Earthwalk Day 1110 (5 February 2025), 11,260 km: Owens Valley Radio Observatory

I arrived today at the Leg 38 destination: Owens Valley Radio Observatory.

This facility goes back to 1958, when a 9.8 meter antenna that had been installed at Palomar Mountain was dismantled and rebuilt at Owens Valley along with two new 27.4 m telescopes. Six 10.4 meter dishes were added to the site in the 1980s and 1990s. Research at Owens Valley includes study of a variety of astronomical phenomena.

And Jodie Foster did her dissertation research there. Okay, her character in Contact did.

January, eh. Not a great month for this kind of thing in the best of years. This year we had an accumulation of 107.4 cm of snow, compared to 59.7, 25.9, and 44.7 cm in 2022, 2023, and 2024, and an official normal of 86.4 cm — we’ve had a streak of low snowfall winters, but this winter isn’t looking like it. In fact we had more snow through January 31 than in all last winter.

There was not a day in the entire month where I felt like facing the weather and road conditions on a hybrid bike. There were several days when I didn’t feel like facing them at all, one day where other activities prevented accumulating very many steps, and one day when a sore knee kept me in. In the end it was the worst month of the Earthwalk so far (by a hair) for average daily distance. For average steps it was in a near tie with 2023 and 2024, and slightly behind 2022. The first half of February, to judge from the forecast, isn’t looking a lot better.

I’m about 8 km into Leg 39, starting off going almost due south. Right now I’m in Zurich, which is a lot less interesting than that other Zurich.

A map showing my progress is here, a spreadsheet with progress detail is here, and a Google Earth KMZ file is in this Google Drive folder. Present coordinates: 37.182°N, 118.261°W.