CSU Using AI to Predict Hail Storms

Colorado hailstones, June 2025.  (9News photo)

I was in Pueblo talking with my new insurance agent yesterday -- new in that her Colorado Springs-based agency (with satellite offices) has bought up my old small-town agency, which earlier had bought a smaller-town agency). Consolidation everywhere — like hailstones,

We talked about trying to get fire etc coverage for our rental cabin, It came up for renewal right during the big Aspen Acres Fire,  and that was a hard no. (The coverage came from a different company arranged through a broker). Bad enough that it is not owner-occupied; now it's too close to the fire.

Yet as her computer told her, the only claims that I have submitted for that house and for my own house were for hail damage! A big storm in 2017 led to roof replacement on both houses in 2018. The cabin already had a metal roof; now it has a newer one.

Fires are scary and can take out many structures in a day, but hail costs Coloradans more:

Hail is the number one factor driving up homeowners insurance rates in Colorado, according to a new analysis released by the state’s Division of Insurance and the Governor’s office.

Wildfire risk accounts for a much lower percentage of premiums on average, according to the data, though wildfire-prone homes in Colorado are often dropped by insurers altogether. 

Insurance premiums in the state are rising faster than the national average and far outpacing inflation, with no clear end in sight. That’s partly because Colorado regularly faces multiple catastrophes, like hail storms and infernos. 

 Now this news from Colorado State University:

Colorado State University researchers will deploy artificial intelligence-assisted weather forecasts in 2027 that could extend warnings of dangerous, destructive hailstorms by hours or possibly days ahead of current modeling. . . .

A cross-discipline team is linking a specialized version of chipmaker NVIDIA’s forecasting, which they dubbed Hail-StormScope, with a previously developed CSU machine-learning model. Using the two together is already proving to increase warning times and update impact areas as storms change. . . .

The new system will draw on older, low-tech tools as well, including CSU climatologist Russ Schumacher’s statewide network of amateur weather observers whose home stations come with a foil-covered styrofoam platform that can register the size of hailstones before they melt.  

Click through for some interesting graphics. 

Searching for Edible Chile Ristras

 

A ristra in the kitchen, slowly disappearing.

Back from a post-fire holiday in Taos County, New Mexico, where I encountered the Ristra Riddle, namely, how old is that ristra?

Ristras are strings of chile peppers, garlic heads, hung to dry, typically under roof eaves or portales (porches). 

And that is where they often stay. I will bet that more ristras are sold in the Southwest for home decor than for consumption. 

Not that consumption is hard. You pick the dried peppers, put them in a bowl, pour boiling water over them, and in fifteen or twenty minutes they are rehydrated and ready to be cleaned and chopped for whatever you are making.

A friend in Colorado wanted me to bring her a ristra for cooking purposes. I went to the Taos Farmers Market, and a fine market it is. I love hitting it in late summer. But I looked around, and there were no ristras.

OK, maybe I was early for this year. I stopped by the Made in New Mexico store on the plaza. There in the back -- ristras!

But they were suspiciously glossy. And a sign said "Not edible."  

"What's this?" I asked the clerk, "Are they varnished?" 

Yes, apparently so. They "will not not drip dangerous chile juice, attract fruit flies, or become moldy."

You want edible chiles? We have some over here in a sack.

Now the the sprawling Mexican-import stores along the highway have ristras, apparently unvarnished. But how old are they? I would not even bother to ask. They are decor items, like the tinware and Talavera tiles. 

And I suppose that the people selling loose peppers at the farmers market are not interested in sitting and stitching them into ristras at a price competitive with the undated imported ones. So it's do it yourself or do without.

I'll be dropping off a sack of dried red chiles for my friend. I wish the people growing Pueblo Mirasol chiles would branch out. Maybe some day. I need to poke around more closer to home.

Where Are the Jolly Lumberjacks When You Need Them?

  

Video from Colorado Parks and Wildlife. 

A log jam on the Arkansas River -- probably the first time I have heard of one of those -- is frustrating boaters in the Brown's Canyon section:

The blockage, below Hecla Junction and downstream of the Seidel’s Suckhole rapid in lower Browns Canyon, stretches for 100 yards, and anyone using the river is required to portage around it. Nobody should try to cross the debris raft or try to remove parts of it, state officials said, as the floating wood is unstable. 

You never know, maybe some of those young guys who throw axes in taverns might equip themselves with caulk boots, buffalo plaid shirts, and peavey poles, and try to clear it. Probably best to leave the job to the spring run-off though.

The source of these logs is not mentioned. No large fires have burned above that spot recently. I am open to suggestions,

Now if you want a real big log jam, try the "Red River Raft." Miles long, many years old.

The raft removal project, initiated by Captain Henry Shreve in the 1830s, opened new territory in Louisiana and East Texas for settlement and agriculture. Its engineering audacity inadvertently reshaped the geology of the Lower Mississippi River watershed.

The "Red River Raft" came to the US government's attention in 1806 when it was blocked the upstream  progress of the Freeman and Custis "Red-River Arkansas" expedition. It was centuries old and nearly a hundred miles long. 

The Louisiana Purchase, more or less (Wikipedia)

This expedition was a less-known parallel to Lewis and Clark's trip up the Missouri River and to the Pacific Ocean, and Zebulon Pike's probe up the Arkansas River.

All three expeditions were devoted to exploring our 1803 Louisiana Purchase from France, which supposedly covered all French land claims in the Mississippi drainage.  

The problem was that Spain claimed some of that territory too. In fact, President Jefferson thought that a frontier war with Spain was a distinct possibility.

The Spanish tried twice to intercept Lewis and Clark on the prairie but were too late both times. As is well-known, they did shadow the Pike expedition along the Arkansas and captured his little group (who probably were in fact spying as well as exploring) in the San Luis Valley of Colorado in February 1807. 

The Freeman-Custis Expedition, the most purely scientific, was an easy snatch for the Spanish. As Dan Flores writes,

The Spaniards had no intention, then, of letting the Americans treat with Comanches and groups like that, and so for their own reasons, the Spaniards were determined to make every effort to block these American expeditions. . . . the Red River of the South was easily accessible to those Spanish troops, and so Spain, in the spring of eighteen-six, began to put together a plan for stopping this Southwestern Expedition. It decided—the Spanish government in Madrid, and in Cuba—decided to, first of all, alert the authorities in New Mexico and in Texas of the impending American expedition. 

Collecting specimens and mapping, the expedition (with Caddo Indian guides) had to pole their boats through streams and swamps to bypass the Great Raft. But then on July 29, 1806, on roughly today's Arkansas-Oklahoma border, they encountered about two hundred Spanish cavalry troopers. Oops.

No blood was shed. The Spanish commander, Capt. Francisco Viana, was firm with them.

He said, my instructions are, you cannot proceed beyond this point. He said, this is as far as the French ever established settlements and posts the Americans had passed an old French post about two days before. And the Spaniards had set up their blockade of the river just about fifty miles upstream of that old French post, and Viana said, this is as far as the French ever proceeded on the Red River, the country above this is ours, and you are going to have to retrograde to American territory. 

Thomas Freeman, the expedition leader, was a civil engineer, not a soldier like Zebulon Pike or Meriwether Lewis, although some American soldiers were present for protection. This was not a military probe of hostile territory. President Jefferson had given Freeman written instructions that if they encountered hostile forces, they should turn around. And so they did.

Flores has several reasons why no one remembers the Freeman-Custis Expedition:

This expedition, blocked by the Spanish army in 1806, simply doesn’t play into the idea of American expansion across the Southwest. Now, it may be, in our own time, as the history of the West becomes more multicultural, that Hispanic-Americans in the Southwest will look upon the outcome of this expedition as sort of one of their victories in blocking American imperialist expansion into the West. But, I think in terms of American national history, this is one of those events that can’t be fitted comfortably into the story of a successful kind of migration of the American people across the continent.

Another thing that makes it an invisible expedition to a certain extent is that the scientific results were relatively meagre, and they were undermined really by how the expedition was reported by the Jefferson administration. The map that resulted from the expedition was a remarkable map, but it didn’t really explore very far into territory that the French hadn’t already explored. So it didn’t provide much in the way of new geographical discoveries.

Peter Custis’s work, on the other hand, I think, had things played out a little differently, might have made the expedition very well known and famous, but the way, in fact, Custis’s work did pan out, it made the expedition even more ill-starred. What happened was that Custis wrote descriptions of more than two hundred and sixty-seven plants and animals that he described on this four-and-a-half-month expedition. It’s a remarkable ecological kind of time machine into what the Red River was like in 1806.

But the the publication was fumbled: you can read more here.

Your Porch Wants to Burn

The projecting beam caught fire, which was luckily caught by
firefighters working in the area. 

As the Aspen Acres Fire moved toward them in early July 2026, the owners of this historic ranch (clear back to Charles Goodnight, in a way) cut a fire line through the surrounding pines with a skid steer. 

Later they got permission to come back for a few hours, while the area was officially evacuated, to look for some missing bison. Another volunteer firefighter and I were tasked with escorting them — there was still some live fire in the area — and making sure that they left on time.  

They cruised on ATVs here and there. We parked our "brush truck" and walked around nearby, noting what had burned (two outbuildings, a Kawasaki Mule) and what survived.  

The fire line had held, and that was good. But wind-blown embers had flown up under the back porch roof and lodged there, setting a large beam on fire. Had not a Forest Service wildland engine come by when it did, fire could have taken the whole roof and then the house.

We love our porches, but they are fire traps. 

Horseshoe Lodge, 1950s (?)

A few valleys away, the historic Horseshoe Lodge (12,294 sq. ft.) stood in Pueblo Mountain Park just above the little town of Beulah. The park was created in the 1920s as a refuge from Pueblo heat, and the lodge, originally called Mountain View Lodge, was built for lodging, dining, and event space in the 1930s. Its Pueblo Revival style might be considered to be Southwestern "Parkitecture," with adobe walls and heavy pine beams.

Decrepit by the 1970s, it was heavily renovated and upgraded in the 2000s. The park managers were fire-conscious too, and over recent years thinned trees and removed underground in the central parts of the park.

Aerial view of Horseshoe Lodge after the fire, published on Facebook 
by Pueblo photographer John Wark. Click to enlarge.

On its first day, the wind-driven fire rolled downhill from the west — the top of the photograph — toward the lodge. It looks to me like embers flew into the porch timbers, setting the roof and then the interiors ablaze, which reflected heat back into the trees in front of the lodge. There no trail of charring on the ground. Only the adobe walls were left.

If you want a fire-resistant house, build with masonry, metal, or stucco, and have no protrusions for fire to snatch. But who wants that?  

I am as guilty as anyone. My house is basically a rectangular box, set into a hillside along its long edge. 

What makes it more than a box is the covered porch taking up most of the downhill long edge. M. and I eat out there, weather permitting. There are chairs for lounging and a desk/work table. And the space underneath the porch, where you can walk in, is always where both junk and necessary stuff collect.

We left in too much of a hurry. I should have cleared it, but I did not. I came home to find the chairs, tables, firewood box, garden supplies, wheelbarrow, and everything else set helter-skelter out in the grass. I totally understand: that was basic structure protection. Even with the metal roof, that underneath space is a fire-catcher. All you can do is prepare for it, I suppose.

Or there is this approach:

A historic cabin in North Cascades National Park is wrapped with foil
to protect it during the 2026 Border 2 Fire (National Park Service).

After the Aspen Acres Fire: The House is Still Here, So Is the Blog

 

Having driven out of the hills and onto the prairie, 
we stopped for a short break before going on to Pueblo.

Where did this blog go? No, I have not quit blogging, but I was a little distracted during the month of July. 

At around 6 a.m. on June 29, a tree (it is believed) was blown into a power line near the little resort community of San Isabel, on the Custer-Pueblo county line. (Local residents had already put out a couple of little fires previously in that general area.)

That spot is in the Rye Fire Protection District. Chief Gallegos and his volunteers got the call. It's uphill and twisty all the way—maybe 15-minutes plus in a car, but longer in a fire truck with a full tank of water.;

The weather had been hot, dry, and breezy. The fire was spreading in conifers and aspens. The Rye crew called for "mutual aid" from the nearest department  — the even-smaller Beulah fire department, with about 20 volunteers.

Beulah responded. The big guns of what would become the Aspen Acres Fire of 2026 (102,000 acres) were pointed right at their faces.

 

The Beulah Valley in winter.

"The Aspen Acres Fire experienced explosive growth due to record‑low fuel moisture levels and persistent red flag conditions during the week preceding and the days following ignition. The fire was driven by sustained winds over 40 mph, with gusts estimated up to 100 mph. It initially impacted the community of Beulah, Colorado, and later affected additional communities and areas across Custer, Pueblo, Fremont, and Huerfano counties."

Between the little town and the fire, a couple were car-camping off CO 78 (a.k.a. Twelve-Mile Road) on national forest land. The wife later commented on Facebook that had they not heard Beulah's sirens out on that road, they would have had no idea (at 6:30 a.m.) that the fire was burning and coming right at them.

A home on Pine Drive in Beulah. 
I do not know if it survived. (Redfin.)

Beulah is "nestled in the pines," as a real-estate agent would say. For more than a century it has been a community of summer homes and parks for those fleeing prairie heat, a retirement community, and a home to people who commute down to Pueblo for their jobs. The elementary school focuses on the natural sciences.  Every December there is a community Yule Log hunt which is actually fun to watch.

M. and I go there occasionally for a change of scene, and I would look at the comfortable, even fancy, homes under the tall ponderosa pines, and think, "This is lovely and gracious and oh gawd, if it ever burns. It's the textbook example of 'wildland-urban interface." (WUI, pronounced "whooie.")

The outnumbered fire fighters were trying to be in six places at once. My even smaller department had not been summoned, but help was streaming in from the city and county of Pueblo. I kept the radio on though, eavesdropping as they called for more water, ordered evacuations, and dashed from place to place. I heard someone say, "Down power lines. Venting propane tanks, Everything they taught you in WUI class — and more."

We thought we were safe, but the wind had other ideas,  By July 1, we were on "pre-evac" in the morning. "Maybe I should air up the tires on the pop-up trailer," I thought. By late afternoon, it was "GO!" 

 This was Evacuation Number 4? Or 5? But the others were always for a night or two or three. This one was for two weeks. For some people in Rye, it was three weeks.  

If you watch this Facebook video, it's Beulah firefighters discussing how they prepared for such a fire and what they did when it hit. Yes, some lost their own homes.

Since Facebook is not always fun, here are some local TV videos from the beginning of the fire:

 

 

After the fire, there was monsoonal flooding, of course. CO 78 re-opened only two days ago (Aug. 7). Some time I will go have a look, but I hate to be a disaster tourist, even though I am a "local" in the broader sense. Could go patronize the coffeehouse and/or the little restaurant; they survived.

European Bison versus Wolves

It's a long way from the Southern Rockies, but this video fits the June 20 theme of "predators and fawns/calves." 

A friend in Poland sent the video's link to the news site Notes from Poland. The European bison, sometimes called "wisent" (similar to ours but taller and slimmer) was extirpated by over-hunting. Its population has recovered in a few places due to re-introduction from captive herds. 

The largest population is in Poland's Białowieża Forest, one of the last examples of Eastern European old-growth forest. It was saved over the centuries mainly by being a royal hunting preserve. It is known for wildlife but is also the site of disputes over logging vs. preservation.

You can see wolves harassing the bison — they mainly are interested in the two calves, which they keep trying to cut off from the adults. As wolves do.

Hungry Bears and Fawns

The suspect makes his first pre-dawn appearance.

 

My "neighborhood" is a little too rural for apps like Nextdoor, but we do have a text-message network. It lit up a few days ago when a young (I'd say yearling) black bear started doing the equivalent of squeezing the door handles of all the parked cars.

Before long he (?) was spotted at this house and that. Over the next few days he knocked over wheelie bins (that should have been indoors), got into some smelly fertilizer, and committed other mischief.

We are in a drought. Spring fruit like wild plums and chokecherries basically did not happen.  The days are hot with a series of Red Flag fire warnings. (My volunteer department rolled out on one small wildlife fire on the 17th.) 

No doubt the little bear is hungry. 

He appeared behind our house during when I was away on the fire. His scent must have drifted in, because M. said that Marco the Chesapeake Bay retriever jumped up barking and ran for the back door, where she looked out and saw the bear up on the trees.

Another neighbor posted said the bear checked out his propane grill. Elsewhere, the yearling broke into a shed where some livestock feed was stored. The shed's owner has now added an electric fence and placed an elected "unwelcome mat" at the door. 

I  got up  Friday to find that someone had dug up up soil in an outdoor planter, knocking two tomato cages and the Walls o' Water that they support onto the ground. Luckily the plants survived. 

The local game warden came around and gave another neighbor a bag of the non-lethal rubber-ball 12 gauge shotgun shells. They pass those out like candy.

The recipient rode around on his side-by-side distributing them, so I have a couple placed at hand. It's never come to that in the past, probably won't this time either, but there they are.

All this past winter, a mule deer doe (last seen visibly pregnant) and her yearling offspring hung out in the oak brush close to our house. 

All around, fawns should be dropping now.  And although black bears do not hunt prey the way that mountain lions do, they like fresh fawn.

There used to be a buffalo ranch about ten miles from here, and the owner once told me that during calving, black bears would come off the mountain to hunt the calves. You would think that Mama Buffalo would be a formidable opponent but apparently the bears get though some times.

(In Yellowstone, a grizzly bear recently nabbed an elk calf in front of an assembly of tourists. 

[Wildlife researcher John Winnie, Jr.] wasn’t there when the grizzly first found that calf, but said one of his students witnessed the moment. The bear’s head suddenly snapped in the calf’s direction right before she moved in and found the helpless young elk.

That probably means Storm [the grizzly] heard the calf rustling in the grass, or caught a glimpse of it moving, Winnie said.

Once Storm started eating, it was hard to watch, he said.

The calf cried out as it was being devoured, but no other elk heard it.

“The nearest cow elk we saw were probably out of earshot, 400 to 500 yards away,” Winnie said.

In Yellowstone, spring calving produces about 80 calves per 100 cow elk, he said. but “by the time the first of the next year rolls around in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, we’re down to around 20 to 25 calves per 100 cows. And most of the calves that were lost were lost to predation."

 Deer and Deer Hunting magazine, which is devoted to whitetail deer-hunting, posted on X (formerly Twitter) a scout camera video from John Lockburner Jr. (Sussex County, N.J.) of a black bear taking a whitetail fawn. The post said, " According to scientific research by John J. Ozoga in Michigan, yearling black bears can reduce fawn survival by as much as 22% annually."

You can hear the fawn bawling. 

 So in this drought year, will this yearling bear get a taste for fawn?

Can a Bull Snake Be a Show Snake?

A week ago, Marco the Chessie and I were walking up a pedestrian-bike trail that goes trough "open space" by the Walking Stock golf course in northeast Pueblo.

Suddenly he jumped sideways. I looked down and back — this bull snake was artistically coiled next to the wall that separates one of the adjacent upscale houses from the public path.

Not a bad homestead for a snake—a secure den under the masonry wall, just a short slither away from rodent-hunting grounds. 

The snake tired of being photographed and false-struck at me. No danger; it was just annoyed. "OK, buddy," I said, "I'll leave you be."

What was interesting that this particular bull snake did not vibrate its tail to mimic a rattlesnake. A lot of them do that, and then humans start grabbing guns and shovels: "It's a rattlesnake! Kill it!" 

Is the gene pool changing? Marco started out to be a show dog, but washed out. He still strikes poses. So did this snake. Very artistic fellow.

Low Flows Threaten Arkansas River Rafting. Guess Who Benefits

Paddleboarders on the Arkansas (Colorado Parks & Wildlife)

Today's Colorado Sun reports that the low snowpack -- 24 percent for the Arkansas River basin -- means low runoff and a shorter season for the rafting companies:

There are about 45 river outfitters in the Arkansas Headwaters Recreation Area between Leadville and Cañon City who host as many as 250,000  commercial rafting visitors every year, almost 75% of them coming from out of state. Those vacationers riding the most rafted river in the country direct anywhere from $50 million to $75 million into the local communities every year. 

The Arkansas River rafting season will happen. It will just be a bit different. There will be fewer paddlers on smaller boats. If guests are ready, they will captain their own stand-up paddleboards or inflatable kayaks, which are called duckies. Trips could take longer. Paddlers in rafts are going to play a larger role, helping guides navigate more technical lines through rapids. Lower sections of the river with more water — like the Royal Gorge — will see more traffic. 

The calls from vacationers are coming in. Demand is there. And outfitters are ready. 

Let's face it: When flows are down around 500 cfs, it's hard for guides to give clients the high-excitement pinballing riiver rides that some will tip extra for. (Guides call this trade-off "bash for cash.") 

But there's a bright side too. Anglers won't be sitting out the "rubber hatch" in June and waiting for flows to drop. It should be a great summer for river fishing.

Snakes on Your Screen!

I read once about this Appalachian doctor who told a patient to take a certain medicine in the winter and to keep taking it "until snakes crawl" -- in other words, until warm spring weather. Tying the directions to the natural world was simpler and easier to remember than setting a calendar date. 

 Now I have my reasons for avoiding rattlesnakes, so maybe I could just be a tech-user and watch the Colorado RattleCam.

You are watching a livestream of a Prairie Rattlesnake rookery (MegaDen) at an undisclosed location in Colorado. At this rookery, hundreds of snakes overwinter, shed their skins, and bask in the sun. Dozens of pregnant snakes spend the summer here preparing to give birth and care for their babies. 

ProjectRattleCam also has a camera in California and in some zoos and museums. 

Antero Reservoir Closing; Fish Salvage Underway

Antero Reservoir (Colorado Parks & Wildlife

Antero Reservoir, one of the two "saucer" reservoirs in South Park, as I like to think of them, is being drained to save water in the current drought. (The other is Spinney Mountain Res.)

Denver Water announced Monday it will drain and close South Park’s Antero Reservoir fishing and camping spot to avoid critical evaporation losses in a tinder-dry season. 

The agency serving 1.5 million Front Range customers will send Antero’s reserve down the South Platte River to Cheesman Reservoir and close the recreation area to the public for the first time since the severe 2002 drought.

The move will keep 5,000 acre-feet of water from evaporating in summer heat about one-quarter of the reservoir’s capacity. In a normal runoff year, that 5,000 acre-feet would easily be made up by snowmelt, but Denver has declared this year’s snowpack the lowest in recorded history in its resource areas. 

Colorado Parks and Wildlife has announced a "no limits" fish-salvage operation.

All . . . regulations, including a valid Colorado fishing license and legal methods of take, will be enforced. Motorized boating and commercialized fishing will not be allowed. Hand-launched vessels and shoreline angling are permitted.  

After May 13, no public access for camping or anything.

Two Buttes Res. in SE Colorado was recently drained too. Maybe the El Niño winter that is supposed to be coming will refill it.  

That's Cotton in the Blog Stew -- Don't Eat It

Marco checks out a muddy arroyo in Huerfano County.

I let March go by without posting. That's bad. I was deep into the most annoying book-edit of my life. Kind of like "Who's on first?" but with different drafts and different sets of corrections from different proof-readers.

That said, I did get out in the weirdly warm and dry weather to investigate some public hunting lands-mostly Colorado state trust lands that are also grazed, but opened during hunting seasons. 

I may live in the foothills and love mountains, but the High Plains, mesas, and canyons call me too, Chad Love, who lives in Woodward, Oklahoma (touched by one of the big prairie fires this spring) says it well. He talks about autumn here, but early spring as upland seasons end is just the other side:

If you really want to hear the world creak and groan and slip from one epoch into the next, walk out into the prairie in early September. Find a hill to sit on, turn your face up to the sky, let that ancient celestial light strike your eyes, and listen to the ancient gods whispering in your soul’s ear; old thoughts, old yearnings, old fears, old hopes, all welling back up from within on the tendrils of that first softly keening fall breeze that marks the trembling of the seasons and the dimming of the summer light. 

And it's dry, so dry. What can farmers do? Some people suggest that the future is less corn and more cotton, even here in Colorado. 

For decades, the Wertz family focused on corn and alfalfa in the Arkansas Valley. But in recent years, the economics became harder to ignore. Water supplies dwindled, and production costs climbed. They needed a crop that used less water but still offered a solid return.

Even though cotton had never been grown successfully in Colorado, Wertz believed it could be the right fit for their operation.

“Finding a crop that cash flowed better and something that conserved water, we decided cotton was the way to go,” he said. “Cotton does all of those things. It just fit a niche that we were looking for.”
Cotton brings in similar revenue per acre as corn, but requires far less fertilizer and water. That makes it a natural choice for hot, dry areas and more sustainable in drought conditions. 

 Maybe parts of Eastern Colorado will start resembling West Texas—wisps of cotton blowing in the wind. 

Who Has Been Digging Up the Wasps' Nests?

Something there is that does not like a yellowjacket -- 
but loves to tear up the nests and eat fat larvae. 

* * *  

This was a rough autumn in Wasp World. The tenant in our rental cabin, about 150 yards from the main house, reported being attacked by yellowjackets when stepping out on the back stoop. And he is sensitive to them, although not full anaphylactic-shock-death-sensitive.

The wasps got me too when I went over there.  They were coming out of a warp in the cedar siding. Time for action! There I went, gloved and jacketed, wearing a loose head-net over a plastic hard hat, climbing a ladder with wasp spray in hand.

After chemical warfare came expanding foam and calking compound. Eventually the buzzing stopped. 

Wasp traps lure with scent

But there were still some around, so we hung conical wasp traps (they fly in but can't fly out) front and rear. The number of yellowjackets in the air was considerably reduced, although not totally down to zero.

At the main house, we had paper wasps in the greenhouse, but they are not nearly as aggressive as yellowjackets , though they will sting -- particularly dogs, for some reason. I found their nest and dropped it in a bucket of water. They'll be back though, I'm sure

Someone else was hunting wasps too. I found the scene at the top about fifty yards from the cabin. Something had torn into an underground yellowjacket nest, torn out the chambers with tasty larvae in them, and departed. 

Then M. went walking and found another similar pillaged nest a quarter mile up the county road, as shown below. My first thought was "bear," but the damage was rather . . . dainty compared to what bears do. So maybe a skunk? They are always around. 

If you want to see how a bear approaches yellow jacket nests, watch this video from the Wilson Forest Lands YouTube channel

 

Now that's bear style!

For more on bees and wasps -- but mostly bees -- in Colorado, listen to this episode of the Colorado Outdoors podcast, "Pollinate Your Mind: Colorado's Native Bees."  

Cruising El Cuartelejo

 
I'm using the broad definition, not the Kansas-centric one.

And it's the Colorado Otero County, not the New Mexican Otero. But both counties are named for the same man, Miguel Antonio Otero (1829–1882). Now you know.

Endless sky.

Big Cat News from Northern and Southern Colorado

A couple of days ago, I checked the trail camera nearest the house, located about 80 yards up  the ridge in back. With apologies for the infrared flash on the ten-year-old camera, this is one photo of a sequence.

Photo taken about 9:30 p.m. on December 13, 2025.

 M. was out for a walk as I was checking the photos on my laptop. "Guess what I got," I said when she same in. "A mountain lion," she answered. "Steve [our neighbor] showed me a video from his camera."

And here it is, five nights after the photo above.

Not the same cat thought. This one is wearing a collar and tracking device. I checked with the district wildlife manager, who said a study was underway in western Pueblo County and adjacent areas involving a number of collared cats.

Then came the report of a woman killed by a lion while hiking on New Year's Day in western Larimer County, as first announced by Colorado Parks & Wildlife that same afternoon. This Colorado Sun report from January 2 has a little more detail, including an attempted attack on the same trail in November 2025:

Gary Messina said he was running along the same trail on a dark November morning when his headlamp caught the gleam of two eyes in the nearby brush. Messina pulled out his phone and snapped a quick photo before a mountain lion rushed him.

Messina said he threw his phone at the animal, kicked dirt and yelled as the lion kept trying to circle behind him. After a couple of harrowing minutes he broke a bat-sized stick off a downed log, hit the lion in the head with it and it ran off, he said.

“I had to fight it off because it was basically trying to maul me,” Messina told The Associated Press. “I was scared for my life and I wasn’t able to escape. I tried backing up and it would try to lunge at me.

Both reports say the last known mountain lion killing of a human happened in 1999. That refers to the death of Jaryd Atadero, 3, in the Poudre River canyon west of Fort Collins.

To me from a couple hundred miles away, his unwitnessed death like a lion attack. Some people, including his father, at least initially, wanted to believe it was an abduction and murder. His parents wrote a book about the experience.