trains, coal, and ethanol

Today I learned that it's 3.7 miles from Posta Quemada to Three Bridges and that one of the bridges is a train bridge. As a side-effect, I learned that besides doing the same work as lots and lots of trucks, trains smell like lots and lots of trucks, and I could have used that charcoal mask I left in the car because who the heck worries about traffic on the Arizona Trail? I still got to follow the trail under the train trestle between trains, where instead of regular reddish to whitish rocks, the rocks were coal. So I got a lump of coal, and only three months late.

In newspaper news, ethanol may be good for driving up corn prices and increasing starvation-driven illegal immigration, but it's apparently not good for reducing air pollution, unless you give points for it being a renewable resource. Since I got blown out of town twice this winter, I'm not handing out points until somebody comes up with something that doesn't blow me out of town, except I got to see a Titan missile, which you have to admit is a pretty good consolation prize.