Blog Stew with Spikes

• Colorado's Most Dangerous Trails! Yes, Death-Defying Dangerous —  and Search & Rescue Will Come *For Free* Because They Are Crazed Adrenaline Junkies

Here's the list. It's kind of an ad for shoe spikes, compasses, etc.

The list is based on the number of rescues conducted and emergency GPS signals near those trails. . . .

Shane Leva, general manager of Mountain Chalet, a hiking outfitter in downtown Colorado Springs, said he agrees with the selection of the four trails on the list.

"For a lot of those, you'll be in fourth- and fifth-class settings, which means you'll be using both your hands and your feet to be scrambling," he said. "Think like low-grade rock climbing, essentially. You'll have hundreds if not thousands of feet under you. You'll need to have some good mountain sense and know how to navigate through that type of terrain

Which remind me that I need to check out the new Mountain Chalet location, but I have not been in Colorado Springs since March, the day before lockdown began, when I went up to see my dentist. 

• How to Photograph the Winter Solstice Jupiter-Saturn Conjunction

Some good advice here  (your tax dollars at work), even if you are just staggering out into the cold night with your smartphone.

And no, this is not the feckin' Star of Bethlehem or the star of anything. Those ancient Zoroastrian astrologer-priests, a/k/a wise men from the East, spent more time looking at the heavens than you do, and they knew the difference between wandering planets and fixed stars. 

If you have been outside recently after it gets dark, you might have noticed a bright pair of “stars” in the sky lying southwest — or left — of where the sun sets.

In reality these are the two giant gas planets, Jupiter, the brighter of the two, and Saturn. Even though they are separated by hundreds of millions of miles in the solar system, they have been moving closer and closer to one another in our sky for quite awhile.

 

• Please don't geo-tag the good places writes Greg McReynolds at Mouthful of Feathers. 

I can't agree more: 

You can post all the hashtags you want, but please knock it off with the geotagging and mapping bird hunting spots. Social media hotspotting is not cool man. Name a state. Name a region. Name a large city with a good BBQ restaurant. But don’t name spots. I know it’s not just hunters. It happens in fishing and mountain biking, sometimes splashing back on hunting. I’ve lost many a blue grouse hunting spot to user-created mountain bike trails, many of them spurred on by social media stoke. And I’ve given up a lot of spots over the years.