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Beat the rush and put for your U.S. passport now on the supposition that you’re planning on traveling out of the rustic in the next year.

There could subsist a surge of passport applicants in winter and resiliency, thanks to a new U.S. law. As of June 1, 2009, all travelers returning to the United States from Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean and Bermuda

Unlike after this, the new law means Americans won’privately be able to head to Vancouver, B.C., and use just a driver’s license and birth certificate as ID when driving across the U.S.-Canada confine.

From it being so that until the end of the year is traditionally when the fewest Americans apply for passports, uttered Trip Atkins, assistant regional director of the Seattle Passport Agency. It takes about three weeks (or fewer) to breed a pass in the next few months.

Next year, getting a passport could take longer, especially as the June 1 deadline nears. Applications for passports are expected to swell over the next year to greater degree than 18 million nationwide, said Atkins, from about 16 the multitude for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30.

More processing staff has been added, said Atkins, so travelers won’t face the months-long delays in getting passports that occurred last year. Those long serenaders came after the first part of the U.S. law, called the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, took effect in early 2007 and required passports for American air travelers re-entering the U.S. from Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean and Bermuda.

With the tougher identification requirement for land/sea travel now approaching, here’s a look at ID options:

Passport

What: A safeguard (formally called a “passport book”) is the gold standard for crossing borders, proving the pair U.S. citizenship and identification.

The moral qualities: A passport is internationally recognized for travel worldwide

The bad: Passport fees can add up, especially instead of families. A first-time safeguard is $100 against an ripe, $85 for a babe under 16. (An adult passport is valid for 10 years, a child’s for five years.)

How to put: Get details and forms at www.travel.state.gov/passport/ or phone 877-487-2778. First-time applicants and children under 16 mould apply in person at a passport acceptance facility; there are 9,000 athwart the abiding habitation, including at express offices, libraries and local command offices. Find them by ZIP code at http://iafdb.travel.state.gov.

Passport card

What: The U.S. passport card is a cheaper, limited alternative to a traditional passport, valid for land and sea travel only between Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative countries (the U.S. and Canada, Mexico, Caribbean and Bermuda). The U.S. started issuing the passport card in July.

The good: A passport card is cheaper than a safeguard, $45 because an adult (valid because of 10 years) and $35 on account of a child less than 16 (valid for five years). It’s also portable, resembling a driver’s lawlessness. Travelers who want the convenience of both a passport and a safeguard card have power to get one for just $20 whenever applying during the term of a passport.

The bad: A safeguard card cannot be used for a single some international atmospheric air travel and isn’t valid beyond the Western Hemisphere initiative countries.

How to apply: Like the passport, the passport card is issued by the State Department: or 877-487-2778.

Washington enhanced driver license

What: This extraordinary state-issued driver’s license (and a similarly-enhanced Washington State ID card) be possible to be used to cross U.S. land and sea borders. It works as proof of identity and U.S. citizenship; advice is embedded in a radio tag that’s read at border stations, like passports and pass cards.

The good: It costs just $15 other thing than a standard driver’s give a permit, and you need to carry only one writing.

The bad: The enhanced license can’t be used for between nations flights or beyond the Western Hemisphere initiative countries.

How to apply: It’s issued by the Washington State Department of Licensing. Proof of U.S. citizenship and Washington residency is required; www.dol.wa.gov/driverslicense or 866-520-4365.

Children’s ID, Nexus cards

Groups of teens aged 16 to 18, when traveling as part of a school, sports, religious or other group under adult supervision, also can use just birth certificates or naturalization certificates being of the class who ID at land/sea border crossings. However, all children must have passports for international deportment travelling.

www.cbp.gov/xp/cgov/take a journey/.

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WASHINGTON

I be erect athwart the rush of conservative ship-jumpers of every streak

First, I’ll have no truck with the phony case ginned up to rationalize voting by a view to the most liberal and inexperienced presidential nominee in living memory. The “irregular” temperament issue, for example. As if McCain’s risky and unsuccessful but in not any way unreasonable attempt to tactically maneuver his way through the economic tsunami that came crashing down a month agone renders unfit for office a individual who demonstrated the most admirable equanimity and courage in the face of unimaginable pressures as a captive of war, and who later steadily navigated not to be counted challenges and setbacks, not the least of which was the collapse of his campaign regular a year ago.

McCain the “erratic” is a cheap Obama talking aim. The 40-year record testifies to McCain the brave.

Nor will I countenance the “dirty campaign” pretense. The double upright here is deafening. Obama ran a scurrilous Spanish-language ad falsely associating McCain with anti-Hispanic slurs. Another ad falsely claimed McCain supports “cutting Social Security benefits in half.” And because months Democrats insisted that McCain sought 100 years of war in Iraq.

McCain’s critics are offended that he raised the issue of William Ayers. What’session astonishing is that Obama was himself not offended by William Ayers.

Moreover, the most remarkable of all tactical choices of this discernment season is the storm that never was. Out of extreme (and unnecessary) conscientiousness, McCain refused to raise the legitimate issue of Obama’s most egregious association

The case for McCain is straightforward. The fiscal crisis has made us forget, or just blindly deny, how dangerous the world out there is. We have a generations-long struggle with Islamic jihadism. An apocalyptic soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. A nuclear-armed Pakistan in danger of fragmentation. A rising Russia pushing the limits of revanchism. Plus the sure-to-come Falklands-like take off one’s guard popping out of nowhere.

Who do you want answering that phone at 3 a.m.? A one who’s been cramming on these issues for the last year, who’sitting never had to make an charged with execution decision moving so a great deal of as a city, let unaccompanied the world? A foreign-policy novice instinctively inclined to the flabbiest, most vaporous multilateralism (e.g., the Berlin Wall came in a descending course because of “a universe that stands as one”), and who refers to the most deliberate play parts of war since Pearl Harbor as “the calamity of 9/11,” a term more appropriate for a bus accident?

Or do you want a man who is the most prepared, most knowledgeable, most serious foreign-policy thinker in the United States Senate? A man who not and nothing else has the best instincts, but has the honor and the intrepidity to, yes, put country first, as whenever he carried the lonely fight in the place of the surge that turned Iraq from catastrophic conquer into achievable strategic victory?

There’s just no comparison. Obama’s own running mate warned this week that Obama’s youth and inexperience will invite a crisis

And how will he pass it? Well, for what cause has he fared upon the body the only two significant foreign-policy tests he has faced as he’sitting been in the Senate? The first was the surge. Obama failed spectacularly. He not single opposed it. He tried to denigrate it, stop it and, finally, deny its success.

The sixtieth part of a minute test was Georgia, to which Obama responded instinctively with evenhanded ideal equivalence, urging restraint steady both sides. McCain did not have to consult his advisers to instantly identify the aggressor.

Today’sitting housekeeping crisis, like every other in our history, will in interval pass. But the barbarians will still be at the gates. Whom do you destitution on the breastwork? I’m for the guy who can tell the lion from the lamb.

letters@charleskrauthammer.com

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WASHINGTON

Never mind that your presidential candidate is sinking in the polls while your president plumbs historic depths of popular scorn and your free market squeals for intervention while your Wall Street investments evaporate. You are not just happier than the other guys, but more of you are happy, according to new survey results published Thursday by the Pew Research Center.

The pollsters were in the field asking about happiness this month, when economic news was gloomy for everybody and presidential campaign news seemed especially baleful for Republicans. Yet they found 37 percent of Republicans are “very happy,” compared with 25 percent of Democrats; 51 percent of Republicans and 52 percent of Democrats are “pretty happy”; and 9 percent of Republicans are “not too happy,” compared with 20 percent of Democrats.

The partisan happiness gap

“I’m very happy,” said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, and a Republican. “When I was 12, I realized the world was not organized around my desires and wishes. The problem with guys on the left is they never figured that out at age 12. And they’re just irritated the world is not organized around their vision. This makes them grumpy.”

Chris Lehane doesn’t sound grumpy. The Democratic consultant is on the phone from San Francisco: “My guess is if [Pew] checked the cross tabs out in California, we’re all pretty happy out here. The wine is still good, the food is fresh, the people are beautiful.”

But seriously, Lehane said, if Republicans are more happy, it’s because they care less.

“The typical Republican is happy coming home to a 62-inch television, pulling out a fine bottle of cognac or scotch, putting his feet on the table and enjoying the fruits of his labor, but not caring what’s going on in the world outside their living room … and their gated community.”

Government-funded researchers identified the happiness gap in 1972. Democrats since have been comparatively more bummed out not just during the tenures of GOP presidents Ford, Reagan, Bush and Bush. They were noticeably less joyful than Republicans even during the GOP fiasco of Watergate and during the Democratic Carter and Clinton administrations.

This year, when things seem so rosy for Democrats, the joy gulch yawns wider than ever. The fraction of very happy Republicans never has been so much larger than the very happy Democrats.

The Republicans’ secret?

“They have more money,” Paul Taylor, director of the Pew Social & Demographic Trends project, writes in the new report. “They have more friends. They are more religious. They are healthier. They are more likely to be married. They like their communities better. They like their jobs more. They are more satisfied with their family life. They like the weather better.”

How many construction cranes did you count the last time you drove from one side downtown Seattle or downtown Bellevue? Ten? Twelve? More?

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Count them though you can.

The credit crunch and related economic woes are drying up the development pipeline in the region’sitting two commercial hubs. More than couple dozen projects are on hold, many because developers say they can’t borrow money to build.

The slowdown is hard to see amid the forest of new office, condo and apartment towers under shape in the two downtowns. But work on many of those buildings began in 2006, before the first glimmerings of crisis. Most will be finished by means of the end of next year.

As those cranes come prostrate, fewer new ones will go up. Even now they are in a less degree numerous than made up of many company had anticipated.

In early 2007, the Downtown Seattle Association identified 10 projects as the next wave of downtown development, projects that were “permitted and scheduled for construction.”

Nearly two years later, four of those projects still haven’t shaken ground. A fifth, the troubled 1 Hotel & Residences, started at that time stopped, leaving a deep hole at the prominent nonplus of Second Avenue and Pine Street.

“It’s a different world now,” says Seattle land-use economist Matthew Gardner. “The banks have enclose their doors.”

Financing, or be wanting of it, isn’t the only deterrent to newly come development. Pre-sales at many of the downtown condo projects already under construction are dragging. Office-vacancy rates are starting to climb as companies downsize and new buildings come on rope. Construction costs have shot through the roof.

“This is a veritable good time to do nothing,” says LeisureCare holder and CEO Daniel Madsen. His company put the brakes on a proposed 30-story retirement community in Seattle’session Denny Triangle after all the rest winter, sensing waning buyer demand.

Other developers obtain reached the same completion. Altogether, at least 4,000 condo or apartment units and 3 million square feet of office space in downtown Seattle and downtown Bellevue have been delayed, or worse. Contractors say the slowdown will despicable less work for them and the people they busy.

Many of the stalled projects wish key permits. Some were supposed to break ground months ago.

Now added are being redesigned. Other developers have put their properties up for market. Still more are blameless tarrying for better times.

A friendly admissions interview involves asking questions as well as answering them. Here’s in what plight to be prepared

By Dan Macsai

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During every business-school admissions interview, there’s a moment where the tables turn. Usually, it’sitting present the cessation, after you’ve been probed ("What sets you apart?") and prodded ("How was the workforce?"), and you’re ready to head home. "So," the interrogator chirps, "do you have anything to ask me?"

This is, of turn, an optional request. But it’s also every suitable to think an impression, or blow your chances, says Randall Sawyer, director of admissions at Cornell University’s Johnson School of Business. "You have to be prepared," says Sawyer. While asking smart, informed questions can set you apart, soliciting information that’sitting readily available on a school’sitting Web site ("What’s your class size?") might irritate your interviewer.

What constitutes a "good" question? BusinessWeek recently spoke with several private consultants and deans of admission, all of whom recommended a variety of questions. Following are a selection, and some tips onward how to ask them. And tax the memory with, these are ordinary guidelines; the most affecting inquiries are case-specific.

What to ask deans, board members, and other officials:

In your opinion, what really sets this school apart?

Officials know this is every important study, especially if you’re choosing betwixt multiple schools. To win points, Sawyer suggests prefacing your question with some original thought (e.g., "I’ve read that Professor X just received the Nobel prize" or "As an entrepreneur, I was impressed with your ‘Fund My StartUp Program"). Otherwise, you may get the retort: "Well, what behave you think sets this school apart?”

Can you talk a little about the student piece of work search?

When you’re relating to to drop $100,000-plus on an MBA, you’re entitled to ask about career prospects, especially for the period of the rife financial crisis. But tread carefully, says Chioma Isiadinso, the CEO of Expartus, an admissions consulting gathering. Putting one official on the site ("Can your instruct find me a job?") is awkward and offputting. Before you broach the subject, show heat of imagination ("I’ve heard prominent things about your alumni network") and emphasize that you’re willing to be proactive.

For students, current and former:

How have you most benefitted from attending this school?

This motion is crucial, especially if the interviewer pursued your compression into a small compass. According to Sawyer, it shows that you’re "in the resolute, and interested in good fortune." Be uneasy with phrasing, though: "How have you chiefly benefitted?" is much more winning (and much less skeptical) than "Have you benefitted?"

What was your favorite rank? Who were your favorite professors?

O.K., these two are pretty obvious. But they’re still good bets, says Dawna Clark, boss of admissions at Tuck School of Business. Students (and preceding students) love to impart wisdom, especially with like-minded interviewees. Give them time to sparkle, and everyone wins: They’ll get to relive a positive academic experience, and you’ll pick up some inside information.

What’s a emblematic day like?

Beyond engaging your interviewer, this question shows you superintendence about more than academic factoids, says Linda Abraham, president of Accepted.com, some online hub for college counseling. After every part of, you’re applying for an experience. It’s solely human to caution about the little things, like when and where you’ll eat, sleep, learn, and let loose.

For anyone:

Is there anything else I can further address?

This should be your final question, says Beth Flye, the assistant dean and director of admissions at . It’s proactive, it’s accommodating, and it’s a great way to hint that you’re eager to attend (as opposed to, say, asking at the time that you’ll get your acceptance letter). Also, on the off-chance that you made a mistake on your application, this request could spawn a shot at redemption.

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Boeing and the Machinists concurrence plan a fourth twenty-four hours of meetings Sunday in efforts to end the strike that has idled 27,000 union members since Sept. 6.

A narrative on the Local 751 website Saturday evening said, “Union negotiators continued meeting with the federal mediators and Company negotiators throughout Saturday and into the evening with supplemental talks scheduled for Sunday.”

The company and incorporation have agreed not to disclose details of their talks.

A previous round of negotiations began Oct. 13 but broke away for just two days.

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“Cobain Unseen,” Charles R. Cross’ “illustrated biography” of Kurt Cobain (Little Brown, 159 pp., $35) in bookstores Monday, is a deeply personal, tangible, equal visceral examination of the late, troubled Seattle protection star.

Through his artworks and writings, you can see — and, thanks to the many facsimile pullouts, unruffled feel — tangible evidence of the mental and natural trouble that plagued Cobain from end to end his short life. Suicide was part of his personality from adolescence, the book shows in quotes and writings, so that when he finally does it (in 1994, when his ligament, Nirvana, was at the height of its fame and popularity), it seems almost inevitable.

The gut aches and back pains he suffered most of his life are played gone out in drawings and collages of raw meat, bones, skeletons and doll parts; his alienation and escapism are seen in drawings of spindly aliens and references in his writings (including his suicide note) to his imaginary friend, Boddah; the heart-shaped boxes he collected and turned into sagacity objects, mostly as gifts for his wife, Courtney Love, seem to prefigure his empty heart and unfulfilled desire for unconditional love.

But the most moving and heartbreaking elements of “Cobain Unseen” are the multitude personal photos, most of which have never been published before. The childhood snapshots of the cute, towheaded, strikingly blue-eyed Cobain show a seemingly expert boy, especially the person where he’session at an easel he got on account of his 8th birthday, copying the hide of a comic book called “Giant-Sized Werewolf # 4.”

The first time I talked to him, before Nirvana stardom fell down in succession him, Cobain told me he was greater degree of an consummate performer than a musician. This book makes that readily ostensible, as Cobain continued his artwork until his death — even his suicide note be able to be construed as an artwork.

The childhood photos of Cobain are matched in cuteness by those of his baby girl, Frances Bean Cobain. The few photos in the volume that seem to ostentation a content adult Cobain are the ones with him and his infant.. And you wonder, in what condition could he ever allowance such a graceful child?

“That’s certainly one of the questions I ask myself,” Cross responded in every e-mail interview, “though it does give me a little more understanding of how troubled he was with his own demons. He clearly loved that kid, and even the photos of Kurt and Courtney indicate a kind of tenderness not seen in previous photos.

“Anyone who understands and knows someone who suffers from addiction — and of behavior we all comprehend those folks — knows how cohesive this all is.”

Cross is the only biographer given admission, by Cobain’s estate, to his effects, stored in a Seattle warehouse. Cross used much of the material when writing “Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain,” the definitive biographical writings, published in 2001.

But the passage in “Cobain Unseen” isn’t a rewrite of Cross’ earlier book.

“It’s not meant to be a main division about new revelations,” Cross explained, “but I think in that place is a commencing angle on many of Kurt’session creative accomplishments. Actually, I did about a dozen new interviews for the book, and used a fair amount of stuff I wasn’t able to fit into ‘HTH.’

“But, of run after, I couldn’t make the story arc any different. It’s the same life. He’s born in Aberdeen; he dies in Seattle. I did, yet, this present life focus in succession the creative work. This is not a biography of Kurt, the man; it is a bio of his practical knowledge, and that reflects different focus and attention.

“The text is all new, but obviously in that place are many points in ‘HTH’ that are going to be the same. The newest stuff, however, comes in fact in the last chapter or so, which reveals quite a tittle of new stuff about Kurt’s last days. Creepy stuff. I, however, didn’t want that to overwhelm the rest of the main division, so I didn’t make that chapter longer than the others.”

A CD that comes with the book includes spoken-word material read by Cobain, as well in the same manner with some parley through Cross about his research against the book.

Cross said he got everything he wanted into “Cobain Unseen,” except for a photo of a naked Love, taken by means of Cobain.

“I thought she looked great, but she didn’t think so,” Cross wrote in his e-mail. “She obviously had the right to axe that. Nothing else about the work did she critic or ask to change.”

Cross was surprised to find several rolls of latent film among Cobain’s movables. Love told him she didn’t want to call on the photos right after Cobain died, but she and Cross had the rolls developed, and many of the photos appear in the book.

“Some of the photos in this book were never seen by anyone other than the photographer through the lens, and at times that was Kurt himself,” Cross wrote in the e-mail conference. “That fact amazed me.”

Patrick MacDonald: 206-464-2312 or pmacdonald@seattletimes.com

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At the dusty Hardiwar train degree in the foothills of India’s Himalayas, passengers be able to pervert with money a prime of day newspaper, sip a steaming cup of chai and bear some enthusiastic ear-cleaning by the station’s earwax wallah.

With other thing than 7,000 train stations, and customers taking 5 billion trips annually, India has one of the universe’s largest railway networks. To subserve the passengers, there is a haphazard legion of scrawny porters to carry bulky bags, shoe-shiners who will brilliance flip-flops and, aye, earwax cleaners.

At 10:15 a.m. one morning, Mr. Wax Wallah, as he is known, removes a giant swab of cotton-wool from the folds of his red turban. He hooks the cotton onto a stick and roams the station, vocation out: “Ears cleaned in this place!”

Some less-scrupulous ear-cleaners have been known to pretend to birch a cotton swab into the head of an unsuspecting pretended customer and reveal it coated in a dirty, waxlike goo. The soiled swab becomes Exhibit A for the wax-cleaner’s matter in hand that the potential customer is in desperate need of a thorough cleaning, which costs the equivalent of 25 cents.

But Mr. Wax Wallah has a stellar reputation and skilled hands. He says he has never faked the need for a cleaning or punctured an eardrum.

Western tourists visiting Haridwar to acquire skill in yoga or meditate seem relieved when the followers arrives at 10:45 a.m. — just 40 minutes late. It’session chugging along to New Delhi, about a six-hour journey through half-built towns filled with explanation sites and hulking cows napping beneath the bamboo scaffolding.

“There’s an old-school charm to the Indian train experience,” said Anshu Mala, 48, whose family lives most of the year in Gaithersburg, Md. She was vacationing in Haridwar, an ancient city where Hindu pilgrims come to pray and conduct funeral rites near the banks of the Ganges River. “I love the train, because you don’t have to have being in a trifle. You be possible to think.”

Mala is craving the train’s coffee and vegetable cutlets. But it’s in addition early for lunch, so she settles into her cubby, in the second-class air-conditioned section. It is cozy and has small worn-out cushioned bunk beds facing a smudged window. There is likewise a curtain for privacy. Indian trains usually have three classes, eddish. with its own degree of personal space, gladden and chaos.

On this body of attendants, many of the poorer passengers squeeze into the third-class division, which has only a small in number seats — all made of wood. Most passengers are forced to stand, leaning on one any other and creating a swollen knot of arms and legs.

Many passengers carry foam mattresses and cooking pots because they sleep outside to not including money while visiting one of Hinduism’s holiest cities. A journey to Haridwar is being of the class who sacred as a Muslim’session take a tour to Mecca or a Catholic’sitting tour to the Vatican. After praying for sick loved ones or performing funeral rituals, members of many families sit silently during the ride back to Delhi.

Young men, their heads recently shaved in a Hindu ritual of mourning, rest their bald scalps in compensation for the windows. Some cry as they look out over the scene of Indian life: women in saris hauling loads; unintelligent Hindu temples with marigold-draped deities; and plant markets, where stray dogs sniff the tomatoes and onions.

The biggest complaint about India’s trains is the bathrooms. “Let’s just say the toilets are not really up to the mark and leave it at that,” laments Sanjeev Sharma, 45, an engineer who finds the train “cheap and unhygienic. But I like it anyway.”

Train ridership has been going up as expansion and fuel prices have tightened budgets.

Safety considerations superadd to the train’s seek reference of the case: Long car trips in India are seen as risky because very not many people obey traffic rules and because the country has one of the universe’s highest accident rates.

REPUBLIC, Ferry County — As the line of horses and riders ambled up a hillside through sunny aspens, Ponderosa pines and wild currant blushing with the first chill of fall of the year, our group of incorporated town slickers felt more and more like characters in a Western movie.

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Like, maybe, “City Slickers.” Or, at that particular moment, “Blazing Saddles.” To be particular: the campfire scene.

Yes, that scene.

The thing was, human being of our horses — Val, a plus-size gal, part draft horse and part quarter horse — had a reputation by reason of being, uh, windy. And the make effort of climbing up toward a rocky promontory where we’d look out over the purple hills surrounding the pretty Sanpoil River dingle seemed to set off her, er, problem.

And, in some things, there’s non-existence subtle encircling horses.

“Geez, I’ve got rocket propulsion!” howled Mark, the 30-year-old marketing consultant from Seattle who rode Val during a three-day stay at the K Diamond K Guest Ranch in this ancient gold-mining district of far Eastern Washington.

“You know, I do purify to match the horse’s allusion with the rider, but I crave you to know I didn’cheek by jowl mean anything that way,” apologized Clay McDermott, our 19-year-old trail guide — known in authentic ranch lingo as the wrangler.

I tried to decide whether I should be flattered for being given a stately Appaloosa named Dutch, who liked to take the lead on the trail, or humbled by his determination to try to eat every darned free, blade and blade of grass in reach along every blasted step of a ride. (I’hodge-podge trying to cut down put put on snacking.)

For city folks, a few days without interruption a ranch is a great method to become back to basics.

And while death on the gallows right and left a barn can at a past period bring a tear to your watch for reasons other than sentiment, this scenic ranch country also offers moments of breathing pine-scrubbed air on hilltops where the only sound is the “skreee! skreee!” of a circling hawk, of clapping forward to banjo music at the edge of a campfire, of finding time to toss a dauntless of horseshoes or try twirl a lasso.

With those kinds of “up” sides to a ranch vacation, the other stuff doesn’t mean beans.

Home on the ranch

The K Diamond K isn’t a fancy resort. It’s the home of the Konz family, headed through 82-year-old Steve Konz and his 74-year-old wife, June Konz, who moved from the dank espouse a cause of the mountains to lightly populated Ferry County in the early 1960s. Here they started a 1,600-acre cattle ranch and raised five kids. June has a veterinary practice, still operating on the ranch.

As children grew up and moved out, they began vexation in guests to help keep the ranch going. Visitors stayed in supernumerary bedrooms in the ranch house. The oldest son, Dave, moved into a cabin on the characteristic, and in 2002 started building the nearest big thing for the Konz line of ancestors: a guest lodge.

The K Diamond K opened 8 of the 16 visitor rooms this summer in the new lodge, situated a few century feet from the family home. Built of peeled logs of fir and larch cut on the ranch, and constructed mostly by family and friends, the lodge is a masterpiece of rural workmanship. Rustic particulars range from forked-timber balcony railings to decorated through inlaying made of wood horseshoes in the stairs, complemented by elegantly gleaming wither floors. Twin stone fireplaces flank the lobby and dining room.

“This is just gorgeous, I didn’t expect anything this beautiful — the ambience is in the same manner as a storybook!” said Arlene Sullivan, a visitor from Honolulu, on her first visit to a dude ranch.

“I went out and divide every tree,” related Dave Konz, 44, a bearded bear of a man with a knack for forging quick friendships.

The ranch operates on the “American prepare,” meaning that for $150 per night per person, you own lodging, three meals a time and all activities, including twice-daily trail rides if you choose.

Buffet meals are eaten at shared tables, which helps guests finish to know each other. I shared my stay with the Sullivans, Jim and Arlene, who had come for a small family reunion with their grown children who live in Seattle. Also staying were a retired German couple, Brigitte and Bernd Göpfert, from Berlin. (Many Germans are fascinated by the American West; this was the third part German couple at the ranch this season.)

Joining guests at meals are the ranch hands — such as William Beier, a 70-something banjo picker from North Dakota who stopped to work in which case “just passing end” — and the Konz family, which makes it feel much less preference a hotel and much more taste a visit with a congenial bunch of relatives.

Don’t expect gourmet. The only lump of matter French might be fries. Steak night (usually Saturdays) brings cuts that are tender and tasty, but other meals tend nearly meatballs with gravy, or tuna casserole topped by potato chips. According to wrangler Clay, who came here to take a break from a college education that wasn’t what he’d hoped for, this is a side of the world where most music on the radio talks about “your gun or your woman.”

And as the cook says in the movie “City Slickers,” the food is “hot, brown and there’s plenty of it!”

It’s a ranch. The real deal.

Saddle up

As we climbed into the saddle at 9 a.contest. on a ancient September morning, the sun was warming air that had carried a hint of frost at dawn. Around the barnyard, the whicker of horses blended with the doodle-do of roosters and the chug of a tractor. Chickens pecked underfoot and barn kitties came up to stretch and be patted, season in a nearby shed baby goats suckled steady their mother.

Clay took a moment to expound one and the other horse’s “operating instructions.” Dutch responds to neck reining or leg difficulty; “Sam is a slow starter, you’ll need to kick at first.” Also in the lineup this set time: Val, Pepper, Cooper, Thorin, Lucy and Big Red.

Along the trail, riders enjoyed an easy camaraderie, with time to chat and joke. As we headed up through an open grass land and I vainly wrestled with Dutch’sitting reins to stop him from grabbing bites of meadow grass, Mark put it in perspective for me: “It’s approve we were walking from one side a field of bacon. You’d want to close up and try some!”

Well, OK, if you incite it that way.

Out here, in great part from the offices of the city, it’s easy to unplug, actually and figuratively. Most guests’ cellphones had no signal here. But as we climbed a superior hill, one rider’sitting phone buzzed in a pocket. Without stopping his stallion, he answered it and proceeded to have a long business conversation with a client in the manner that we rode.

Black-hatted Clay, with a twinkle in his eye, steered us off the trail and up a steep embankment where the horses lunged to find footing.

“Let’s see if we can agitate him off the phone,” he said with an impish tone. “As in, ‘I’m sorry, I’ve got to go, I’m climbing a overhanging rock face!’ “

The old homestead

In the evening, Dave Konz loaded bales steady the back of a flatbed truck and took us for a hayride down the road to visit his family’s original homesite.

“The Little Red Farmhouse” that his people first moved to decades ago, and where Dave lived “until I was about 8,” is none longer in that place. His family donated it to the local fire region for practice years since. “The year just in imitation of the movie ‘Backdraft’ came out, I lit the house attached fire,” Dave told us.

But what corpse are the rustic remnants of a pioneer homestead, complete with the according to the facts two-seater outhouse and the gaping ingress to an old gold sap. (Miners took more than 3 million ounces of gold from Republic-area shafts from the late 1800s until the last commercial mine closed in the 1990s.)

Dave told enjoyment tales of his childhood as bats flitted in and out of the mine opening at twilight.

Back at the lodge, we all sat outside around a bonfire as William picked his banjo and a Konz family confidant, Sid Cowan, strummed a guitar. Amid the salty-sweet smoke of pine logs, we clapped and sang along: “Hang down your head, Tom Doooo-ley!”

Brigitte and Bernd entertained through a Marlene Dietrich song. And we heard more tunes, from George Jones to Woody Guthrie, as first stars gleamed in the sky and the moon rose above the ridge.

Reflecting on years of exert one’s self to build the lair, with times of frustration between moments of accomplishment, Dave Konz looked without ceasing as his friends and guests reveled in melody and companionship.

“This is what it’s all about,” he related through a satisfied smile.

Brian J. Cantwell: 206-748-5724 or bcantwell@seattletimes.com