Blog Stew: You Are Tracking It

• Watch the video trailer for a class on animal trailing and tracking taught by Casey McFarland,  "but also, by extension, appreciating our connection to the natural world and how to view it more discerningly."

At the website, select "Nature Watching: How to Find and Observe Wildlife." and click the "Start Free Trial" button. See what you think.

• This small fact has been in the news of late. I read it at The Hill in February: Plastics recycling is a bigger scam than 'cigarettes are good for you.' Coincidentally, the reccyling facility that I used went from "accepting plastic" to "separate no. 1 and no. 2 plastics" to "sorry, no plastic accepted."

• After her angler husband died, Dylan Demery of Fort Collins wanted to take up fly-fishing herself.

Then she ran into the fly fishing-bros at the typical fly shop, who would ask her if she was buying something for her husband, if they waited on her at all.

Frustrated, she started her own women's gear line and fishing school, as described The Colorado Sun. 

Fishing wasn’t going to lose her. Ranalla became hooked — heh — after fishing helped her as much physically as mentally: fly casting helped her rehabilitate from an injury when nothing else worked. She was willing to wear waders that fit her poorly because she loved the sport. There aren’t many like her. Not even her daughter, in fact, was willing, and that’s what drove Ranalla to change the industry. Her daughter is tall, 5’11, and shaped like a woman. 

“I wanted my daughter to go into the water with me,” Ranalla said. “I bought the best thing I could find. It was lame. I knew she would never get in the water with it.”

Blog Stew Followed by Pie

¶ That there is, in fact, an actual place called Pie Town, New Mexico, continues to fascinate food writers. Going to Pie Town is compared to eating beignets at the Cafe Du Monde in New Orleans — a culinary "rite of passage."

¶ We are still thinking about what Colorado forests will look like after the big beetle kills.

During a year of extreme drought, in 2002, the first signs of this latest North American mountain pine beetle outbreak started appearing. From 2006 to 2009, three million acres of red-needled lodgepole pines blossomed into nine million acres of dead trees spanning from New Mexico to Montana, west to Washington, and all the way up into Canada. West of Fort Collins, the picturesque landscape of Rocky Mountain National Park was transfigured when the majority of the park’s large pole [sic. Should be "lodgepole"] pine died.

(That is what happens when editors never leave the asphalt.)

¶ "Why Americans are the Weirdest People in the World." A funny read on perception.

Willdfire Can Be Different in a University Town

It now comes out that the recent 1,348-acre Galena Fire outside Fort Collins was started by a retired nuclear physicist from the Los Alamos National Laboratory. 

The device was one of many do-it-yourself projects keeping George Rinker occupied in retirement. Some had led to unintended results or scared neighbors, but nothing compared to this mistake.