[geodeticman.5]

Char - There is a really, really neat house here in the foothills outside of Golden, Colo., (home of Coors Beer - factory lunchpail town... & college town both.. odd mix - Colo. School of Mines - - hardest Engineering and earthsciences Univ. in Colorado, & mining of course, too).

The house is owned, & designed by a person famous in my field y'all will groan about if I wag on map-wise - so I'll only say what a newspaper-blurb or obit would say about him if - God-forbid, he were to pass. Hal Shelton, inventor of modern (key designation, vs original) method of coulor shaded-relief 3D appearing maps in natural colour as seen on the ground from a somewhat lower flying plane - generally under 20,000 feet - when away from our notorius 52 x 14,000 ft, mtns, anyway....

Well, he was commissioned in WWII to develop , or better said - enhance the method, ofthis type of map - for military lower-flying planes initially, and then NOAA-FAA adopted the method for their series of nav charts for flying - kinds like pictorial color-shaded simulated 3-D from a straight overhead view - as pilots would view the ground. They then can navigate by the ground features when their instruments are out, or they do not have them - (VFR). Like my friend's twin-engine Cessna - we are...scattering ashes from it coming up ...

WELL THE WHOLE POINT - was Mr. Shelton's HOUSE in Golden - tucked a bit up in the foothils. It is astounding..... squared. I have always really liked, dreamed of....mountain homes with natural features built into them. There's a new pop craze among the Aspen - Telluride $$$ celeb and CEO crowd building this way NOW..... but he did it THEN.....

Now, people in Colo. and elsewhere in mountains - affluent areas in any event, will build "Log" homes - understatement - where they will retain firms to supply them with peeled. sanded, soaked with oils to avoid cracking, and varnished - whole tree trunks, spread base and major branches and all, and either build them into the house, or the house around them as the case may be, with immense diameter log/tree - cross members, beams, "trees" in the living room for no -apparent- reason - other than aesthetics sometimes, and, *********Rock Walls********** !!!!

Mr. Shelston's house is a progenitor of the concept to my knowledge, in that he built a house after he grew, uhm, affluent from his maps and scientific illustrations - "blow-ups" of scientific machines in a 'exploded' view - to show the inner workings of say, a new kind of pump or something. This area of his talent made him rich. But first and foremost, he is a schooled cartographer, and his work is in shows regionally, and in libraries at times, and it is staggeringly -wow- quality of hand-rendering. The process of maps has been *automated* by computer programs that do his thing the way he does for nationwide FAA airflight ground maps, but they are really works of art for science.

Back to his house - in adition to the earliest user I've heard of of the now popular "whole trees" in houses - all varnished and smooth, and holding floors up.... again is the stone. He built his house against an immense moss-rock granite cliff-face that was tall . wide, and close to straight up and down. It has some natural mini - sconces in it that act as shelves of sorts, and one that has had an amazing drilling done to form a foreplace chimney-flue from a Bonanza-size fireplace sconce in the rock, repleat with natural rock hearth protruding, and the drilled-down to the fireplace hearth chimney-shaft. Its one of a kind as far as I know.
There are knick-knacks all over the rock wall on little projections, Large paintings of the mountains he did hanging here and there- realize this rock wall is about 20 feet high in the house, on the North cool side, and maybe 30 - 35 feet wide, and forms an entire wall of the house as is.... amazing. The south face of the house is - you guessed it - for passive solar input, tall walls of windows not unlike the house in the thread subject here. That is what made me think of Hal's house. Visinting his house is a sort of *mecca* for every local "serious" cartographer, the equivalent of traveling to Star-fleet academy for Trek-nerds (like me) to see his work.... he is a genius. His house reflects it, too.

How many people can lay-claim to their house having a whole rock small cliff-face as one wall, and entire trees and giant peeled logs built in structurally - with the requisite Navajo blankets and etc. flung over the mezzanine-like 2nd-story level, that opens down to the main "Yellowstone-lodge" living room. Its on a scale thats hard to associate the word house with... When my Dad retired from NASA and built his dream mountain home high-up, he did some of Mr. Shelton's ideas... on a reserved scale.. But he did build a 35 -foot tall moss-rock fireplace-hearth-chimney of indigenous rock from the property....that is to say he retained a mason to do it that specialized. Its pretty cool. Sad he lost the house to medical expense when he incurred unique needs from Parkinson's before he died. But hat house was really neat - fun to spend my senior year of high-school living in - my own mountain behind the house to walk up after school, etc.

Yup some people have some really amazing homes - Char the one you show is beautiful, and made me think of Shelton's from the windows.

I'd shudder to guess what Shelton's would sell for.

Thanks for letting me babble-on , on a fun subject. I want a rock-wall and real tree house some day - for the aesthetics, not the prestige - could not give a rats patoot as Char said, about that.

~geo steve