All of the features that you point out do make it quite clean and easy to load. I visited on a desktop and in that visitor mode the reader sees a wide bar of r

All of the features that you point out do make it quite clean and easy to load. I visited on a desktop and in that visitor mode the reader sees a wide bar of rock on each side of a compressed text field amounting to ~60% of the screen width. The story is told in the remaining ~40% of the screen between the two grey bars on the rock border. Inside that ~40%, the actual text field uses ~2/3 of the width to tell the story and deliver the photos, etc. Only ~25% of the screen width is used to tell the story and as a result the user spends a lot of time scrolling through the story unnecessarily. Making effective use of screen real estate wasn't one of the things the site is optimized for. All that noted, it is still quite worth reading the story. The author has included a long bibliography of sources at the end and the story, though repetitious in spots, ends up being believable as he has related it.