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.

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.

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.

Lesser Prairie Chickens Reintroduced in SE Colorado

Some footage from Colorado Parks & Wildlife's ongoing efforts to re-establish lesser prairie chickens on the Comanche National Grassland in southeastern Colorado.

From the CPW news release:

CAMPO, Colo. – Lesser prairie chickens, gone for decades from the Colorado landscape, are again living on the eastern plains, thanks to an ambitious four-year project led by biologists from Colorado Parks and Wildlife, Kansas, the U.S. Forest Service, along with private landowners.

Recently completed surveys by CPW biologists revealed that hundreds of the birds are now thriving on breeding grounds, known as leks, on the plains extending across southeastern Colorado and western Kansas.

Lesser prairie chickens once numbered in the tens of thousands in those grasslands. But a variety of factors led to their gradual disappearance. Experts blame, in part, the conversion a century ago of grasslands to cropland that contributed to the Dust Bowl in 1932 and wiped out many of the birds. More recently, the lesser prairie chicken population in Southeast Colorado and Southwest Kansas was devastated by severe snowstorms, particularly in December 2006, followed by years of drought.

They even vanished on a 330,000-acre swath of sand sagebrush and grasslands known as the Comanche National Grassland in Baca County, Colo., and the Cimarron National Grassland in Morton County, Kan., as well as privately owned rangeland and Conservation Reserve Program grassland. . . .

By 2016, biologists counted just two males on the Comanche and five males on the Cimarron.

That same year, CPW decided to try relocating lesser prairie chickens from thriving breeding grounds in Kansas in hopes of resurrecting leks on the national grasslands. So a CPW team, led by conservation biologists Jonathan Reitz and Liza Rossi, began working in collaboration with the Kansas Department of Wildlife, Parks and Tourism, Kansas State University and the U.S. Forest Service. . . .

Over the past four years, the team of Colorado and Kansas biologists, and K-State graduate students, relocated 103 males and 102 females to the Comanche. The team also released 101 males and 105 females during the same time period just east of the state line 

Read the whole thing. 

Extra-credit question: What is the relationship between prairie chickens and contemporary pow-wow fancy dancing?

Bobcats Released, Bunnies Beware

Bobcats. Photo by Tom Sanders, Wet Mountain Wildlife.

Two  bobcat kittens (Felis rufus) came into the local rehabilitation shelter a year ago. Actually, at one point there were three, but one released himself, hung around for a time for the free meals, and then went on his way. These two stayed put and ate rats. Lots of rats, delivered by the Rat Man, who was usually me.

I picked up so many rats at the Raptor Center that I felt I needed a steampunk Rat Man costume and a Cockney accent: "Foine rats, madam. None better!"

I always thought the Raptor Center raised their own rats and mice, but they buy them too. They come neatly arranged on a plastic-wrapped foam tray, just like when you buy rats at the supermarket. 

Rats may be ordered by size, up from "pinkies" to "jumbo," or whatever the New York-size ones are called.

But enough about rats. The bobcats are them, grew up, and on the summer solstice they were released on the High Plains near Limon, Colorado. If you were thinking of them as a forest cat, think again — they were found near Limon, and they can make a living on rabbits, rodents, and maybe by scavenging birds knocked out the sky by the renewable electricity project in the background of the video (courtesy of Colorado Parks & Wildlife).

Bird Festival, Cattle-Rustling, and Elk in Beetle-Kill Forests

• Plan now for the Mountain Plover Festival.

• You’ll get the chance to mingle with farmers and ranchers who choose to live in the local community and learn about their lifestyle.
• Eat home-style food at every meal. Most meal are prepared by the community non-profit organizations.
• Saturday evening includes a chuck wagon dinner with authentic Western entertainment.
• Learn about conservation practices and history of the area.
• Tour Private Land that would normally not be accessible.
• Make new friends! Here's the website.

Sounds perfect if you are allergic to cities.  

• Cattle-rustling still happens in 21st-century Colorado.

But even keeping a close eye on livestock sales doesn’t prevent Colorado ranchers from experiencing their share of losses. Annual reports of missing or stolen livestock — the vast majority being cattle — average a little over 100, with losses ranging from a little over 400 to more than 650 head over the past four years. But that’s where the numbers get a little fuzzy.

• Pine beetles and the fungus they carry have killed huge amounts of lodgepole pine forest in the northern Rockies. As the dead trees drop their needles and become just standing trunks, more grass comes up between them. So that would be good for elk, right?

The evidence, however, is mixed. Some species do benefit, but not much the elk.

Looking at elk daytime use during the summer in Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest in south-central Wyoming, [University of Wyoming researcher Bryan G.] Lamont’s team expected to find mixed results. The loss of canopy would likely mean a loss in thermal cover, and more downed trees would make it difficult for the elk to move, forcing them to expend more energy. On the other hand, with new understory growth, elk would have more vegetation to forage. They expected elk might avoid the densest areas of downed trees but take advantage of the forage in other places.

Instead, elk tended to avoid beetle-killed areas overall, resulting in much less forest habitat that the elk use to keep cool during summer days. Beetle kill, researchers found, was different for the elk in important ways from wildfires or other disturbances.

 Time on the elk's side, however, as the dead trees start to fall and decay. Read the whole article here.

End of the Season in a Mountain Town

M. and I went over to Westcliffe Friday night to watch a movie in a real (and historic) theater.

Westcliffe is not a ski town, not a river town, not a mountain-biking town. When its one ski area, Conquistador, finally faceplanted too many times and shut down in 1993, the town gave a collective yawn and got on with its real industry, building mountain mini-mansions.

There are a bazillion photos taken looking west down Main Street toward the Sangre de Cristo Range, all variations of this one:

Add more a few more trees, neo-historic streetlamps, paving, and diagonal parking,
and you have the Westcliffe of today.

It occurred to me as I sat on a street bench across from the Jones Theater that you could pick up the whole place and set it down in, say, Phillips County—only with neo-historic streetlamps and a "dark skies" ordinance. The two counties' populations are about the same, and the buildings would fit right in.

The only difference is that almost no one is building mini-mansions all around Phillips County, thus supporting numerous small construction firms. On the prairie there is maybe less talk about agricultural "heritage" and more actual agriculture.

Walking down Main Street, it seemed like every third retail space was for rent and almost every restaurant for sale. Chappy's, our favorite bar for Westcliffe visits, was "closed for renovation." I hope that's not a euphemism.

The Chamber of Commerce types want more economic activity. Factories? In all these towns and small cities the refrain is, "We don't want our kids to move away." But guess what, the kids are going to move away.  Maybe some will come back later and find a way to make a living. Most will not. (Did I go back to Del Norte or Rapid City? Nope.)

What you can get in a place like Westcliffe:

• First-run movies
• Hardware store merchandise (the Ace store is pretty good)
• Carhart clothing (at the hardware store)
• "Western decor" items
• Paintings by local artists
• Grass-fed beef
• "Lowest-common denominator groceries" (M.'s phrase)
• Hiking boots 
• Firearms
• Automotive repair
• The rural health clinic

What you cannot get:

• Auto parts
• Books
• Other clothing
• Appliances
• Specialized medical care
• All kinds of other things that send people "down the hill," leading to much Facebook angst about road conditions

Then there is the new but growing Amish population (buggies at 8,000 feet!) who have a different set of shopping needs and probably rely sometimes on mail order from Gohn Bros. or wherever.

So there is much complaint about how retail businesses (except hardware) cannot succeed with a season that is only four months long.

On the other hand, there seems to be little desire to be one of those resort towns with a different manufactured "festival" every other weekend throughout the year. The argument goes around and around.

But the views!

Windmills, Missing Cattle, and Free Online Hunter Ed

The model on the left needs a jacket that fits her, don't you think?
Outdoor gear made from women's bodies-- still too hard to find (NRA American Hunter magazine.)

• The NRA is putting together free online hunter-education classes — they are only acceptable for a certificate in three states right now, but safety is safety, right? Here is an article about them from American Hunter.

• If you hunt on the High Plains, your eye is drawn to windmills? Is it still pumping? If there water there that might draw quail or whatever? You can still buy one if you need it. Otherwise, here is a good history of American windmills.

•  Range cattle are disappearing in the San Luis Valley, reports Saguache Today. And this being the SLV, the writer can't help write the expected lede: "Missing Livestock. For many residents, these two words usually conjure up one of two images: outlaw-cowboy rustlers or visiting-alien mutilators."

Last November, the largest herd of 46 was reported to have vanished from the Double X Cattle Company as they were out running in the Cumbers Forest Allotment. In total, 114 head of cattle went missing in Colorado during the month of November. And those were the ones that were officially reported.

But seriously, a really big rustling ring? Or maybe some insurance or loan fraud going on.

A  public meeting was held last Thursday—  sounds like it was mostly devoted to reporting procedures.

Linkage into the Wild

Other linkage:

¶ Alaska writer Craig Medred proposes some cures for "bus madness," in other words, the pilgrims and wannabes who turn the abandoned bus where Chris "Supertramp" McCandless died into a destination — and who often have to be rescued at public expense.

A sample:

Ransom the Bus: Americans, or at least some of them, seem to think there’s something mythical, mystical, magic, marvelous, mad or some other m-word about visiting a bus where some poor, foolish young man sadly starved to death. Let them pay to keep their shrine out there. Put out a press release warning that the cash-strapped state of Alaska cannot afford further rescues, and unless people contribute $500,000 this year to save the bus it will be blown up as public nuisance. Let America start a GoFundTheBus campaign.

¶ A new cultural history of the Great Plains for that mythical creature, the general reader: Great Plains Indians by historical geographer David Wishart. It's part of a new series from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, "Discover the Great Plains."

¶ A retrospective of setter and pointer dogs in advertising art. That is not two different appreviations for "Colorado," but rather Delta County and the town of Cedaredge.

Of Sage Grouse and Prairie Chicken Display

This is the time of year when people are booking tours to the dance grounds (leks) of sage grouse and prairie chickens.

If the tours are full, here is some footage from the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, outtakes and behind-the-scenes material from the film The Sagebrush Sea.

I have long assumed that some of the traditional Plains Indian dance-costuming and moves are based on these amazing spring displays.

Bear with Me — There's More

Bear enjoying late-season tomatoes.

More links that I need to clear . . . 

• "The Hermit: New Mexico's First Mountaineer" — it's a story of religion, violence, penitence, and isolation, in other words, New Mexico.

• Some birds do well in cities and suburbs. How can we help them?

• We are told the decades of forest-fire suppression has led to hotter, bigger files. But a CU study suggests that severe fires are not new on Colorado's Front Range.  

• Plans to sequence the genome of the oldest dogs found in North America.

• Outdoor magazine's best 25 books for well-read explorers. Old Glory, yes!

• Everyone hears about Coronado's expedition in the American southwest,  no one about Francisco Leyva de Bonilla's. Maybe that is because it was such as disaster.

• Saving a big piece of southeastern Colorado's canyon country. And a chunk of the High Plains east of Pueblo.

• Why are we still talking about Chris "Supertramp" McCandless?

Twenty-three years after his death, McCandless still has people talking — debating his cause of death, condemning his choices and discussing how perhaps they, too, can leave everything behind and walk into the wild.

• A "river of sheep" in northwestern Colorado. Good photos.

Only for Weather Nerds

If you live in Wyoming, the Black Hills, Colorado, or western Kansas and Nebraska, the most interesting weather forecast happens online, a service of the Geographical Area Coordinating Centers (now there is a bland and opaque bureaucratic name).

The "Daily Fire Fire Potential Briefing," a short mp4 video, talks a lot about relative humidy and wind but also serves well for forecasting weather in your area or where you plan to be going for outdoor activities.

Admitedly, the narrator sounds like the most boring graduate student teaching assistant that you ever had in college. But the info is solid. (So was the TA's, probably.)

John Martin Reservoir is Full Again

Enjoy it while it's this way.

I have never fished John Martin, but I have tried it for waterfowling with mixed success. When it is high like this, you can find some cover and improvise a blind.

But when it is low,  the best areas are surrounded by a wide margin of boot-sucking mud. I wonder how far down the original bottom is under the the silt that has washed in.

News release from Colorado Parks and Wildlife:

HASTY, Colo. - The wet Colorado spring at John Martin Reservoir has allowed something that hasn’t been seen for quite a while: high water levels.

That means it’s a great time to visit the park. There’s plenty of room for boating in the reservoir that now spans roughly nine miles long and two miles wide. There's also 200-plus campsites and nearly five miles of hiking trails to explore.

Water levels at John Martin Reservoir are nearly seven times higher than levels last year. As of June 23, the reservoir had 276,000 acre feet of water, while last year at a similar time of year the reservoir held only around 30,000 acre feet.

"The reservoir hasn't looked like this in a long time," said Park Manager Dan Kirmer. "If you haven't been to the reservoir before or haven't been in awhile, you definitely need to come check it out."

Boat, picnic and fish at this peaceful oasis known for its wildlife. John Martin Reservoir is also considered a birdwatcher's paradise with almost 400 species documented in Bent County.

Beat the crowds and long lines at boat ramps at other reservoirs across the state and enjoy the open water at John Martin Reservoir. While the dock at the east boat ramp had to be closed, boats can still launch and both the east and west boat ramps remain open.

The reservoir is letting in water at a rate of around 3,900 cubic feet per second and is releasing at a rate of about 820 cfs, so the high water levels will remain for a while.

For more information about John Martin Reservoir State Park call 719-829-1801, or click here.

The Vanished Corn Farmers and a Cooler, Drier Future?

There is a lot of Apocalypse Porn going around, like in the closing of this article on the flooded shopping mall in Bangkok. Coastal inhabitants will be living in shacks on the roofs of flooded office buildings, etc. etc.

We have been telling the story of the Great Flood for at least 4,000 years, after all.

On the other hand, some researchers of solar-output cycles still see a better chance of a coming period that is cooler — and drier. Let's start with the story of some corn-growing prehistoric villages in what is now Iowa:

There were possibly over one thousand Indian villages on the Great Plains from Iowa to Colorado during the Medieval Warm Period. In the early 19th century when the explorers who spearheaded the European invasion of the American heartland crossed the plains, they found no corn-farming villages. They left behind the last of the agricultural tribes as they moved out onto the grasslands – the Akira and Mandan on the Missouri and the Pawnee in eastern Kansas – not to find corn fields again until reaching the Pueblos in the southern Rockies. Remnants of the villages were uncovered in the early 20th century as layers of debris covered by wind-blown soil.

In other words, the subsequent Little Ice Age made maize farming more and more difficult except in favored locations, and no one was doing it (except maybe at El Cuartelejo) much west of present-day Wichita.

The phrase "lower solar activity, and thus a posited colder climate" produced a lot of heat in the comments section, at least.

Blog Stew on Horseback

 ¶ Western dude ranchers are having to buy bigger horses for fatter guests.

"Little horses just aren't sturdy enough to hold up in a dude operation in the Rocky Mountains," Kipp Saile said, noting that about 15 of their 60 horses were Percheron mixes, the largest weighing 1,800 pounds.

¶ Colorado's oil and gas-drilling boom is polluting farm land (spills, drilling waste), and oil companies hope that microbes will clean up the hydrocarbons.

The number of spills reported by companies reached a 10-year peak of 578 last year (43 related to the September floods), contaminating an estimated 173,400 tons of topsoil, according to the COGCC data, which come from reports companies are required to file.

While energy companies responsible for spills recover much of the liquid hydrocarbons during cleanups, an analysis of the data shows that roughly 45 percent stays in soil.

¶ Never mind the propaganda about how corn-based ethanol is "patriotic." Even the business press, like Forbes, is moving to the position that ethanol is a loss overall. (Especially when you use High Plains Aquifer water to grow the corn.)

Some High Plains Bird News

Mountain Plover (Cornell Univ.)

Another news story on the upcoming annual Kaval mountain plover festival. Or how a tiny farming town, fearful of federal regulation, learned to love a (not officially) threatened species.

Meanwhile, to the southeast, the lesser prairie chicken has been placed on the "threatened" list.

The prairie chicken, a type of grouse known for its colorful neck plume and stout build, has lost more than 80 percent of its traditional habitat, mostly because of human activity such as oil and gas drilling, ranching and construction of power lines and wind turbines, Ashe said. The bird, which weighs from 1 ½ to 2 pounds, has also been severely impacted by the region's ongoing drought.

Populations in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado and New Mexico are affected. Governors are upset. So when is the Lesser Prairie Chicken Festival?

You Can't Burn 'Em, You Can't Plow 'Em: SE Colorado's Tumbleweed Blizzard

Southeast Colorado county officials try to deal with the combination of blustery spring winds and last summer's bumper crop of tumbleweeds (Russian thistle).

Burning kills the seeds, but you cannot burn them when it is windy. And the various mulching solutions just scatter the seeds.

A Piñon Canyon "Armistice"

The big news in southern Colorado back in the late 1970s was the Army's search for a new training area for mechanized troops.

Blue is the current PCMS, brown the proposed expansion area.
Green areas are the Comanche National Grasslands (Wikicommons).

Fort Carson, formed during World War II (at the begging of city fathers who wanted soldiers' pay spent in Colorado Springs), was created by expropriating ranch land to create the 137,000-acre military reservation.

But it was not enough anymore, the Army said. They wanted another training area close enough to shuttle units back and forth. Various locations were suggested: South Park, the San Luis Valley, the High Plains.

The High Plains "won," and a new round of condemnations created the 235,896-acre Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site along the Purgatory River.

Some landowners took the money and ran, while others fought futilely against the federal government.

It's possible to hunt on PCMS, and my friend Eric and I took advantage of that to explore various archaeological sites, old and new. I remember walking into an abandoned house in the late 1980s and finding, for example, a 1977 Sears Roebuck catalog still lying on a kitchen counter, while kids' toys littered the living room floor. It was a sad scene.

At the same time, I had to admit that Army ownership gave those of us who jumped through a couple of bureaucratic hoops opportunities to explore country that we never could have entered before.

The Army's civilian wildlife specialists kept windmills pumping water for deer and antelope and lobbied to keep training activities out of "sensitive areas." One of them told me that they would mark off small wetlands, for example, with engineer's tape, and the troops were supposed to treat them as "minefields."

An area containing the now-famous dinosaur trackway was transferred to the U.S. Forest Service and opened to the public.

But generals kept hinting that they needed still more land — more than 400,000 acres — and local residents lobbied Colorado politicians to stop that. Homemade signs saying "This land is not for sale to the Army" went up in Otero, Las Animas, and other counties.

Late last November (I missed this at the time), the Army backed down.

At the urging of Sen. Mark Udall, a Boulder County Democrat, Army Assistant Secretary Katherine Hammack used the paperwork equivalent of a wooden stake to kill expansion plans for the 235,000-acre training site.

"It's kind of an emotional moment," said Las Animas County Commissioner Gary Hill, a rancher and neighbor of the training area who has been at war with the Army over expansion for years.

The Army's reason is that fewer troops means less need for training. But then they would never admit that the years of bad publicity, political conflict, and hard feelings mattered.

Furthermore, generals and assistant secretaries come and go, but the expansion plan, once written, can last for decades.

The Tumbleweed Menace

Colorado Springs Gazette columnist Bill Radford notices the tumbleweed hordes of 2013. 

Oh yeah. I am not one of those people who goes around mowing everything mowable — that is so Midwestern— but this year I mowed one little meadow that I had not touched in twenty years, because it was sprouting kochia and Russian thistle, the baddies:

In El Paso County, the two chief culprits are Russian thistle and kochia, [rancher Sharon] Pattee says. The Colorado State University Extension labels them both as "troublesome annual weeds of rangeland, pastures, fields, disturbed areas, gardens, roadsides, ditch banks and small acreages."

Both are non-native species. Russian thistle originated in, yep, Russia, and is believed to have come to the United States in the late 1800s through contaminated flax seed. Kochia is from Asia.

Tumbleweed Christmas trees? Been there, done that. One year when I was little, I was sick in bed during Christmas, so my older sisters decorated a big globe tumbleweed with glass ornaments and put it by my bed.

This was when we lived in Rapid City, S.D., where they were easy to come by.  This year in southern Colorado, every barbed wire fence looks like a fuzzy brown wall. Yeech.