(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:
A mountainous view that inspired Jack Kerouac in one of his books.
A personal dispatch from the Winter Olympics.
More fun facts about swim-bladders than you expected to read this week.
A cool postcard created by the great A. Dishhead, back from a long hiatus.
Fish farts.
We didn’t have a winner for last week’s tough challenge, since every sleuth who submitted an entry had won the contest already. Remarking on that absence is our super-sleuth in Augusta, GA:
“Somewhere, Earth” would have counted as a winning entry last week — though what “proper” sleuth would want to win like that!
I don’t know if this will be of any interest to anyone else, but the biologist sleuth’s delightful ant-related entry reminded me of an old Onion video of an “anteater expert” — probably since it represents the antithesis of our animal expert’s seemingly boundless enthusiasm for the natural world:
Hope I can rejoin the game soon, since time spent sleuthing is never time wasted!
Here’s the submitter of last week’s view:
Thanks again for running my photo. I was in Bogotá for a week, yet I learned so much from your sleuth correspondents. Also very impressive that so many were able to solve it; I wouldn’t have been able to, if I hadn’t been there.
To the sleuth worried about altitude sickness, I recommend doing what the locals do. At the top of Monserrate amid the souvenir stands are a couple of vendors who sell coca tea — yes, that coca. It gives only about the same amount of buzz you’d get from a similarly sized cup of coffee, but it definitely relieves altitude symptoms.
Does it also help with long days of Dishing on a deadline?
Another followup comes from the A2 Team in Ann Arbor:
Contest #496 was a tough one indeed, and we take some consolation in realizing we were not the only ones frustrated. The video surveillance sign in the foreground had pointed us to a Spanish-speaking country; South America was kind of obvious; and the car with a yellow license plate at the far right of the photo suggested we were in Colombia — and then? The only thing to go on was the high-rise building at the center, and when we didn’t see it in Bogotá, we searched up and down Medellín, which has hundreds of high-rise buildings … but not this one.
Oh well. At least, we were closer than with Casablanca.
From the super-sleuth on Park Avenue:
I had to laugh at last week’s gas pumping discussion. My wife has a “Jersey Girls Don’t Pump Gas” coffee mug and has definitely driven roundtrips through the Holland Tunnel to get gas. You can take the girl out of Jersey but …
Speaking of gas stations, on to this week’s view — from our super-sleuth in Malvern, PA:
Not as impossible as it seemed at first, when contemplating 5,000 Valero gas stations. But 2,000 of those are in Texas, and this is not Texas!
The Rockies? No native insights for an East Coast guy like me, so time to consult the handy “Find a Station” page on Valero’s website and apply some brute force. No luck running down the close-to-the-mountains locations along the Colorado Rockies, from Fort Collins to Colorado Springs, so then it was across to the Sierras … but then the northeast snowstorm takes out the internet..........
Probably a good thing to get the mind and snow cleared, then coming back quickly leads to the Valero station in [town redacted] with a hotel and its grassy field nearby.
Speaking of that snowstorm, here’s the view from the UWS super-sleuth:
Mother Nature isn’t kidding around!
Our super-sleuth in Sagaponack adds:
As was our luck, we had to ski through two blizzard-y days in Telluride only to have to travel home while missing a picture-perfect, fresh-snow day … and now welcoming a huge blizzard in NYC. Definitely first-world problems, but still :)
A bigger problem befell our super-sleuth in Brookline:
Our blizzardy nor’easter didn’t bring Brookline a crazy amount of snow, but it did bring down a tree in our parking lot that landed on the trunk of my car. Between that and a host of other headaches, my bandwidth is greatly diminished this week.
Ugh, best of luck with the insurance process. Back to gas stations, here’s the architectural super-sleuth in NYC:
Well, there are no famous architects from [town redacted], or buildings of note located there. Lake Tahoe isn’t too far away, but we already discussed Mountain Modern houses and Faulkner Architects when the VFYW was in Truckee, CA.
So this week I thought I’d switch it up a bit. Since two of the last three contests, as well as some earlier ones, have prominently featured gas stations, I thought it would be interesting to see if any have been designed by well-known architects. It turns out there have been a few.
First, last week a Vancouver sleuth wrote: “Readers will notice (or not) that Shell now relies solely on their logo and color scheme to identify their stations. Their name is unmentioned on their signage... Such is the power of a 120-year-old brand.” It turns out they’re just reverting to form. Here’s a signless Shell station from 1930:
I guess it isn’t surprising that several of the gas stations designed by notable architects kind of look like miniature versions of their larger projects.
And then there are the gas stations designed by unknown architects in historical styles:
Too bad there aren’t more interestingly designed gas stations dotting the landscape.
Back to the UWS:
Well, my original guess this week was Bum Fuck, Egypt. (Not sure where I even got that term, but it popped out from the deep recesses of my brain.) I decided to expend a bit more effort after my initial impression, and I started with Valero gas stations. I was quite surprised to see that there aren’t any in the Northwest that immediately came to my mind when I saw this View. I did some searching on mountain ranges in states with Valero stations, and the best I could come up with was Taos, New Mexico.
But the contest just visited New Mexico a few weeks ago, so I’m thinking I’m likely dead wrong. Maybe we’re in the Northeast. Perhaps Vermont or a nearby state. But one guess to a customer, so I’m sticking with Taos.
P.S. Sorry to hear that you were having a crappy week; hope it’s gotten better. I do share your delight in seeing a postcard from A. Dishhead. Can’t believe it’s been two years.
The crappiness hasn’t abated much, but A. Dishhead serves up a full postcard this week, so that definitely helped a little. Here’s the view from Chini:
The Intrepid Couch Traveler throws a dart at La Veta, Colorado:
So, I’ve noticed that my contributions have generally appeared down in the heart of the VFYW write-ups. Well that’s about to change, because I’m one of the WAGs this week; I have little to no clue.
So instead, I give you a secret peek into the den of inadequacy, and the top secret protocol for determining this week’s answer:
LOL. From our previous winner in South Jersey:
Hope you’re digging out of the snow ok (again!). I started this contest when it came out on Friday and then got incredibly busy; I’m a psychotherapist but also a former professional musician preparing to play my first show in over 20 years in NYC next week! Bananas.
Anyhow, for this week’s view I have a pretty wild guess, based on a hunch and a very quick search for images of yellow buildings near mountains and overhead wiring: Orem, Utah? I think maybe it’s Mt. Timpanogos back there.
Congrats! On the show, that is — you’re totally off with the VFYW :)
Our super-sleuth in San Mateo is also stumped this week:
Last week’s VFYW was particularly difficult, so wasn’t this week supposed to be easier? I spent a lot of time unsuccessfully looking for the house in the foreground, so let’s make it this week’s Reimagined:
Or perhaps we should strip this challenge down to pure mountain morphology:
Left cluster:
Jagged but not needle-like
Layered, blocky cliff bands
Light-colored rock
Looks sedimentary
Several stepped buttresses
Center massif:
Rounded, broad dome
Heavy snow coverage
Forested lower slopes
Transitional between cliffy and smooth
Right ridge:
Long continuous face
Strong diagonal avalanche gullies
Very planar snow slopes
No sharp spires
And the manufactured house, nearby buildings, and the Valero station distract from the natural beauty of the mountains. So let’s eliminate the distractions:
Come to think of it, the trees and brush don’t add much either, so let’s remove them too:
Or, if you miss the house:
Our previous winner in Sherman Oaks names the right mountain range:
At first I thought there were no clues except for the mountain range in the background and a Valero gas station. Lucky for me, there aren’t many Valero stations north of Colorado and none in Canada and Alaska, which narrowed my search for remote Valeros at the base of a mountain range. I clicked off about a half-dozen in Colorado. I searched Washington and Oregon and thought maybe those are not the Rockies, but could be the Sierra Nevada.
He eventually got to the right town and motel, as did our super-sleuth in Oklahoma City known as “the a-maize-ing sleuth”:
Let me first compliment the color palette of the view: the siding of the house caught the low-angle winter sun, giving out an a-maize-ing, warm, golden glow, against a clean, dry, high-altitude blue sky. It’s as if a Midwestern landscape has been put in front of a Rockies backdrop.
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