In Defense of Deserts

An early autumn sunset sets the sky aflame in Joshua Tree National Park in southeastern California.  When you take a closer look, you see beyond the reds and catch the blue sky beyond the clouds, and below, the subtle shades of the plants and hills.  The desert, it seems, always rewards a second look.  Rainfall is rare here, and this faint rainbow seemed like a visitor from another world...

Sunsets present themselves in endless variety and subtlety, giving a depth to an ordinary intersection on Twentynine Palms Highway.

About 72.5 miles from the southern entrance to Joshua Tree National Park, you will find the Galleta Meadows Estate in Borrego Springs, featuring about 130 impressively-scaled metal sculptures.  The unfenced, privately-owned site is open to the public every day of the year, for hiking, horseback riding, and of course photography...

The sculptures were all created by Ricardo Breceda and commissioned by landowner Dennis Avery, with the goal of land conservation and sponsoring a public art display.  There are diverse themes, including native animals like bighorn sheep and these life-size, wild horses above, and this giant scorpion facing desert insects.  Other themes focus on prehistoric animals including dinosaurs...

The sculptor also created mythical beasts...

Seen at enough distance, you can take in the full length of the 350 feet of Breceda's  sand dragon sculpture. 

The sculptures, including the tortoises below, were all created from 2008 to 2012, when Dennis Avery died.  Because of his land conservation effort, the Galleta Meadows Estate protects actual wild creatures and plants, as well as the metal kind, and because of this the land will be protected from development.   

Our two photographers exercised extra caution because serpents (the real, not sculptural kind) are common in the desert.  Despite precautions, one was surprised to be at face-level after turning around, with a rattlesnake coiled up in rocky crevice, just inches behind him.  Because he is dedicated to his craft, he got the shot, and avoided any bites...

This art car was a late 90s Buick (we think) under that eye-catching psychedelic paintwork, photographed at Rainbowland in Joshua Tree, a 3-acre art park with gallery and work studio. The park, facilities, and works were created by artist Patrick Hasson.  Somehow, California car culture has collided here with what was once called the counterculture...

A somehow-related roadside attraction invites passers-by to share their joys.  By an eerie coincidence, "my dogs" is listed over "Picasso", which stunned our other photographer because she had a legendary, much-loved hound named after Pablo Picasso.  The cosmic, psychedelic alignments keep coming, in true California style.

Just 45.5 miles west on I-10 from Joshua Tree National Park, you'll find the desert town of Palm Springs.  Though it gained fame as a center of mid-century modern architecture in the 50s and 60s, architect Lloyd Wright (son of Frank) got the ball rolling with his 1924 design of the Oasis Hotel, with innovative concrete block construction. Other postwar architects adopted perforated concrete blocks and shady metal vaulted trellises, as here, in the Old Las Palmas neighborhood...

In the same neighborhood, this mid-century bungalow forms a style suited to the then-new car culture, and the postwar innovation of air conditioning.  When I once asked a Palm Springs friend if she planned to take her dog for a nice, post-sunset walk, she replied, "Are you crazy?  It's still a hundred outside."

Even a spaceship gas station qualifies for landmark status, because of its reinforced concrete structural expressionism and futurist adventurism. Ironies abound; the futurism dates from 1964, when architect William Cody created this design.  Back to the future...

But we will want return you to the desert before closing, back out in the primordial wilds.

At Joshua Tree, this coyote pup levels his gaze at the photographer before moving on...

Because the desert rewards a second look, you realize that it is teeming with life in amazing diversity.  Folks who avoid the desert (after all, it can be hot and dry, and can make demands of us), often assume it's a vast, empty place.  After you spend some sustained time out in wild nature, perhaps you may experience a shift of perspective.  Perhaps the truly empty spaces are ill-considered artifacts of our civilization: the vast asphalt parking lots with oppressive sodium-vapor lighting, the AI data centers, and the first postwar suburban tract developments that leveled hills and cut down trees to maximize profits. We hope you take that second look, and treat the landscape and its creatures with respect.  You may come home with new gifts...

Photo Credits:  

All photos were generously provided by Veronika Sprinkel, a frequent contributor in past days of this blog, except the rattlesnake and the coyote pup shots from Duncan Mackenzie. Our wildlife photographer friends concluded their desert adventures happily, without any injuries, despite that one close call with that rattler...

Dog Days Part 2 at Boulder Coffee and Classics

Boulder's Coffee and Classics August 30 event gathered a crowd of humans, perhaps looking forward to the cooler days of autumn, and of a crowd of canines too. Of course dogs do what dogs do best, living in the present, without fretting about looking forward or backward...

And we might want to emulate the pooches' penchant for living the present, because many of the car wonks remarked on the record-setting heat wave this past summer. The early Series 1 E-Type Jag roadster was a lovely specimen, and also a car that was, back in the day, prone to overheating in traffic...

The 3.8 liter E-type was produced from 1961-64, and clues that give away the early cars include the thin shell bucket seats, and the embossed aluminum on the center dash and transmission tunnel.  At the April 1961 model introduction, the E-Type was the first production car equipped with 4-wheel independent suspension, 4-wheel disc brakes, and a dual-overhead cam engine.  

The Jag XK120 roadster appeared in autumn in 1948 as a ploy to drive showroom traffic and show off the new DOHC inline six that powered the big Mark VII sedan.  But Americans wanted the 2-seater, and Jaguar owner William Lyons saw a good export bet, and increased XK production. The XK120 was joined eventually with a coupe and convertible with wind-up windows, and stayed in production through '54. The louvered hood (oops, bonnet) was non-standard, but was a common modification for racing.

This 1939 Bentley 4.25 liter tourer offers an essay of British style from a decade earlier.  Rolls-Royce took over the firm from engineer W.O. Bentley in the Great Depression year of 1931...

The red Lotus Esprit V8 offered a mid-mounted, aluminum 4-cam, 32-valve, twin-turbocharged 3.5 liter engine designed in-house at Lotus, starting in 1996.  Esprit production ended in 2004, and around 1,500 examples of the Esprit V8 emerged from the Lotus works.  The bright blue right-hand drive original Mini (that is, of BMC, not BMW origin) looks like the perfect scaled ride for this little pup... 

American cars are in the minority at the Sunday events, but this 1956 Cadillac Eldorado commanded attention because of sheer size, along with GM Styling's over-the-top touches of  GM styling.  But a '56 Eldorado starred in a Hollywood comedy that year, "The Solid Gold Cadillac", with Judy Holliday...

Coffee and Classics events* start at 8 to 10 AM on the last Sundays from April through October, though the Memorial Day exceptions are listed on the event calendar*. On warm mornings, live music events overlap the end of the car shows, in the courtyard at Spruce Confections at 767 Pearl Street.  

The Alfa Romeo Giulia Spider (1962-65) signals the 1600 engine with this hood scoop, because the engine is a bit taller than the 1300 Giulietta.  The Ferrari Testarossa lurking back of the Alfa was produced from 1984-96. The mid-engined flat 12 had a bit over 3 times of the displacement of the little Alfa.  The author dimly recalls driving an example of each, and that the Alfa was a bit more flingable (is that a word?) on narrow country roads.  A friend had to replace the windshield on his Testarossa when a gravel truck rumbled past. I was very happy not driving at this moment...

The expanded Coffee and Classics event closes part of Pearl Street from 9th Street to 7th, and 8th from Pearl to Walnut, except for exhibitors and their old cars, so it's a safe and relaxing place for dogs to wander and sniff.  And a decent place for dog lovers to wander and sniff too...

Matt Kennan contributed some words to live by...

"You don't have to be everyone's cup of tea.

Be the person dogs run to first.

That's better anyway."

*Event schedule note: 

For more info on Boulder Coffee & Classics, you might contact event founder Mike Burroughs at fuelfedboulder@gmail.com.

Photo Credits:

All photos are by the author.

Revs Institute Revisited: Cars Bred for Racing, Working…and Just for Show

A recent visit to the Revs Institute* in Naples, Florida, posed some problems for contributor Paul Anderson. The original suggestion to photograph mass-produced cars, the working dogs trapped in a collection of wildly expensive show dogs, was sabotaged by the fact that the Revs' Citroen 2CV, its vintage VW, and even its Trabant (yes, they have a Trabant) were not on display. You could stretch your definition of working and say that racing cars have something in common with working dogs, because they are, like greyhounds, bred to focus on the job of winning races.  And some of those racers, like the '55 D-Type Jaguar and the '69 Porsche 917 PA, were in the immaculate Revs shop for work...

The 4.5 liter, air-cooled flat-12 PA was named for the era when Porsche and Audi shared US dealerships, but decades before they shared anything else like, for example, SUV parts. Porsche built 65 of the 917 chassis between '69 and '73; of these, there were only 2 of the PA versions intended for the Can-Am Series. That's the Canadian-American Challenge Cup, by the way, a friendly contest which lasted from 1966-'87, an era when the US avoided treating its northern ally like an enemy.

The 917 PA is a genuinely rare car; it couldn't get much scarcer without being nonexistent. This '63 Elva-Porsche is also pretty scarce; no more than 20 were built with a four-cam flat four Porsche Type 547 engine in a modified Elva Mk. VII chassis. In its first race outing, the Elva-Porsche won the Road America 500 at Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin against a field of more powerful cars, despite sketchy stability under hard braking. The 1,000-pound cars often beat Porsche's factory racers, in fact. 

The Elva-Porsche is a good example of the kind of reductiveness that happens when you breed a car to win races. It usually means it's not much good for anything else, like carrying passengers or groceries.  In the same vein, you wouldn't expect a greyhound to be very good at herding sheep...

While cars like the Elva-Porsche were usually trailered to the races, the D-Type Jaguar was one of the last sports racers that could be driven to a race, compete in it, and then drive home.  The D-Type first appeared in 1954; the ultra light mid-engined cars of a decade later were more focused and specialized, and thus impractical for workaday tasks.

Single-seaters like this Cooper Type 43 from 1957 are even more focused.  Along with no passenger seat, there are no fenders or lights.   Formula 1 and 2 races were only held under daylight conditions...

The Type 43 aimed at Formula 1 and 2 was an important design because it compensated for its less than optimal engine power by putting that engine (a 2 liter, 4-cylinder DOHC Coventry Climax) behind the driver and ahead of the gearbox. That way, the driver could make take advantage of the car's balanced handling and light weight (1,060 lb.) to make best use of the 180 hp. Stirling Moss sat in the workspace below to win the Argentine GP in 1958...

It was the first Formula 1 race won by a mid-engined car, and it foreshadowed a design trend.  More F1 drivers would see something like the view below in 1959 and 60, when Jack Brabham would win tandem World Championships in a Cooper. The rush to mid-engined designs was on, and the road racing world would not turn back. 

Along with the Cooper T43 Moss drove to victory in  the '58 Argentine GP, the Revs has a T51 from 1959, the type that Brabham used to win the World Championship that year, with a 2.5 liter version of the Climax four making around 240 hp.  Not bad, for an engine derived from a portable fire pump design...

In addition to race cars powered by fire-pump engines, there were road racers based upon humble production cars.  Carlo Abarth's firm specialized in those.  The Fiat 600, designed by engineer Dante Giacosa, was released in 1955 as an Italian "people's car" and stayed in production for 14 years, powered by a rear-mounted, water-cooled inline four.  The radiator was in back too, but race versions like this 1970 Fiat Abarth TCR-1000 Berlina Corsa (a name longer than the car) have front-mounted radiators.

Abarth gave their most modified 600 an engine bored out for a displacement of 60 cubic inches and an aluminum "Radiale" head with hemispherical combustion chambers. Still with pushrod-operated valves but a 13 to 1 compression ratio, it made 112 hp.  Abarth added their own 5-speed transmission, shown below.

Under all the spoilers and go-fast add-ons there was a Fiat 600; here's a picture of a standard 600 with sunroof option to give an idea of how Italy's answer to the VW Beetle looked wearing its real face.  Cheery, and relatively unthreatening...

Over at Citroen, engineer André Lefebvre and designer Flaminio Bertoni designed a people's car focused on motorizing France's farmers. The front-driver powered by an air-cooled flat twin was released at the 1948 Paris Salon.  A design goal was to allow a farmer to carry a basket of eggs across a plowed field without breaking any, and this was facilitated by a suspension connecting front and rear wheels. The canvas sunroof made carrying tall loads easier, and the Deux Chevaux (named after its taxable horsepower) was already a fixture on French streetscapes when the 2CV Sahara on display was introduced in 1960.  It featured a second, rear-mounted 425cc twin powering the rear wheels, which moved the gas tank under the front seat, the reason for the fuel filler in the driver's door.  Michelin introduced its radial tires on 2CVs.

The Revs actually has a VW Beetle, but because it wasn't on display we found a photo from an earlier visit.  Perhaps the only Beetle story not generally known by car wonks is that the Czech car builder Tatra sued VW for stealing the Beetle's design concept from its rear-engined, air-cooled V570 prototype from 1931-33. This was something that Ferdinand Porsche had already admitted. Tatra won a settlement of their pre-war lawsuit in 1965, when VW paid them one million DM.

East Germany's front-drive Trabant 601 was produced in over 2.8 million examples from 1964 to 1990, powered by a transverse two-cycle inline 2-cylinder based upon a 1930s DKW design. Bodywork was made of Duroplast, a phenolic resin reinforced with cotton fibers leftover from the fabric industry.

In the same era, BMC engineer Alec Issigonis designed the Austin and Morris Mini twins. Introduced in 1959, the first generation Mini design would remain in production until 2000.  In Britain, the 1956 Suez crisis had revived fuel rationing, and chairman Leonard Lord wanted a proper 4-passenger car to compete with the German bubble cars that were beginning to sell, even in England.  Lord wanted a car that would fit inside a box 10 feet long, 4 feet wide and 4 feet high, with 6 feet of its length devoted to passenger space.  

The engine was an existing design to save money, BMC's A-type inline 4, but mounted crosswise between the front wheels, and sharing its crankcase oil with the transmission to save space.  Other cars like the Saab 92 and the Trabant had used transverse engines, but failed to maximize passenger space as the Mini did.  This first-generation Mini was judged the 2nd most influential 20th century car design in 1999, behind the Ford Model T and ahead of the VW Beetle and CItroen DS. There's plenty of evidence the jury was wrong; the original Mini was the most influential car design of the century.  The Ford T was mainly significant because it introduced real mass production; it broke no new technical ground.  The Mini, however, influenced dozens of designs that came after it, including the Honda Civic and transverse-engined front drivers from Toyota, Ford and GM.  John Cooper, who with his father Charles founded Cooper Cars and gave us those mid-engined single seaters, worked a bit of magic on the standard Mini, making it into the Mini Cooper S, a car that won the Monte Carlo Rally in 1964, '65 and '67.  The Revs example is a '64 Cooper S.  Below, a shot of that transverse engine and gearbox...

A wildly opposite approach to basing a road racer or rally winner on a mass-produced car might be to base a road car on a Grand Prix contestant. It would also be an expensive approach, and Alfa Romeo appears to have tried it with their 8C2900 series, made in A and B versions from 1935 to '39. The engine, a supercharged inline 8 with dual overhead cams by engineer Vittorio Jano, was alleged to have been sourced from leftover units built for Alfa's single-seat racers.  Details matched that of Alfa's racing eights, including two separate aluminum blocks of 4 cylinders separated by the gear drive for the supercharger and camshafts.  But Alfa built 41 of these cars, and it's hard to believe even a well-financed racing program would have needed over 3 dozen GP engines.  So maybe what we have here was always intended to be a show dog among mutts.  But the show dog delivered on the track, with a 1-2-3 finish in the Mille Miglia in 1938, the year our subject berlinetta was built...

The rest of the specifications came up to show dog standards; Jano designed 4-wheel independent suspension and specified hydraulic brakes.  Short wheelbase racers often had alloy bodywork by Touring Superleggera, which built this lightweight, long-wheelbase coupe using their system of aluminum panels anchored to a network of small-diameter steel tubes. The 8C2900 Alfas were the fastest production cars in the years before World War 2, if you'd accept 41 cars in 5 years as "production".

The approach to road racers and show cars at France's Delahaye was a bit different. They built 4 GP racers powered by a 3-cam V12, and no more than 5 Type 165 road cars powered by a detuned, 12-plug version of the 24-plug racer.  But they eventually built around 2,000 of their Type 135, including the Figoni & Falaschi bodied 135 MS Special Roadster at the Revs.  These cars were powered by a famously reliable and durable glorified truck engine...

Under its swoopy exterior, the Delahaye 135 featured a 3.5 liter inline 6 derived directly from Delahaye's commercial truck engines. Modern enough to have overhead valves, it was nowhere near as complex or sophisticated as the Alfa's supercharged, twin-cam straight 8.  In the 135MS the engine produced 160 hp, less than the 180 to 220 from the Alfa 8C2900, but the same as the first DOHC Jaguar XK that was a dozen years in the future. Most 135s featured the Cotal electromagnetic preselector gearbox, not the hot ticket for racing...

Still, stripped-down, lightweight versions of Delahaye's 135 did well enough in road races to establish a reputation for performance, and the cars didn't have the temperamental reputation that attached to Alfa's high-strung 8C. Perhaps this may indicate that the most trouble-free cars, like the most trouble-free dogs, are really mutts beneath the surface...

*Postscript:

For reservations and ticket information on the Revs Institute, one should visit their website at www.revsinstitute.org.  And an oddball technical fact we left out:  Cotal's preselector gearbox offered the same 4 gear ratios running forward as well as in reverse, so a Delahaye could easily have won any race run backwards...

Photo Credits:

1 & 2:  Paul Anderson

3:  The Revs Institute

4-9:  Paul Anderson

10:  Ian Avery-De Witt\

11 & 12:  Paul Anderson

13:  Wikimedia

14, 16, 17, 19 & 20:  Ian Avery-De Witt

15 & 18, 21-23:  Paul Anderson