The Air Force Academy

Wednesday, July 29, 2015

The USAFA resides on over 18,000 acres of land with beautiful views of the Rocky Mountains. It has a huge variety of outdoor athletic fields along with educational buildings and two very long dorms. There is also thousands of acres of trees for fostering wild life and providing field training areas.

After driving an area open to the public with over views of different parts of the campus, we parked at the visitor center to see the movie about life at the academy as well as visit the museum area and take the guided walk to the chapel. 

It was interesting to discover that presently the superintendent of the school is a woman - the first one in that position after 18 men.

Pictures and displays told the story of the Academy - its creation, goals, and so forth.  Frank was interested to see this picture of the original buildings in Denver used by students before this campus was built.  He lived in them about a year and a half later while stationed in that area.

But by far the best part of the visit is seeing the gorgeous chapel which sits on a huge raised mall area from which you can see the mall below with dorms on two sides and educational buildings at the end and a plane on each corner of the grass mall.

The chapel itself has four different worship areas 

The largest is the protestant one that holds seating for 1200

Its stained glass windows progress from dark to quite light going from the back to the front - the emphasis being on the light at the worship end.

In the second pew from the front is a very tall candle (it can be seen above) representing those military presently being held as prisoners of war.  The huge organ with all its pipes is visible at the back in the balcony

The huge cross at the front leans slightly forward and is held in place by wires so it won't sway

Below this chapel is the Catholic chapel

with the stations of the cross between each of the narrow stained glass side windows yet intermingled with the glass

It too has a pipe organ in a balcony

In this lower level there are two other much smaller chapels - one for the Jews

with this center piece in the worship area that represents the ten commandments with the first two Hebrew words of each in the circles

And nine paintings on gold leaf backgrounds portraying qualities each person should have (the gold leaf makes them each worth over a million dollars)

Very near by is the smallest of the chapels - one for Buddhists

A huge mall area with memorial statues of people and planes is on the outside (here is Frank standing by one of the ones for participants in WWI)

with several additional buildings for administration and cafeteria 

At the far end was this glass building shaped like the tail of a plane that is still in the process of being built

and behind it another building that included a cafeteria for the students and guests.  We decided to take advantage of it and have lunch while we were there.  This sign was inside giving artists drawings of the new building

By the time we finished touring the temperatures were dropping the winds picking up and sky getting very dark so we decided to head back to the campground. But first after several errors in turns that put us at security posts we finally found the overlook of the football stadium.  Unfortunately it was so far away it was hard to get a very good picture.

There Bette and I had fun playing several different games well into the evening.