Maybe the driver was so unused to seeing a person on crossing the street that he assumed I was an incorporeal ghost. Or he was drunk.
There's no need to walk.
Jeep's "Borrow Ditch Advantage" option is available only from Great Plains dealerships, so it is not well-known to the automotive press.
If you take your finger and place it on a map marking the geographical center of the nation, somewhere above Kansas and below South Dakota, it won’t simply be resting on a blank spot, it will be touching the beating heart of true American wildness; a place of windswept, impossibly vast tableaus, ancient, grass-covered hills, and fast-flying prairie grouse.
I am on a Northern Plains journey night now, with a traverse of the Sandhills planned for the return leg of it. Here is one of several links to earlier crossings: "Self-Advertisement in the Nebraska Sandhills."
I never have spent as much time there as I would have liked, but this video helps to make up for that lack. It's scripted by Oklahoma writer Chad Love for the Pheasants Forever conservation group. You can find more still photos here.
There is public land there too.
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| Hiker looks a rain gauge in an aspen grove | . |
With enough water and nutrients, deciduous trees can produce more leaves, creating denser foliage that offers even more of a spectacle to enthusiastic leaf peepers in the fall.
This year, winter precipitation blanketed Colorado in a deep snowpack, which acts as a vital natural reservoir for the state’s water supply. By May, most of Colorado mountains had an average to above-average snowpack compared with historical records from 1991 to 2020, according to the Natural Resources Conservation Service.
The summer was cooler overall, and some parts of the state even received record rainfall. The state hasn’t seen many of the windy days, cold temperatures and snowfall in aspen stands that all contribute to falling leaves.
“It’s just shaped up to be a fantastic year to get out and see some of the colors in Colorado, and it’s a good year for trees in general in Colorado,” [said Dan West of the Colorado State Forest Service].
With the wind coming in, the northern Colorado aspen leaf season is ending, but you can still see them in parts of southern Colorado into New Mexico.
The orange, yellow, and red scrub leaves are peaking down here, but the Denver-centric media like the Colorado Sun don't mention those!
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| Gusse and Inglis canoeing in Canada (NY Post). |
A friend who sometimes traveled with them said, “Their skill level was extremely high, they were conservative. They took every precaution they possibly could."
Another of the couple's friends said, "“I remember him telling me about camping and how you got to go so far even to pee from your tent. He would tell me all the safety precautions.”
An expended can of bear spray was found at the scene.
Naturally the commenters weigh in on how bear spray is useless and ya gotta have a big 'ol gun in a caliber starting with 4 or 5. Except this is a Canadian national park: "The use of firearms (including pellet guns, bear bangers, bows, sling shots etc.) and hunting are not permitted in Banff National Park." So there is that.
I am not a big bear expert, and I have used pepper spray only on angry dogs (where it worked just fine). But I am reminded of my late brother-in-law Stone Curtois and one of his hogs.
He used to raise a small number of hogs at at time, ten or fifteen, on a little farm in southeastern Missouri, supplementing his main source of income, which was a portable sawmill.
The hog pen was fenced with electric wire, which the animals respected, except for this one. It wanted to break out, he told me, but it knew that the electric fence would "bite."
So it would charge the fence, screaming in pain before it hit the wire. In other words, its commitment to breaking free overruled the pain that it knew was coming.
I've read of various bear attacks, talked with people who used pepper spray on grizzlies successfully, and interviewed one woman who was shaken like a rag doll by an Alaska brown bear but saved by the person in her BLM survey party who had a rifle.
I have noticed that people living in places like Cooke City, Wyoming (adjacent to Yellowstone NP), mow their yards and walk to the store with bear-spray cannisters on their hips.
It seems that bears can be like that Missouri hog: once they stop assessing the situation and commit to an attack, pain won't stop them. But if they are still only assessing, bear spray can be effective.
The 2018 attack on Wyoming hunting guide Mark Uptain and his client seems similar to this recent case: bear spray was used, but the bear (or two) involved were not fazed. Like the hog, the bears had already made up their minds.
It's also indicative that both of those attacks occured in September, when bears are "hyperphagic," as the biologists like to say. In other words, eating eating eating.
As for my brother-in-law, he died in a tree-felling accident. Him, a guy who read logging-supply catalogs for recreation. You can know what you are doing and still have something go wrong, or make that one tiny error.
Liatris blooms in late August. It is a perennial, and its energy-storing coms must have gotten a good soaking in our wet early summer, because I have never seen it thicker on the slope behind the house.
Its message is obvious: this is the last blaze of summer — enjoy it while you can. (Meanwhile, some are impatient for summer to be gone, but that is another story.)
I almost hate to see its blossoms, not only because summer is ending, but because they always take me back to the summer when I turned 36 and the bottom fell out.
M. and I had come to Cañon City, Colo., so that I could work on a friend's start-up magazine, but it failed (as most start-up magazines actually did in the pre-Web era). There we were in our 1910 smelter worker's cottage without enough money to leave town, nor any idea where to go if we did.
The mortgage payment was low, but with her working only part-time and me just selling an occasional freelance article, our finances were tighter than tight.
Our friend Hank stepped in. His family were florists in Pueblo. He had earned a master's in agronomy at Colorado State and worked for a seed company in Idaho breeding peas, but he wanted a change, so he came home and started a wholesale flower business on part of his family's little acreage on St. Charles Mesa (SE side of Pueblo).
It was pretty much a one-man operation -- including the long drives to deliver flowers down the Arksansas River and over into the San Luis Valley -- and sometimes when he had a lot of harvest and prep to do, he hired us as casual labor.
He grew commercial varieties of Liatris, taller than our wildflowers, because they made good cut flowers, with the blossoms opening over several days. Good "vase life," you might say. He always called it "Liatris," so I did too.
Things changed. I thought I was done with newspapers, but took a job at the Cañon City Daily Record that fall. It paid the bills, and overlapped partly with our seasonal job censusing owls for the Bureau of Land Management. I finished the overdue thesis and started teaching part-time, then full time, finally saying goodbye for good to journalism. M. did likewise, teaching at a community college and finding she was good at it.
Hank's marriage ended, and so did the flower business, but he too switched to community college teaching, got a doctorate, and ended up on the biology faculty at Merritt College in Oakland, Calif.
I wonder if he sees any Liatris out there, and if so, what its mental associations are. When I see them, I still get a quick gut-flinch: What am I going to do?
According to the researchers interviewed for this article in Popular Science, "Why Your Dog Needs to Smell the World," too many dog owners neglect smelling opportunities in favor of motion.
Many dogs, however, live in less enriching circumstances. They spend most of their time in relatively scent-impoverished indoor environments and then, when taken outside for a walk, are hurried along at a pace that’s more about their caregiver’s interests than their own. Even just a cracked-open window can make a difference, says Horowitz, though she tries to let her own companions, Quiddity and Tilde, sniff to their hearts’ content while exploring on a stroll.
Dogs change too: Our former collie-mix, Shelby, used to charge forward on walks. She never learned not to pull the leash -- or I was unwilling to correct her again and again times 1,000.
More often she was off-leash except for the last bit of the walk home, past the other houses.
But as she aged, she more and more prefered to take "sniff walks," going a couple of yards and then pausing to examine some tuft of grass or bush. That is what old dogs often want to do.
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| Just a lion walking past a trail camera two years ago. |
• What is chronic wasting disease and why is it a problem for deer, elk, and msein the Rockies? Two more videos here from CPW.
• Yes, beavers are great! Beavers in every drainage!
SILVERTON, Colo. — Colorado’s San Juan Mountains are home to about 15,000 abandoned mines, according to Rory Cowie, the president and owner of Alpine Water Resources.
Several hundred of these abandoned mines are in need of a cleanup, which is something multiple federal agencies are working on. Cowie refers to these mines as “legacy mines”— mines that are no longer in use.
“They either have draining water that's of poor quality, or they may have a bunch of mine waste or tailings ... near them,” Cowie said. “And so, for the past 25 or 30 years, there's been efforts to clean up these mines, but there are a lot of them and it takes a lot of funding.”
But Cowie has a low-cost, natural solution in mind: the American beaver.
But be careful. As Ben Goldfarb writes Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, mountain lions look at newly dropped-off beavers the way that you might look at a cheeseburger. There is a video embedded.
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| The 1892 Crystal "Mill" was actually a powerhouse. (Library of Congress) |
What used to be a popular destination is now closed off. It was just too too Instagram-able. The owner used to charge visitors a $10 fee. Now access is closed, reports the Colorado Sun.
Some of the visitors to the Crystal Mill and Crystal City ghost town area — estimated at thousands a week in the summer season — had started prying off bits of the historic mill. They were carving their names into surrounding trees and spray painting on structures. Some threw a party inside the rickety mill building. One slung a hammock from the side of the mill. Some buzzed drones over the area. One pulled a gun on a Cox employee when asked to pay the $10 access fee.
Marble locals have reported that others went to nearby private historic cabins and walked in on summer residents, thinking the structures were there for more of their backcountry exploration. People relieved themselves outside the cabins after they found they couldn’t wander in and use a toilet.
Marble business owners who run tours to the mill or rent rugged vehicles capable of getting there, blame social media for the influx of ill-intentioned visitors bent on snagging the best selfies with an internationally recognized mining-era structure.
Find your own damn social media hotspot, OK?
I thought of a pine sawyer, but there are no pine trees in that area, only cottonwoods. There is a cottonwood borer, but it has a distinctive black and white pattern.
One that looks close is the palo verde beetle. No palo verdes grow here in southern Colorado, but I read that their grubs will also bore into cottonwood roots. Maybe someone could save me a hard day's night of reading guidebooks and websites and identify it?
Fendi Despres (right) and a prairie-restoration volunteers. (Photo: Fendi Despres via 5280).
5280 Magazine describes how the 1,100-acre Plains Conservation Center (owned by the city of Aurora) is a test area for restoration and carbon sequestration.
The area is inside the E470 beltway, which means that it is accessible to visitors who want to take wagon rides and learn about regenerative agriculture. No dogs permitted though.
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| Click to embiggen. |
The plains in particular have had tons of hail, which threaten the wheat harvest.
"Heavy rains and severe thunderstorms continue in the Southern Plains where producers are watching forquality impacts. In Colorado, Wyoming and South Dakota, producers are hoping for dryer and/or warmer weather ahead of harvest." (US Wheat Associates harvest report, July 7, 2023).
On the other hand, it is starting to look like a good summer wildlflower season, although spring was not so good.
A quarter of New Mexico is "abnormally dry," while the southeastern quadrant is in either "moderate" or "severe" drought.
If you find this information endlessly fascinating, visit the .gov "Drought Portal." Your tax dollars at work.
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| Last of the low penstemon. |
Spring started dry. I was out on a couple of small fires in April, and we all worried what was coming next. Rain was coming next: from mid-May to mid-June we got more than nine inches (24+ cm).
All my May outdoor projects — plantings, rail-fence repair, house-painting — were postponed.
The natural world was similar. The usual spring wildflowers were never seen or only rarely. Spring beauties (Claytonia) not at all. Sand lilies — just one or two. Pasque flowers, hardly at all.
Bird life changed too. A flock of evening grosbeaks (as many as eighteen) that had hung around all spring finally dispersed, except for a couple, when M and I went down to Taos for a week in early June, taking away their free food, because we don't leave bird feeders out all night when the bears are about.
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| Colorado Springs had the wettest June since record-keeping began. |
The broad-tailed hummingbirds arrived in April as usual, and two males are busy disputing rights to the sugarwater feeder. Black-headed grosbeaks are here, although perhaps not as many as I expected.
But spotted towhees, which are usually screeching from every oak thicket as they proclaim their nesting territories, don't seem to be here at all.
I miss Lucinda. There were many Lucindas over the years. Back in the 2000s, every year a little cordilleran flycatcher would nest in some inconvenient (to us) place, like on the front porch light, and so we named all the mother birds Lucinda.
In 2023, as I recall, some eggs were laid but never hatched. Did some predator nab that year's Lucinda? And this year, no flycatchers. The chain seems to be broken, and I am surprised how sad that makes me feet.
So many things seem to be happening late, and I keep hoping, but I don't think it is likely that they will show up to build a nest two weeks later.
Wildflowers recovered better. June saw a burst of blue-flowered low penstemon in every forest clearing, supported by some vetches, clover, feral lilacs and others. Wild plums bloomed profusely , but ponderosa pine pollen was scanty.
In late June, we flipped from rainy to hot with highs hitting 90° F, all of which goes to show that when it comes to weather, "average" is just a number. So M. and I are still setting out plants and even seeds, hoping for a long warm fall, with backup plans of moving some container plants into the unheated greenhouse if need be.
And mushrooms! Thanks to all the rain, we're picking here around the house, mostly shaggy parasols, but a twenty-minute drive put us into some giant puffballs, sitting in the high grass creekside like skulls on an ancient battlefield. Two of those in a shopping back feel like serious food. Maybe 2023 will go down as a great mushroom year.
I can't tell what it all adds up to though. Some things good, some puzzling.
