It is made up of
thousands of identifiable artefacts all welded together. The sculpture was
created in 1993. Dixie Jewitt was at one time a bush pilot in Alaska before
she took up sculpting. |  |
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The classic pose of the stag. Entitled 'Sound of Autumn', this piece was
created by Gerald Balclar and depicts a Rocky Mountain bull elk with antlers
which would weigh 40lb. I suspect these weigh rather more. Photographs are
not permitted inside the museum where there are some lovely pieces of art
showing scenes and figures from 'the West'. We did however get a book
showing some of the art. |
| National Centre for
Atmospheric Research Close to the centre of Boulder but some 1000ft
above it lies NCAR. Part of the University of Colorado, it undertakes
research into the atmosphere and weather forecasting, thus it is also part
of NOAA. The building is quite spectacular and modernistic. There are
several displays in the main building of their work and the impacts of
climate change. |  |
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Mostly it is pictures and boards explaining various aspects of weather
cycles, both modern and historic. This is a collection of atmospheric lights
which can be seen under particular conditions, such as the aurora borealis. |
| Other displays track
other atmosphere-affecting events like earthquakes and volcanoes and the
effects of plate tectonics on ocean currents which control so much of our
weather. |  |
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This is one of their mobile telescopes which gets taken to view solar
eclipses and help study solar flares and their effects on our atmosphere. |
| Another board, this time
showing the different cloud types, what causes them and what they mean. |  |
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In the basement behind a glass wall is their supercomputer capable of two
trillion flops (floating point operations/sec). Odd that you should need so
many flops to be able to predict the weather better. They now use IBM
processors (replacing a CRAY) running their own ARCS operating system
In 2002 they were adding storage at a rate of 100 terabytes every 3
months, so goodness knows what it is now. |
| This looks like the
computer control console. The left hand screen looks like it is running
"Windows" which seems slightly odd. |  |
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The computer is actually underground, under this field on which deer
apparently frequently graze without being affected by the analysis of chaos
taking place underneath them. The view of the mountains behind does make for
an idyllic setting, at least in this weather. |
| Looking the other way we
see the city of Boulder over 1000ft below, and the plains stretching out
eastwards as far as the eye can see. |  |
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