Shootout at the Watering Hole

Photo: Colorado Sun

 "Pastoral cultures are always violent," I read once in an anthropology book. 

You know the scenario: two herds are convering on a watering hole from different directions, and the respective herdsmen get into a fracas over whose animals will drink first.

I figure it will be the same with electric vehicles, which politicians are pushing with religious fervor. 

They typically take about an hour to charge, and charging stations are still few and far between in most places. Like having a small city of 100,000 people with two filling stations.

Today's headline out of the Denver inner suburb of Edgewater: "Fight between Tesla drivers ends in deadly shooting at Denver-area charging station."

A fight between Tesla drivers at an electric vehicle charging station in suburban Denver escalated into a fatal shooting that killed one driver and left another man in custody, authorities said Wednesday

With all the "plans" and "mandates"out there, and all the glee in the news media, this might be a new part of our future.

No Matter What We Do, They. Keep.Trying.

The National Weather Service office in Pueblo posted these radar images on Facebook today.

See the oval on the left? That is not rain, it's birds.

No matter what we do. No matter who is running for president. No matter whether the stock market is up or down. No matter how wet or dry the winter was (dry here in the Arkansas River drainage),  they keep trying to live their ancient, ancient lives.

You can do them a solid by turning off as many lights as possible. They don't need your lights. They know the way.

Great Information for Colorado Birders, Ecotourists, and Upland Hunters

When I was young and the internet still only dial-up, I had an idea for a Future Farmers of America chapter fundraiser.

A chapter in, say, Wray, Colorado, could poll its members' parents and friends and come up with a list of landowners who allowed hunters on their property (for free or for a small trespass fee). 

This list could be photocopied into a little booklet and sold at the Chamber of Commerce or fundraising events.

Maybe someone did something like that, somewhere. But now Colorado Parks & Wildlife has done something a little bit similar.

I picked up this 6x9-inch spiral bound book last month at the High Plains Snow Goose Festival. It is for southeastern Colorado —  there are similar books for the other three quarters

There is an overall "birding trail" page at the CPW website.

 You can also download the books as PDF files or pick up durable printed copies (if they are in stock) for free at regional offices.

You will find descriptions of accessible sites such as public parks, state wildlife areas (all adults must have a hunting or fishing license or SWA pass), and others, and also farms and ranches that engage in eco-tourism, offering hiking, camping, birding, and in some cases hunting access as well.

Fees are not given, but there is contact information. 

There are also auto-route guides, such as this excerpt for Cordova Pass in southern Colorado.

It's a lot of good information in one place, and you should have it if you live in or travel through Colorado for outdoor recreation.

History Wars II: Where is Your Fine New Signage Now?

In 2008, I described two different narratives about the area south of Florence, Colorado, in the pre-Civil War era of trappers, traders, and would-be ranchers. 

I called it "History Wars in Custer County," which was slightly misleading, because the marker also relates to SE Fremont County. But it was a Custer Co. historical group that — annoyed by the then-Colorado Historical Society (now History Colorado) replacing the good ol' historical marker with something more self-consciously multicultural — decided to erect a replica alongside it.

That group is winning the battle of the elements. Their old-style sign, with occcasional repainting, has outlasted the new one, which has been erased by the gentle Colorado sunshine. 

Go to the early post to see how the new sign looked when it was new and to read some of its text. Back then, you could read it. Now, like most derelict structures, it is attracting graffiti. 

This historical-marker database lists the new sign as "marked unreadable," but you can read part of its text.

It's kind of like how well-maintained traditional buildings outlast modernist structures whose concrete splits and spalls and whose cladding falls off.

Hartman, Colorado, and the 'Ecology' of High Plains Hamlets

The last commercial structure on Main Street, Hartman, Colorado.

Some years back my friend Galen and I went to a "hunters' breakfast" in Hartman, a fundraiser for a local service club or something. Bacon, eggs, pancakes for a reasonable price, in a little place in Prowers County, southeastern-most Colorado, where there are more people in the cemetery than on the street.

If we were in the brick 1930s gymnasium — it fits my memories — then it is crumbling now.

Hartman's population in 1920: 175. In 1930: 269. [Insert Dust Bowl here.] In 2020: 56. That's a story of the High Plains right there.

There was still a tiny, moribund Main Street then. Now it's just this brick building (a former bank?) and a modern modular little post office. I hope that they do not lose that.

Hartman clearly is a "hamlet." 

Former Colorado writer Merrill Gilfillan (b. 1945) defined hamlets this way in Magpie Rising: Sketches from the Great Plains, which just happens to be my favorite contemporary "travel" book about the High Plains.

Hamlets are utterly disctinct entities. Detached and austere, they occupy an ecological nice between the town and the isolate self-sufficient ranch. Hamlets have negligible commerce and none of the awkward communal success or desperate self-esteem of larger farm towns, yet they are socially more varied than the extended family ranch clusters within their windbreaks.

Hamlets are gratifyingly in-scale and honest. They represent a pure and elemental High Plains culture, as in Petri dish. Hamlets have few visible means of support; no schools; no class plays; no historical museums; little public enterprise save the occasional gas station/grocery combination.

There is more. It's worth a read. 

When I first read Magpie Rising, I got the same chills that I did when I found Barry Lopez' Winter Count in the old Chinook Bookshop in Colorado Springs. Just sucked me right in. 

I have often thought of taking certain essays from his newer Chokecherry Places: Essays from the High Plains and just writing a couple of my own with his as a template. Steal from the best, I always say.

If you like interviews with authors, here is one with Gilfillan.

Now I have done it — started out with a lonely hamlet, ended up with "the prose of a lifelong poet." That's what happens when you spend a lot of time observing.

The Backyard Chicken Craze Is Going Mass-Market

I stopped at the Big R store in Pueblo last week — my first visit in some time — and wow, that chicken thing.

Big R seems to cater mainly to hobby ranchers and rural homeowners. (Now I'll from someone: "I farm 600 acres, and I shop there!") You can get your Carhart and Wrangler jeans, your muck boots, animal feed by the sack, gopher poison, guns and ammo, tools, horse tack, all sorts of stuff.

And chicken coops. Out front where there used to be kit-built storage sheds are now displayed kit-built chicken coops. I will leave it to you to decide whether where these come down on the cute/utilitarian spectrum and whether you could build you own for less. But who can wait? There's a crisis!

In the parking lot, two middle-aged women of SE Asian looks were loading big sacks of chicken feed into a car. Somehow I felt that they might have been in the chicken business for some time.

In Colorado, we have not just avian flu hitting large-scale chicken operations, but a new law just went into effect setting "cage free" space requirements for laying hens. Some people want to blame both for the shortage of eggs in stores. Others insist that only the avian flu is to blame:

“The data that we're seeing coming out of the USDA is really indicating that what they're seeing...this impact on prices that we're experiencing, is really a direct input of the impact of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza,” said Hollis Glenn, deputy commissioner of operations for the Colorado Department of Agriculture. “It's a fatal disease for poultry, the laying hens, and the flocks of our producers have been tremendously diminished. So, their ability to produce eggs has been a challenge and when they have an outbreak in their facility, the data that shows that.”

Meanwhile, social media is on it! Two samples for yesterday:

And if you made it this far, you need to be thinking about the legalities.

Additional permits might be required for the coops the chicken will live in. 

“Call [your local zoning department] and figure out if you're going to need a permit for your coop,” [Chicken owner Bekah] Russell said. “Because, you'll definitely need one for your chickens, but you might require an additional building permit.”

[Chicken owner Kia[ Ruiz also advised owners to prepare for chicken deaths. The birds are not particularly hardy creatures and predators common in the state will hunt them if their enclosures aren’t secure. And sometimes, the hens might even fight members of their own flock. 

“I had been in that situation when we first got them. They were pecking each other, they were younger.” Ruiz said. “Chickens are dinosaurs. When they see red and they see blood, they will just keep attacking.”

 

Mountain Lions, Dogs, and Lethal Force

This mountain lion was captured and tagged in Boulder in October 2021.
Relocated to the mountains, it was killed in December 2022 after attacking dogs.
(Photo: Boulder Police Dept, via the Colorado Sun)

In 2003, Colorado journalist David Baron published The Beast in the Garden: The True Story of a Predator's Deadly Return to Suburban America.

Its topic was human-lion relations on the northern Front Range of Colorado, where cities bump into the mountains, with a focus on Boulder County. (A National Public Radio reporter, Barron wrote that book while on a fellowship in environmental journalism at CU-Boulder.)

As Colorado moved away from treating lions as "varmints" with a bounty on their heads to game animals with a limited "take" allowed, populations had rebounded. Boulder, like many other places, had a thriving herd of in-town mule deer, especially on its western edge, and lions had followed the deer — as they do. (The usual figure you hear is that an adult mountain lion will kill a deer every seven to ten days, feeding on the carcass while it is still relatively fresh.)

The death of Idaho Springs high-school athlete Scott Lancaster, ambushed by a lion in 1991 while training for the cross-country running team, was the first recorded human kill in Colorado.

(Here is a list of post-1890 fatal lion attacks in North America, which is undoubtedly incomplete, especially as regards the US-Mexico border region.)

The attack on the young runner is key to Baron's book, as his website explains:

Here, in a spellbinding tale of man and beast that recalls, only in nonfiction form, Peter Benchley’s thriller Jaws, award-winning journalist David Baron chronicles Boulder’s struggles to coexist with its wild neighbors and reconstructs the paved-with-good-intentions path that led to Colorado’s first recorded fatal mountain lion attack. The book reveals the subtle yet powerful ways in which human actions are altering wildlife behavior.

My takeaway from Baron's book was that the Colorado Division of Wildlife (as it was then called) was willing to try some active "management" of suburban and exurban mountain lions, but the feedback that they got from public meetings leaned toward "Please don't kill them. We can learn to co-exist."

Have things changed? A headline in the online Colorado Sun reads, "Mountain lions killed 15 dogs in 30 days near a Colorado town. Attacks continued and now a lion is dead."

Subhead: "People living in neighborhoods around Nederland wonder why Colorado Parks and Wildlife can’t do more to stop attacks on their pets".

In response, Sam Peterson, CPW’s Area 2 Boulder South District wildlife manager, held a meeting at the Nederland community center. Most of it focused on how to peacefully coexist with lions, but that’s not what the 140 people who attended were after. They wanted to know why lions were hiding out under porches, grabbing 100-pound Dobermans and 70-pound Labs and stalking dogs on leashes held by humans.

So the debate continues: Active measures versus careful co-existence, with residents coming down on both side and CPW reluctant — for both philosophical and budgetary reasons — to commit to sending marksmen and hounds after every mountain lion seen eyeing a dog.

Some Nederland-area residents now do their outdoor chores with firearms handy. But there's a catch. Under Colorado's "nuisance wildlife" laws (link is a PDF file),  a dog is not worth as much as a goat, for example, if the goat is classified as "livestock" and not a "pet."

• Black bears and mountain lions CAN NOT be destroyed when they are causing damage to personal property, including pets. 

• Black bears and mountain lions CAN be killed when it is NECESSARY to prevent them from inflicting death, damage or injury to livestock, human life, real property, or a motor vehicle. Any wildlife killed shall remain the property of the state, and such killing shall be reported to the division within five days. “Real property” means land and generally whatever is erected or growing upon or affixed to land. (Note: “Personal Property” means everything that is subject to ownership, other than real estate. Personal property includes moveable and tangible things such as pets, furniture and merchandise.)

In the Colorado Sun article, we see what happens when someone uses lethal force — sometimes:

After being driven away from one dog attack, a lion moved on to the next house:

The large, reddish cat walked up a neighbor’s driveway. . .  Several minutes later [the residents] heard several gunshots. CPW’s deputy regional manager Kristin Cannon filled in the rest of the story. 

Cannon says the lion attacked a dog at a home 400 yards from [the first attack]  and that during the attack, the dog’s owner killed the lion. She reiterated what Peterson had said, that it’s illegal to kill a lion to protect a pet but that in this instance CPW won’t be pressing charges due to “the totality of the circumstances.” 

Which is to say that the law is black-and-white but the wildlfe officers have a lot of discretion based on circumstances and the shooter's attitude. In my small experience, I have seen them usually avoid charging a shooter, which might put them in court being cross-examined over whether the bear was in the "personal property" garbage can or trying to break into the "real property" house. And there are the public-relations aspects.

But the option to charge someone is always there, beloved dog or not.

Across the Steppes of America, Part 2

When Henryk Sienkiewicz crossed the Great Plains on his way to California and adventure in 1876, I assume his train took the "Golden Spike" route, crossing Nebraska and southern Wyoming, then Utah and Nevada on the way to the Sierra Nevada. 

(By contrast, today's Amtrak California Zephyr opts for mountain scenery, passing from Nebraska into northeast Colorado, stopping in Denver, then entering the Moffat Tunnel, and following the canyons of the Fraser and Colorado rivers to Grand Junction, and thence west through Utah.)

I was not shooting many photos as I drove north on Colorado 71, mainly trying to keep the truck between the white lines in the face of strong NW wind.

There was a quick stop at the Cabela's "mother ship" in Sidney, Nebraska. The place was not as depressing as I described last year, but it cannot be doing the sales it was five years ago. Once again, on a bright morning in hunting season, I was able to park almost next to the front door. I needed a cot to sleep on in my friend Galen's under-reconstruction house, so I dashed in, found on, grabbed a bag of jerky and was back on the road.

Hay bale and field of unharvested sunflowers, south central North Dakota

 (ND Hwy 31).

Sunflowers came from North America, were exported to Europe, bred for size and oil production, and returned around 1880 as the "Mammoth Russian" variety.  Plants and people from southern Russia and Ukraine were arriving on the prairies of the US and Canada then. (Unfortunately, Kali tragus, the "tumbling tumbleweed," was one of them.) Now I see sunflowers and think of (a) gamebirds and (b) the viral video of the Ukrainian sunflower death curse delivered at the beginning of the invasion. It must be working.

An eastern North Dakota steppe view, but with a Lutheran spire instead of Orthodox dome.

The Sheyenne River creates a little topography in eastern North Dakota.

Stepples mean grains. These are just some of the grain elevators storing corn,
soybeans, etc. in Finley, North Dakota. Sign directs grain-truck drivers: "Keep line moving. Thank you."

Further south, in central Nebraska, the Sandhills are grass-covered sand dunes, sort of honorary steppes. Where did the sand come from? The winds blew it east from the Rockies after the ice melted last time. Fine grazing for cattle and/or buffalo — not suitable for growing crops in rows.

Part of the Valentine National Wildife Refuge, Nebraska.

Sandhills people look to the sky. Sonrise Hill in Thetford, Nebraska, hosts
Easter sunrise worship services, weather permitting.

I like it when we honor the long-term world rather than just people:
sculpture of life-size blue herons at I-76 rest area in Julesburg, Colorado,
in the state's northeast corner.

Across the Steppes of America, Part 1

 

St. Mary's Holy Dormition Orthodox Church, situated on the prairie east of Colorado Springs.

When I set out on the annual trip to North Dakota in October, I was under the spell of a 19th-century Polish novelist, Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846–1916).

Sienkiewicz in the 1880s,(Wikipedia)

On the advice of a friend teaching at a Polish university, I was reading one of Sienkiewicz's epic novels, With Fire and Sword, published in 1884.

Undying friendship! Massive battles! Heroism! True Love! Massive Battles! Sword-swinging Zaporozhian Cossacks! Sly and dangerous Tatars! Invincible Polish heavy cavalry, the "winged hussars"! A fat Falstaffian knight who still wins some fights! And did I mention true love?

It is set in the 1650s in what is now Ukraine, then ruled by the Polish-Lithuanian Confederacy, which was a regional power at the time.

But when Sienkiewicz was writing in the 1880s, there was no such political entity as Poland. There were Polish people, of course, but their nation had been partitioned between imperial Russia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Germany. So in writing of lost glories he was feeding his people's national spirit.

But here is the irony: according to my friend, Sienkiewicz never visited the areas he was writing about. Perhaps such travel was politically sensitive or difficult.

He had, however visited the American West. He was traveling by train on what is now the route of Amtrak's California Zephyr when he and his fellow passengers got the news about the 7th Cavalry's defeat at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. In California he traveled widely, among other things seeking a location for a utopian commune of Polish expatriates near Anaheim (which never came to pass), hunting grizzly bears with Spanish vaqueros, and enjoying city delights in San Francisco. He also wrote about the experiences of Polish immigrants in the US—all for the newspapers back home that were paying his way. You can find his articles collected and translated as Portrait of America (various editions). 

Therefore, my friend argues, Sienkiewicz's views of the forests, wheatfields, and grassland of Ukraine owe more to the American West than to the places he is writing about. Those steppes are actually our steppes!

A few years had passed since I had last seen St. Mary's Holy Dormition Church in eastern El Paso County, Colorado, but nothing says "steppes" like Orthodox church domes against the tawny grasslands, so I stopped by to take some photos. It is still a functioning parish with a complicated history.

Read Part 2 here.

Trail Rebuilding in the Wet Mountains

Ahead, the sawyer searches for the lost trail while others clear saplings and logs.

I spent Saturday with a volunteer trail crew rebuilding a trail in the Wet Mountains, a process that we began last summer.

Post-wildifre erosion, followed by a lush growth of grass and aspen, and erased the trail in places. Jeff Outhier, the San Isabel National Forest's "master of trails," marked a new route where the old one been washed out by the normally tiny creek.

When I hiked there before the fire in 2016, I mentally subdivided it into three sections: The Ravine, The Wall, and The Summit Aspen Groves.

Last summer's work was mostly in The Ravine and partway up The Wall. 

The Wet Mountains lack craggy, snowy summits, being mostly below timberline, but they excell in steepness. Somebody with a GPS measured a 2300-foot gain in altitude in about a mile and a half (?).

Summit ridges tend to be gentler and fine for just strolling, once you are up there. 

Here, the summit ridge had offered big aspen groves, probably created by a long-ago forest fire that took out the white fir, douglas fir, and ponderosa pine. 

Loppers for small aspens and conifers. The aspens, being clones, will come back eventually, Job security!

The groves, in turn, burned again six years ago, and now show dead standing dead trunks (until the wind blows them all down) and an understory of saplings that make foot travel difficult. Sometimes I think I can find the old trail most easily by shuffling my feet around in the leaf litter.

And then, mid-afternoon, we call it a day, and it's down down down, an hour's walk (with a break). Maybe by this time next year we will have the whole trail rebuilt. 

About those shirts: I could not decide if I felt like an early-seaon deer hunter or a county jail inmate on work-release.

"Right to Wade" Advances in New Mexico and Colorado

Fly-fishing in Colorado (Colorado Parks & Wildife photo)

I am writing this from northern New Mexico, where there are some trout streams — and the usual controveries over landowners blocking access.

Earlier this month, the New Mexico Supreme Court issued an important decision:

The court’s long-awaited opinion further clarifies its March 1 oral decision, which overturned a State Game Commission rule that allowed private landowners to exclude the public from streams flowing through their property. This unanimous decision, as many anglers interpreted it, effectively re-established the public’s constitutional right to wade and fish in these streams.

The court explained that the public’s right to fish and recreate in New Mexico streams has always superseded a private landowner’s right to exclude the public from privately owned streambeds. The justices stressed that as long as the public does not trespass on privately owned lands to access public water, they have every right to walk on and float over these streambeds in order to fish.

Meanwhile, the New York Times has noticed the access war on Colorado rivers, with a case sparked by angler Roger Hill, 81, who enjoys fishing the Arkansas but has encountered viscious opposition by riverside landowners.

The exploding popularity of the outdoors, fueled in part by the limits of the pandemic, has brought a new term to what has long been an etiquette-obsessed sport: combat fishing.

“I tried to take my son fishing last spring,” said Flora Jewell-Stern of Denver, a member of the first all-female team to win the state’s prestigious Superfly tournament. “There was nowhere to park for three miles. And it was a Wednesday.”

For advocates of public access, an upside to the conflict has been the formation of an increasingly assertive alliance of rafters, hunters, kayakers and other river users. Many see themselves as defending more than just pastimes.

Colorado does not have a definitive high-court opinion, but one will be coming. At issue, whether a river or stream is "navigable," which means accessible.

“We’re a total outlier,” said Mark Squillace, an environmental law professor at the University of Colorado who is representing Mr. Hill. “Standing in the bed of the river is something the U.S. Supreme Court has explicitly guaranteed, and the idea that Colorado would try to deny those rights, which are enjoyed by the citizens of every other state, is pretty shocking.”

Mr. Hill would like the state to clarify its position in the face of his historical evidence, which mainly consists of newspaper clippings from the 1870s demonstrating that the Arkansas was at the time flooded with timber used for railroad construction.

“There’s no doubt it’s navigable,” he said.

The attorney general has argued that Mr. Hill lacks standing; the State Supreme Court is reviewing the case, potentially paving the way for a trial this fall.

Mushrooms, Fake Art, Food Trucks, and Controversy at the Colorado State Fair

The last bolete of August? Where is the Jägermeister to summon the hunting horns to blow the "last call"?

We are having what southern Colorado calls "State Fair weather," in other words, hot and dry after a pretty good July-August "monsoon."  Most of my county is now officially out of drought, although my home is on the line between that and "abnorally dry."  The mushroom-hunting ground was a bit dry and not so productive two days ago, so that may be the end of the season, pending some other changes.

Meanwhile, down in Pueblo its time for the Colorado State Fair. No, I have not been yet this year, but there is more weirdness in the news rather than the usual inflated attendance figures.

The Denver Post sent one Conrad Swanson to cover it, who expressed his feelings about the assignment on Twitter with the comment above: "It's no Iowa State Fair but it will have to do." 

Someone responded to the effect that, "Yeah but our butter is infused." 

Meanwhile, Governor Jared Polis himself ventured out of the Denverplex for a ribbon-cutting at a new Interstate 25 interchange near Trinidad.

This is a Good Thing (well, getting Polis out and around the state is probably a good thing too) because it is supposed to aid vistors to the new, big, wild Fisher's Peak State Park. I want to go see it too! (I have a parks pass.)  

Gov. Polis also went to the fair and presented an award to the winning food truck, out of nine contestants. Theme: Your Take on Fair Food.

Charles McKay of the Hungry Buffaltofood truck.

Meanwhile, about fifteen trucks parked at a church across from the fair. These insurrectionist food truck operators were not considered for the award because they were outside the sacred precinct.

[Pastor Tim] Miessler asked the Food Truck Union to staff the portion of the parking lot the church owns during the fair “to offer a more affordable choice and healthy, fresh foods."

Yes, there is a financial angle too, a dispute between the church and the state fair. Read the whole thing.

Meanwhile, artificial intelligence tricked the art judges

The winnah! (Discord screengrab via Vice.com)

This has already gone national.  Apparently judges at the fair's art show gave a first place to a painting created by articial intelligence at a website.

“I won first place,” a user going by Sincarnate said in a Discord post above photos of the AI-generated canvases hanging at the fair. . . .

The image, which Allen printed on canvas for submission, is gorgeous. It depicts a strange scene that looks like it could be from a space opera, and it looks like a masterfully done painting. Classical figures in a Baroque hall stair through a circular viewport into a sun-drenched and radiant landscape.

But Allen did not paint “Théâtre D'opéra Spatial,” AI software called Midjourney did. It used his prompts, but Allen did not wield a digital brush. This distinction has caused controversy on Twitter where working artists and enthusiasts accused Allen of hastening the death of creative jobs.

 I expect that we will hear more about the art award.

This Bear Was Here

Next time, please face the camera

Beside the photo from the 18th, I had been seeing other signs of a hungy bear in the neighborhood: another dumped garbage can (not photographed) and a couple of big fresh bear turds with green apple skins in them. 

So maybe this individual, who ambled past a camera set about a quarter-mile from my house, is the one? Good luck finding those daily 20,000 calories, Bear!

The Eternal Verities of Tarantulas

Yesterday at the grocery store in Pueblo, the conversation was about tarantulas — one of the employees explaining how he tries to usher the huge spiders out of the house before his wife sees and kills them.

It's that season:

Every year, 10,000s of male tarantulas start marching around the southern part of Colorado, typically from late August through October as summer nighttime temperatures cool.

The eternal verities: we Homo saps might all vanish, but giant hairy spiders will still march across the land.

Generally, the first tarantulas to appear will show up in southeastern Colorado around the end of August, roaming throughout the month of September. A second, southwestern wave will appear a bit later in the year, with their presence peaking in October. These fuzzy fist-sized arachnids creep around on a quest to find a mate and after mating, they'll die — typically at the hands of their mate or due to cold weather.

They really should be the mascot for Colorado State University-Pueblo, not the made up-by-a-committee "thunderwolf":

Lira is a student ambassador at CSU-Pueblo, and she often leads campus tours for prospective students and their parents. During these outings, Lira touts the tarantula as a captivating aspect of the campus that sits on a bluff above the Arkansas River several miles from downtown Pueblo. It’s not uncommon to see a tarantula skirting an open expanse as summer cedes to fall. But don’t worry, Lira assures visitors, sightings are intermittent, and the spiders are not harmful to people.

“It’s one of my engagement points when I talk to students because it’s one of the unique things they might experience here,” said Lira, a junior on a pre-veterinary track. “Not having a city impede on you allows you to see the wildlife around us, and tarantulas are part of what you might see. It’s cool being on the outside of the city because you get to experience the prairie. It’s an opportunity for discovery.”

Let the rhythms of nature sooth you.

Western and Colorado Drought Maps, August 9, 2022

 We remain "abnormally dry," despite all the rain. Dry soils, low reservoirs.

What the Mushroom Monsoon Looks Like

A quick shot from the Junkins Burn of 2016 in Colorado's Wet Mountains  — looking roughly west, so the haze is a cold front (relatively speaking "cold") rolling in from the north.

The summer "monsoon" lost its quotation marks in the 1990s or 2000s and is now full-fledged cultural appropriation — English language for the win! 

So July and early August have been fairly wet by southern Colorado standards. Our standards are these: 

1 inch (2.5 cm) of rain in a day: "Ma! Ma! The crops are saved!"

2 inches of rain in a day: "Oh no! Flash floods! The road will wash out — but we need the moisture."

Shaggy parasol, Lepiota rachodes.

On the plus side, mushrooms. Like everyone else who hunts them, M. and I are making forays, and while we have had no bonanza days, we never have come home empty-handed.

Tuesday was such a day: we drove 45 minutes, hiked to a new ridge top, Marco the dog ran happily,  and then when we came home, there they were! Mushrooms just yards from the house. 

Shaggy parasols with caps the size of softballs hiding in the scrub oak —  I left the biggest ones to spread their spores. 

I think this one is Suillus granulatus.

The Suillus that we see only in wet Augusts  — often called slippery jacks, a name applied to several species.

I think of them as the dollar-store version of king boletes: not as big, not quite as tasty, but OK to eat as long as you them before the worms appear.

Which Colorado County Is "Most Rural"?

Hinsdale Co. Courthouse, Lake City, Colo. (Hinsale County)

This particular set of numbers is based on permanent population density, so a couple of tourist-heavy counties such as Pitkin County (Aspen) and Eagle County (Vail and its suburbs) make the list, along with places you would expect, such as Jackson and Cheyenne counties.

"The Most-Rural Counties in Colorado"

The winner, Hinsdale County, also has mostly summer residents, but its year-around population is the lowest.

I live in one of these counties, and our sheriff says the population triples in the summer. That probably is typical.

Now is it just me, or is the language changing? 

I keep hearing people say county names without the suffix "County" on them. Like, "I used to live in El Paso, but then I moved to Fremont." Or "I'm going to be up in Chaffee all day tomorrow."

Anyone else hearing this?

Looking for Monkey Creek, Part 6: What We Found

Part 1: "What Monkey?"
Part 2: "The First Hike"
Part 3: "Flesh and Blood"
Part 4: "Paranormal Bigfoot"
Part 5: "Tree Structures"

Saw a sticker like this
on a car in Pueblo last week

All morning on the way to Monkey Creek, I had seen the humor in the situation.

I am not a "Bigfoot guy" in any real way. It's more like I am up in the cheap seats, listening to some podcasts (notably Timothy Renner's Strange Familiars), looking at a few websites, and that is about all. I don't have a "Gone Squatchin'" bumper sticker or even a Colorado-flag Bigfoot decal on the rear window as a symbol of wildness.

Yes, the "Monkey Creek" name was intriguing, and I plan to try again to find a source for it. But this was just a day trip, with some post-hike fishing planned on the South Platte River.

Then I looked up into the old burn.

Note that branches are laid on both sides of the fallen tree trunk in the foreground,
whereas the stacks further away are more conical. None have room for anyone insde them.

My eye was caught by multiple stacks of wood. At first I thought, "Slash piles." But that could not be right.

When forests are thinned for fire mitigation, large logs are hauled away while saplings, tree tips, and branches (collectively, "slash") are stacked, allowed to dry, and then burned when there is snow on the ground. This is a labor-intensive process, and where conditions permit, contractors will sometimes use large machines (masticators) that just chew smaller trees into wood chips and spray those out.

But this was not mitigration, this was a wildland fire from decades ago. Firefighters building a line may toss chunks of burning wood into "bone piles," so that they will burn up and not be a problem, but they do not leave slash piles for later.

And who would build a slash pile over a fallen trunk that would smoulder on indefinitely?

Close-up of the foreground "pup tent" stack. There is no room inside—it's all sticks.

The piles were clearly built some time after the burned trunks had fallen, using a mixture of charred and unburnt wood. They could not be shelters — there was no room inside, not even for a little kid. Therefore, I ruled out any kind of survival training, like Boy Scouts or US Air Force Academy cadets learning "escape and evasion" tactics. (They do that, but usually in the Rampart Range closer to the Academy, I think.)

So not slash piles for later burning and not shelters either. What does that leave?

Two of several conical stacks of wood.

Note that the pile in the shade is laid against a log —
not how you build a slash pile for burning.

Unlike some of the claimed "tree structures" that might be the result of wind + gravity, these structures were definitely created deliberately. They would not work as shelters, and they do not seem to be connected to forestry practice as I know it — and I grew up with that stuff. I do not read them as created for wildlife habitat either, not at 10,500 feet (3200 m.) in an Englemann spruce-dominated forest.

An ambitious person could have built them all in a morning's work, but why? For future pyromania? Just to mess with people coming up a lightly used trail who have Bigfoot on the brain? 

I saw two "pup tent" structures laid against logs and at least six "tipi" structures scattered up the ridge. So that was a fair amount of work if it was just for fun.

Or what? I have admit that I started feeling a little strange, like that was enough for one day and now it was time to drive out, stop in Fairplay for a burrito, and then go fishing. If the structures were kind of a prank, well, it worked. If not a prank, then it is a mystery to me.

Looking for Monkey Creek, Part 5: Tree Structures

This is not a "tree structure" but a stack of saplings cut by
a trail crew in the San Isabel NF. But it could pass for one
if you ignore the saw cuts on the butt ends.

Part 1: "What Monkey?"
Part 2: "The First Hike"
Part 3: "Flesh and Blood"
Part 4: "Paranormal Bigfoot"

Search YouTube for "Bigfoot tree structures," and you will get dozens of hits with titles like "My Bigfoot Story Ep. 48 - Stick Structures and Other Signs" and "Team Finds Multiple Unexplainable Tree Structures." (Just click here for a bigger sample.)

What is a "tree structure"? The definition is pretty loose. Apparently any two or three or four (usually) smaller-diameter trunks lying against each other in a vaguely tipi-shaped way is a "structure." Some people talk about "stick structures": broken or leaning sticks, particularly if they seemed to be arranged in some non-random way.

There are also "tree breaks," for Bigfoot is often thought to snap trees by brute force as a way of scaring off intruders.

What do tree structures mean? Here is some typical speculation:

As for why Bigfoot might engage in such curious behavior, the theories are several. At first glance, one might assume they have been constructed to offer the beasts a degree of shelter, and particularly so during the cold, winter months. In many cases, however, there does not appear to have been any attempt made to create a canopy or walls. In other words, the structures are open to the environment and all of its attendant harshness.  Other theories are more intriguing: it has been speculated that, perhaps, the teepees represent territorial markers, created by Bigfoot creatures to alert others of their kind that they are present in the area. They may also be a warning to man, to stay firmly away – although, of course, the obscure nature of the formations effectively means that very few are of us are likely to understand such a warning, never mind act upon it.

Meanwhile, back on Monkey Creek, June 20, 2022,  having had our first short walk, I looked at the map and saw that a rough Forest Service road (dashed lines), climbing toward Topaz Mountain, crossed Monkey Creek higher up. Back in the Jeep, Marco and I headed that way.

Aside from some protruding rocks, the road was in good shape. No one else appeared to be up there. We drove down into one drainage (yet another "Beaver Creek") then up and along to where it crossed Monkey Creek.

There we found a small parking lot (probably a former loggers' "landing") and signage for the Nate Stulz Trail, which runs from Lost Park (where we had come in from South Park) up and over the Tarryalls to another trailhead near Tarryall Reservoir.

After investigating the creek, which seemed to lack little brookies, we followed the trail upstream, but ended up losing it, because a creek crossing was obscured by brush. 

We went on fifty yards or so on the "wrong" side of the creek, and then I spotted what looked like a road further up — it was an old logging road, full of sapling spruces, and we followed it ten minutes or so until it crossed the creek and intersected the official trail.

The trail led up through an old forest fire burn.

There had been a forest fire up there, probably a lightning strike since we were on a ridge, and I guess-timated that it was more than twenty years in the past. What had been standing dead spruce had rotted at the roots and fallen to the winter winds, mostly all pointing the same direction. 

I whistled for Marco and started on up the trail. I could see more open views in the near distance, and it was a great day for a hike in the Tarryalls.

And then something else caught my eye. 

Part 6: "What We Found"

Looking for Monkey Creek, Part 4: Paranormal Bigfoot

Part 1: What Monkey?
Part 2: The First Hike
Part 3: Flesh and Blood

A claimed 1988 Bigfoot sighting in Green Mountain Falls, Colorado, led to the placing
of this humorous Bigfoot Crossing sign on the Pike's Peak Highway above the town.

Bigfoot researchers split into two main groups, "flesh-and-blood" and "paranormal," for lack of better terms. Anthropologist Grover Krantz, who typified the flesh-and-blood contingent, referred to the latter in his 1992 book Big Footprints: A Scientific Inquiry into the Reality of Sasquatch as "the lunatic fringe":

There is little need to specifically address the claims of any particular paranoromalist . . . . It is more effective simply to promote what we do know and to ignore as much as possible, and avoid any association with, those people who are making the investigation appear ridiculous. (256)

In 1988, I was a reporter at the Cañon City Daily Record. Dan Masias, a resident of Green Mountain Falls, west of Colorado Springs, claimed that he and his young son had looked out from their house one winter day and seen two "creatures" walking past in shallow snow. He got no photos of them, but he did photograph the tracks in the fresh powder snow. (Some neighbors had also reported odd sightings.) 

The large tracks had three toes and — important detail — went on for a few yards and then simply stopped. By the time we visited, Masias had constructed what amounted to a Bigfoot shrine in one room of his home, with the photos, news clippings, and other memorabilia.

Some readers contacted me afterwards with reports of other strangeness in the Pike's Peak area, including combination UFO-bigfoot sightings. I had never heard of the two being grouped together before, but as I said, I had not paid much attention to bigfoot stuff before, even when living in western Oregon.

"Paranormalists" see Bigfoot encounters as part of a broad spectrum of events that intrude into normal reality. You often hear the source for these intrusions described as The Other. The creatures are sometimes physical (and obey physical laws) and at other times are not. The footprints end.

So when I did think about Bigfoot, which is reported in the Western Hemiphere from Chile to Ontario, the flesh-and-blood explanation broke down over simple zoological questions: What does this "wood ape" eat in wintertime when the black bears, by comparison, are hibernating? (No known ape hibernates) How many must there be in X square miles to support a breeding population with sufficient genetic variety? How do they raise the young wood apes successfully while staying hidden 99.99 percent of the time? 

 

The paranormalists' answer is simple but incredibly mysterious. Timothy Renner and Joshua Cutchin, authors of the two-book series Where the Footprints End, conceptualize it this way:

Flesh-and-blood apes seem to dematerialize and slip through our fingers like wisps of smoke. Nuts-and-bolts UFOS refuse to land on the White House lawn but shoot away at impossible speeds. Clinging to one side of the Möbius strip, we may not notice the twist, but viewed from afar we see the very twist itself allows things to walk on both sides of the loop.

    The idea that something can be real — in that most Materialist definition of reality, i.e., it is physically here (in terms of sasquatch, for example, able to leave footprints and move things) — and yet completely ephemeral has led to even more "science-fiction thinking." Desparately trying to prove the physical reality of bigfoot, yet faced with all the attendant problems of proving a breeding population exists, bigfoot enthusiasts have tured to explanations as varied as quantum physics, interdimensional travel, or even that bigfoot may themselves be aliens, brought here by the Ufonauts. (vol 2, 38, italics in the original)

They add, "When [bigfoot and UFOs] appear together the mystery deepens, but becomes more wondrous at the same time."

Thus, the paranormalists accuse the Grover Krantzes of this world of editing out "strangeness" from Bigfoot sightings (concurrent appearsances of odd lights, UFOs, or strange noises such as loud buzzing or metallic crashing) and also of editing out "sighting" locations that don't look like hypothetical Bigfoot habitat, such as Midwestern golf courses or Texas suburban cul-de-sacs.

There is one point, however, on which many flesh-and-blood and paranormal Bigfoot enthusiast do agree, and that is that the creatures are fond of building "tree structures."  Let's examine that term next before returning to Monkey Creek.

 Part 5: "Tree Structures"