VFYW: Easy To Crack

VFYW: Easy To Crack For contest #515, we explore a tiny town with a huge reputation for earthquakes. (For the View From Your Window contest, the results below exceed the content limit for Substack’s email service, so to ensure that you see the full results, click the headline above.) Highlights from this week’s write-up: One of the most tragic car crashes in American history One of the most iconic car crashes in cinema history A beetle that can sustain a car driving over it repeatedly without damaging it The origins of “cool” An obit for Miss Bigglesworth, a VFYW pet Here’s a sleuth who recently moved to Lake Ellwood, Wisconsin: It’s our first 4th in our new home: Happy 250th birthday, my fellow tax absconders! 😂🇺🇸❤️ Speaking of patriotic Americans, I recently noticed a sleuth’s name in a byline on FIRE’s substack (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression). FIRE has, in my opinion, supplanted the ACLU as the premier group fighting for free speech, so it’s very cool to see a VFYW-er contribute to their mission. (Their president, Greg Lukianoff, was on the Dishcast not too long ago.) So I asked our sleuth — the self-described “ski nerd” who writes the weekly slopes report — if he would remark on his FIRE post: I’m a (retired) fully certified ski instructor and a 40-year member of the Professional Ski Instructors of America - Western Division, which certifies nearly all ski and snowboard instructors in California, Nevada, and Hawaii. For the last year, the organization’s elected board has clung to power, secretly and unlawfully suspending all their opponents and voiding the most recent election. It’s a sorry mess, with three lawsuits, claims of violating fiduciary duty, an illegally recorded private conversation, a police investigation, and alleged civil extortion. I discovered that the root cause was a “One Voice” policy that gags directors, preventing them from speaking critically to the membership after a majority vote of the board. And then I learned that One Voice has been a common policy among nonprofits for decades, and, even more distressing, common among boards for school districts, community colleges, and state universities. I ended up writing a Substack article, “One Voice: Gagging education board members,” for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Next up, our super-sleuth in Sagaponack sends a window from abroad: Welcome back — hope you had a fantastic Dishcation! I captured this view while visiting Montenegro, but I’m just getting around to sending it now that we’re back in NY. It’s a nice view of the Bay of Kotor from the Church of Our Lady of the Rocks, just off Perast: I kinda wish you’d have used this easier View last week so I would have had more time to find the window in Merligen. I had found that tower and was actually in the right town; I just didn’t get to the right buildings. Kudos to everyone who found it. One of them was the “a-maize-ing sleuth” in OKC, who follows up: The write-up about Merligen did not mention the centerpiece of the town’s majestic scene: the diamond-shaped, strikingly symmetrical Niesen peak across Lake Thun. Here is my 2019 view of it on the train from Interlaken toward Thun: Among non-volcanic peaks, Niesen is a rare example of a clean cut by nature’s knife, with edges unnaturally straight. Its steep slope (~45 degrees) approaches the angle of the sides of Egyptian pyramids (51.8 degrees for the Great Pyramid of Giza). Niesen was carved from an alpine mountain mass that’s not a former volcano. Volcanic peaks are more likely to be homogeneous in inner structure, and be eroded symmetrically — think Mount Fuji, Kilimanjaro, or Rainier. While they all have a flat top where the crater used to be, the Mælifell in Iceland is an exception; it retained the pointy top of its cone, thus becoming an iconic specimen of a perfect volcano. Mælifell was shrouded in clouds when my daughter and I drove through Landmannalaugar a few summers ago, so I borrowed a photo online: On to this week’s view, our super-sleuth in Parkfairfax writes: Happy Independence Day! This was a great VFYW for this American holiday weekend. Our super-sleuth in Warrensburg: Hope you got to enjoy a little time off, since y’all deserve a break from covering the shit-show that is our politics! You also gifted us with a mercifully easy view this week, which I appreciate. So does our Burner super-sleuth: This week’s window is my favorite type of window. Impossible at first glance, but eventually the clues review themselves: flag, water tank, directions post, and the carved cowboy, among others. One of the others is highlighted by the ski nerd: The sign “Please Close the Gates to Keep the Wild Hogs Out” reminds me of a sign I saw on a bayou tour outside of New Orleans: From our super-sleuth in Riverwoods: The clues of “close gate for the hogs” and bluegrass led me either to Kentucky’s Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area, or possibly to a couple counties in Eastern KY. It just looks and feels like Kentucky to me :) Is the statue Daniel Boone? What is the word on the barrel that starts with W and ends with H? Wabash? Is that the giveaway clue? The answers will reveal themselves soon. Here’s some context regarding the hogs, from a previous winner — who also names the right state and county: A couple of things in this view are intriguing to me, like the short fences everywhere. This is to keep out feral pigs, which are evidently a huge problem in Monterey County and elsewhere, just like it is where I live in Oahu, Hawaii. California’s wild pig population has soared since various non-native boar and pig breeds were introduced centuries ago. They now can be found in 56 of the 58 counties in California. Numerous environmental and public health problems are associated with pigs, and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife allows year-round pig hunting. Governor Newsom recently signed into law Senate Bill 856, lifting remaining hunting restrictions allowing for better population control and habitat management. Here’s Chini high above the hogs: From our super-sleuth in Sherman Oaks: I haven’t been able to submit many entries lately because I was just stumped. I actually saw how we had an extra week with this view, so I decided to take a stab at it. Luckily it was a fairly easy one. I could tell from the scene that we were in California. The sign post with Paso Robles and the San Andreas Fault told me we were in central CA. Paso Robles is actually pretty far west of the fault line, so I guess the picture was somewhere close to the fault line. I found this map of cities that sit on the fault line in California: Parkfield and Cholame were the closest to Paso Robles. A quick detour comes from Hinckley, OH: This has to one of the slowest-pitched softballs in the VFWY in a long time! I’ll leave it to others to explain the statue, and cafe, and lodge, seismicity, and the whole origin story of this town. But the next town, just north, Coalinga, has its own origin name. Many think it must be Hispanic, but NOPE. In the mining years there were three coal mines, designated Mines A, B and C. “Coaling Station A” was truncated to “Coalinga”: A previous winner has a family connection to that town: I actually had a great aunt in Coalinga. She learned to drive at age 92. Her license was revoked at 96. She died at 101. Her 100th birthday party was off the hook. Berkeley settles on the right town: This week’s vague first impression had me half expecting a point-blank closeup of a solitary, single-story structure with not much in the way of clues. When I got around to really examining it, though, I realized it would be solvable. Dusty was hiding what seemed to be a relatively short town name starting with W and ending with H. Maybe Wabash? (Wrong on both counts.) And the distinctive statue of the cowboy with faithful dog looked as if it might have potential. (Not really.) But I stopped thinking along either of those lines when I saw that you’d left us a couple of ostrich-sized Easter eggs: a pair of tiny directional signs pointing off to the left in the apparent direction of both the San Andreas Fault and the city of Paso Robles, both in California. So suddenly this contest promised to be not only solvable, but easy to solve. Both signs point in the same direction, meaning our window had to be just east of the San Andreas Fault because Paso Robles is west of it. So, using the US Geological Survey’s interactive fault map, I started tracing Highway 46 East out of Paso Robles and, just after crossing the fault, turned left on Cholame Valley Road. The road ran roughly parallel to the fault, with a few jags, for about 14 miles before coming upon a little hamlet: And bingo! Found the place in no time: Parkfield. But I didn’t expect it would turn out to be the earthquake capital of the world (not just a slogan for tourists, although the USGS only goes so far as to call Parkfield the nation’s earthquake capital). It’s called that because of how regularly the place gets bounced around. It was hit by temblors of 6.0 or higher on the Richter scale in 1857, 1881, 1901, 1922, 1934, and 1966, which averages out to 1 every 22 years. (Followed by a pause of 38 years, which messed up the average a bit, but it’s worth noting that the last 6.0 quake was 22 years ago in 2004.) Frequent little tremors also roll through, but they aren’t worth getting agitated about. Here’s the flyover to Parkfield from the CO/NJ super-sleuth: Roberts Creek notes, “Parkfield is a historic, one-block town owned and operated largely as part of the V6 Ranch.” Says Brookland: This was a fun one. I love the way the tree blocks out just enough of what would be tell-tale clues, with Dusty only needing to block out the big “V6 Ranch” painted on the horizontal tank. Enough clues remain: the signs that read San Andreas Fault, Horse Camp, and Paso Robles, plus Bluegrass, to go through a series of Google searches, and eventually “paso robles cowboy log cabin restaurant lodge” revealed the V6 Ranch and [redacted]. Clearing up the directional sign is our super-sleuth in Durham, UK: I’m guessing this view will elicit a lot of answers! The sign was the key for me, and googling “San Andreas” plus “horse camp” got me to this newsletter, which has the same sign on page 6, with the title “Day 5: Parkfield”: So Parkfield it is. Another looks to the other big clue in view: A month ago I had a swelled head for getting correct buildings in the Maldonado, Vancouver, and Lagos VFYWs, but I was then brought back to Earth on my picks for the Cusco, Montreal, and Merligen windows: Western Hemisphere, Upstate New York and Somewhere in Switzerland, respectively. So thanks for the abundance of clues this week, such as the distance signs and especially the Sculpture of Man with Dog. I’m surprised you didn’t cover it with a big sideways Dusty. Another asks: Isn’t that a statue of Jebediah Springfield? I guess not. San Mateo reimagines that statue — with video this time: Welcome back! I always miss the VFYW when you’re gone.