Six Years After the Spring Creek Fire

The Spring Creek Fire ripped through big parts of Costilla and Huerfano counties in southern Colorado in June-July 2018. Periodically I drive through one area because it's on my route to New Mexico.

A lot of (mostly summer) homes in this area survived — clearly because they benefited from retardant drops all around them. It sure changes the view from the old picture window though.

This photo is published in accordance with the Colorado Photography Act of 1964 (familiarly called the "Ektachrome Act"), which requires that all professional and semi-professional photographers in the state—essentially anyone who has ever sold a photo—shoot at least one full roll of slide film on scenic shots featuring golden aspen groves

Lettuce Get Down to Business

Photo from 1918 of the Mahon Ranch, west of Buena Vista.
Pictured are Martha Mahon, her daughter Cassie and Cassie’s husband, George Fields, with crates of head lettuce. Courtesy of Buena Vista Heritage Museum.

An article in the SkiHi News from Grand County, Colo, (Motto: 'The wolves are here, now where are the bucks?") notes the area's success with growing lettuce in the 1920s.

When some of the first settlers arrived in Granby, they realized the sunny days and cool nights were perfect for growing lettuce. The humble lettuce thrived in the mountainous landscape. . . . The Moffat Railroad gave local lettuce producers access to big cities like Salt Lake City. Granby was said to produce high quality lettuce and there are anecdotes that New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel bragged of “Granby Lettuce” on the menu, according to the Grand County Historical Association.

Not just Granby. Back before the time when all fresh vegetables in the typical supermarket came from California, southern Arizona, and northern Mexico, other parts of Colorado were also producing lettuce. 

It was exported from the Wet Mountain Valley [Custer County], from Eagle County, and from Chaffee County, among other locales. The photo above was taken near Buena Vista.

All these locales had higher elevations (6000–8000 feet, typically), irrigation, and in most cases, rail access. A 2014 article in Colorado Central examines this now-defunct commercial agriculture.

By 1922 the Salida growing district was making plans to get in on the lettuce boom with more than 40 people becoming members of the Colorado Cooperative Lettuce Association in the town. Headquarters for the association was in the Unger store and Sid Burleson was a leader, The Salida Mail reported.

That same year there were about 1,500 acres of lettuce being grown in Buena Vista. Westcliffe [Custer Co.] had 800 acres, the Hardscrabble district [Custer Co.] 400 acres, the Divide district [Teller Co.] 300 acres and the San Luis district [Costilla Co.] 500. It was reported in the Chaffee County Republican that Buena Vista shipped 163 cars in 1922, followed by Florence [Fremont Co.] with 85, the Yampa district [Routt Co.] with 75 and Avon [Eagle Co.] with 73.

Since Hardscrabble is about 14 miles from Florence, that may be where the lettuce growers hauled their crop to the railroad. 

The 1941 WPA Travel Guide for Colorado, from the Federal Writers Program, noted that in northeastern Custer County, "fields on the steep [?] slopes grow potatoes, lettuce, and celery." Of Buena Vista it says, "Lettuce Day, combined with a rodeo, is celebrated annually in September." Granby, as noted above, and Alamosa are also described as lettuce-growing areas, as are Divide [Teller Co.] and La Veta [Huerfano Co.].

This production nose-dived by the 1940s. There was World War 2, of course, but as best I can tell, the big factor was improved refrigerated railcars making it easier for larger-scale West Coast growers to send massive amounts of lettuce etc. eastward. 

And with the growing more concentrated in fewer areas, a problem like a plant virus there rolls clear to the Eastern Seaboard as well. From 2023: "Farmers seek rebound after floods, virus hit lettuce crop."

Things were challenging enough for lettuce growers in Monterey County’s [California] Salinas Valley before Mother Nature dealt a one-two punch in this year’s storms.

Farmers in 2022 had suffered an estimated $150 million in crop losses as impatiens necrotic spot virus—a destructive plant disease spread by thrips—moved from field to field.

Then this year, vast flooding from atmospheric storms damaged multiple crops, with lettuce growers suffering an additional $54.4 million in losses, according to figures released by the Monterey County agricultural commissioner.

Most of those Colorado lettuce acres went to hay and cows — or in the case of Eagle County, ski condos. After all, cows are plant-based too.

Buffalo Herds Spread, Sometimes on Their Own

Buffalo at the Navajo-owe Wolf Springs Ranch. (Photo: Ranch Marketing Assn.)

Look at the banner photo on this blog, and you will see at lower right a bull buffalo (bison, if you prefer).

That pasture is part of a big ranch purchased in 2017 by the Navajo Nation. (Technically, Colorado Ranch Enterprise, Dept. of Fish & Wildlife, PO Box 1480, Window Rock). Think of it as the Kaliningrad of Dinétah. 

Its previous owner, Tom Redmond of Aussie and Onesta hair-care products, started raising buffalo, and thus far, the Navajo Nation has continued on that path.

Last month, a friend was visiting from Australia, so I took her up to the upper Huerfano River drainage to see the ranch, hoping we would see some buffalo. You never know where they might be, but luck was with us, and half a dozen individuals were in that pasture, within passable binocular and camera range.

It's in our gene: we enjoy just watching large grazing animals. To borrow a phrase, they are "good to think about."

Meanwhile, up north, buffalo politics are "messy." 

On the other side of Montana, at the Blackfeet Reservation, Joe Kipp, chairperson of the Blackfeet Nation Stock Growers Association, also has a longstanding connection to the reintroduction effort. In the 1980s, he’d been involved with bringing the first wild buffalo — surplus animals from Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota — to the Blackfeet Reservation. These days, he and his wife make the drive south to Yellowstone every winter to hunt the animals; Kipp’s wife is diabetic, and the only meat she eats is bison. (Compared to beef, bison has more protein and minerals, and much less fat and cholesterol.) 

Still, Kipp is unhappy with how the tribe has managed its herd in an austere landscape where many make their living raising cattle. Ranchers deal with ferocious wind storms, bitter winters, crippling droughts: Business margins are tight. He’s heard from plenty of disgruntled ranchers like Danny Barcus, who rent grazing lands for their livestock — the current rate for a cow-calf pair is around $40 a month — only to have the tribe’s buffalo break in and eat the grass intended for their cattle. “It gets to be a sore point pretty fast,” Kipp said.

Kipp worries what will happen now that bison are being considered for protection under the Endangered Species Act, a move he fears would undermine his treaty hunting rights. He’s also content with Yellowstone’s current management and doesn’t see the need to expand the park’s herd. “People envision, ‘Oh, we want bison that are running across the landscape like before,’” he said. “But we didn’t have 50,000-pound trucks and trains running and cars and all these things. It’s a beautiful concept, but I don’t think it’s based upon reality.” 

This spring, Kipp, Barcus, and other Blackfeet cattle ranchers met with their tribal council and asked them to make changes to the herd’s management. After years of frustration, they felt the council had been receptive to their concerns, and this summer, the tribe began a new culling program to manage its herd.

 The whole article is "Bison’s Complicated Return: Growing herds in the Yellowstone area are adopting ancient migratory behavior causing logistical issues for ranchers and Montana state officials."

Worth a read. Good to think about.

An Orphan Fawn with Pretty Good Prospects

Orphan mule deer fawn arrives at the rehabilitation center.

This is the time of year when fawns are dropping and wildlife agencies are telling people, "Don't think that fawn has been abandoned unless it is still there 24 hours from now! Its mother had to go eat, but she knows where she left it, and she will be coming back."

Generally that is true, unless she is lying dead by the side of the highway, which is the back-story to some of the wildlife transport runs that M. and I do every June. That was the case with this little mule deer from eastern Fremont County.

We picked him up two days ago from the woman who had found him. He had a quick 45-minute ride to the wildlife rehabilitors, and now he is in the antelope/deer fawn enclosure, behind a high chainlink fence reinforced with barbed wire and electric wire— all to keep predators from thinking it is some kind of snack bar. (So far, so good.)

As all Colorado Parks & Wildlife volunteers are trained to do, we politely thanked her for taking care of the fawn and for contacting CPW about it.

As I picked up the carrier, she asked that I hold it up to the passenger seat of her Chrysler Pacifica so that the young kids in the back could say good-bye to the fawn. I did that. 

I got the impression that she had kept it longer than she should have as a learning experience for the kiddies. Like some people let the cat have kittens so that the kids can witness "the miracle of birth."

On the plus side, she had given him goat's milk, which  he accepted, and he was alert and lively when he arrived at the rehabbers' place. No harm.

Not like the woman who lived in a little house up the river in Huerfano County and found an injured great horned owl. I think it had collided with a fence or power line.

She kept it for about four days while looking up information on the Internet, where she got some site that told her to feed the owl oatmeal or something equally wrong for a carnivore.

Finally she or someone talked to the Raptor Center in Pueblo, and I was dispatched to get it. When I picked up the owl, she cooed over it, "You'll be going to a better place where they will make you all better."

No, you will be going to a better place where you will get the needle because you are too far gone.

But I was polite and (I hope) upbeat, even though I knew it was a hopeless case.

So if Colorado  Parks & Wildlife ever moves on behind the "Leave the fawns alone!" message, which is super-important, maybe they could add, "If you pick up an injured bird or animal, call now, not two days from now!"

They Are Sandbagging La Veta

Along Main Street in the little resort town of La Veta, where sandbags are piled (sometimes) in front of the shops, in case the Cucharas River floods due to run-off from the area burned a year ago in the Spring Fire, west of town.

Welcome to the World — Where No One Looks Like You

Some time early this morning a motorist in western Huerfano County (southern Colorado) hit and killed a pronghorn antelope doe.

Later, a man driving by saw the dead doe’s belly moving. He did the courageous thing — stopped, pulled out his knife, and performed a roadside Caesarean section. And he got in touch with Colorado Parks & Wildlife, which appeared a while later in the person of game warden Travis Sauder.

M. and I are wildlife transport volunteers, and our telephone rang too. I reached Sauder on his mobile while he was en route to get the fawn. We arranged to meet down in Pueblo, and when we pulled up, there he was in his state truck, with the fawn in his lap, wrapped in a purple bath towel.

If the fawn grows up,
he will look like this.

We put him into a carrier and drove back toward the foothills and the rehabilitation center, where he quickly downed a bottle of constituted goat's milk, and, for the first time, stood up on all four legs.

It's odd to think that the first other creature he saw were all humans — and before long he may be sharing an enclosure with some mule deer fawns (assuming that some are brought in, which is almost certain) — but he will eventually go free and meet some other antelope. Instinct is strong.

It's Time to Fire Up the Coleman Lantern

Last weekend at Sylvan Lake State Park, the solar lantern just was not bright enough for both M's and my reading, so I fired up the single-mantle Coleman lantern to illuminate the trailer.

Coast to coast, this lantern has illuminated many campsites. It heated my old van on waterfowling trips in the San Luis Valley as the temperature plunged well below freezing.

As best I recall, it came from the garage of an old smelter worker's cottage on Cañon City's unfashionable south side, after a co-worker rented it.

(I lived next door. Those were not shining times.)

With new washers in the pump and a new globe, it was back in operation.

The special pungency of Coleman's blended white gas, poured through the distinctive filter funnel — bright red, so you don't leave it sitting on the picnic table, as I almost did last Sunday.

You spin the cleaning lever, pump it, light it, pump some more, open the gas — OK, I admit it sounds like starting a Model T Ford or something like that.

Apparently an ad for the British market.
I never heard of the "Empire" model.

Maybe it's that early-20th-century technology. But it works — and you don't send empty gas canisters to the landfill or let them pile up at Base Camp for someone else to deal with.
Some people say Aladdin lanterns are quieter and better, but growing up in Colorado and South Dakota, I never saw one.

Back in the 1980s when I occasionally served as a camp hand for a local outfitter in return for free outdoor adventure, I heard this story from one of the clients.

He had been looking for a little store that existed or was supposed to exist near Red Wing in Huerfano County because we were low on Coleman mantles, the original kind that you tie on with cold-numbed fingers.
 
As the client stood by his truck, he recalled, this ranchman rode up on horseback. When he learned what the problem was, the horseman pulled out his billfold, opened it, and extracted a mantle, which he handed down, saying, "Some fellows carry condoms, but up here, these are more valuable."

Or maybe he said "carry rubbers." Anyhow, if it's not true, it should be.

Valley of Broken Dreams and Broken Owls

Owl tangled in a barbed wire fence.
Not today's owl, but similar.
(Colorado Parks and Wildlife)
.

.

You drive south from Westcliffe and after the shooting range, a subdivision with "Ranch" in its name, and the Silver West Airport with its 7,000 foot runway (handy for private jets), you pass over a hardly perceptible divide into Another Place, the upper Huerfano Valley.

I think of it sometimes as the Valley of Broken Dreams— there were the people who thought that they would make it as ranchers, and mostly did not, and in the 1960s, various artists and countercultural dropouts who thought it was the place to be. It still attracts some hardscrabble retirees. Fine if you want lots of solar power but do not plan to grow gardens.

Drop City, founded by art students from the U. of Kansas, is claimed as the "first rural hippie commune." The Libre community was also well-known. And there were others — read Huerfano: A Memoir of Life in the Counterculture.
All this is running through my mind as I blast south on Colorado 69 towards Gardner, which looks more like northern New Mexico than adjacent bits of Colorado — flat-roofted adobe or pseudo-adobe houses, piñon pine and juniper, no water to speak of.

My purpose is to pick up a great horned owl, found by a resident's daughter the previous day tangled in a barbed wire fence.

PRO TIP: If you find a bird tangled in barbed wire, do not peel the wire away. Take out your fence pliers or bolt cutters and cut the wire on either side, then bring wire and bird together to a raptor center or veterinarian. If you don't have fence pliers, stop at the hardware store and get some!

I found the house—acres of bone-dry pasture and a little house with good passive solar that was in the usual country status — never quite finished. As I walked through the crowded entryway with my gloves and pet carrier, the owner (70-ish, jeans and sweatshirt) asked me if I knew anyone who could help put some all these 4 x 8-foot panels of particle board that she had stacked up.

I wondered if she had come in the days of Drop City or if she had selected this as a retirement homestead more recently. She would have told me —she seemed lonely and talkative — but I just wanted to get some vet care for the owl.

Of course they had peeled off the wire. I asked if the owl had had any food, and she said that she had tried to give it some "baby oatmeal." But then (after a day) she had called the Raptor Center and been told not to do that. I silently agreed. Owls eat mice.

Its head was up, but it did not struggle much as I lifted it from her cardboard carton into my carrier. "They're going to help you feel better," she cooed to the bird.

I am not a vet nor even a trained Raptor Center volunteer. I just try to get the bird loaded with minimal handling and then drive hard for Pueblo, which was about 90 minutes away. Kind of like a 1950s ambulance driver — in the pre-EMT era. But I know that broken wing bones usually mean the final injection. The Center has enough one-winged birds on exhibition already.

Eventually I reached the interstate, accelerated up to 70 mph and hated modern life. Most of the time, we don't even to make space in our world for the other non-human peoples. There were no cattle around that house — why all the barbed wire?

As I think of that, I pass a cluster of bird-bashing wind turbines. And then at Burnt Mill Road a billboard for the Pueblo Zoo with some cute exotic felid kitten on it. I would rather see a healthy owl that belongs here than some exotic cat inside a cage.

At the raptor ICU, I did the paperwork. "Is this the owl from Gardner?" asked the ICU volunteer. "There's another one coming from Fowler."

There are three other great horned owls in the ICU. What is happening to them? This is their breeding season — are they just out and about more and getting into bad situations?

Paperwork done, I say goodby and start home. I have driven 167 miles (64 Spanish leagues or 534 li). The bird probably won't make it, but it was important to answer the call.

UPDATE: The owl did not survive, but I learned a new term, "capture myopathy."

Massive 2015 Year-End Link Dump! Something for Everyone!

Chef Jess Noy. See squirrel item.

I too often save a link to blog about it but them am too busy to do so. So here they are! All free!

• Aspens in western Oregon could be "refugees" from Ice Age floods.

• An article on Outdoor Wire wondered if the movie Wild would give a boost to backpacking or if The Hunger Games would increase the sale of archery gear. Well, did they?

• Not sure how this turned out: a Jewish kind-of-guru and a land-use battle in the Huerfano Valley of southern Colorado.

• What is the best survival knife? I would say that it's the knife you have with you. But, gear heads, read this article.

• When I was in the 6th grade at Kullerstrand Elementary School in Wheat Ridge, Colo., my teacher, Miss Carter, became engaged to the son of a carnation-raising family. She took us on a class trip through the commercial greenhouses — there used to be operations like that all over the area. Then, boom! no more. All the cut flowers came from Colombia, thanks to the War on Drugs ("We will pay them to grow roses instead of coca.") Now, "Colorado farmers, florists seek renaissance for local flower scene."

• Cañon City commercial herb and flower grower Tammy Hartung blogs on "Protecting Wildlife in the Garden & Farm Landscape."

• BoingBoing offers "The Best Adventure Stories for Kids from 1965." Is having adventures retro-cool? Elidar was actually one of Alan Garner's weaker books, I thought.

• Counting roadkill is depressing: "Our Highways' Toll on Wildlife." A game warden in Fremont County, Colo., once told me that he figured a deer or elk was killed every night of the year by a motor vehicle. No doubt some of those drivers think that hunting is cruel.

• The English discover that squirrels are tasty. Also, redheads rule.

• The Salton Sea was an accident, but birds love it. I finally saw it this past March.

• It's cold this week. Are you at risk for "the frozen five"?

• The "locavore movement" boosts deer hunting, in case you did not know.

• What southern Colorado needs is a good "guntry club." But I expect that northern Colorado will get (or has gotten) one sooner, since that is where the money is. Still, I can fantasize.

• Are you feeding the birds this winter? Some thoughts on where to put your feeders. And keep them clean.  And if you want birds, you have to tolerate some insects.

• What happens when a professional wedding photographer goes elk hunting.

• Don't make these dumb moves when you go to a gun shop.

• I have heard some of these: "Female Hunters Share Tales of Sexism."

• How to shoot down a drone. Hint: they are more like pigeons than geese.

• It kind of amazes me that Bishop's Castle is the must-see tourist attraction in the Wet Mountains. But almost everyone who rents our cabin goes there.

• When I worked at the Cañon City Daily Record, part of my job was visiting the local humane society and photographing the adoptable pet of the week. I learned some these things by trial and error, but I wish that I had had this article to read.

Sheep Mountain Wearing a Hat

Sheep Mountain in western Huerfano County under an uncommon cap of cloud, post-thunderstorm. It and its neighbor, Little Sheep Mountain, are known for their carbon dioxide field. There is a jokey title in there somewhere.

In the Dust Bowl of 2014

There is nothing to see in eastern Colorado. It's all flat and treeless.

 Almost a month ago — January 18th — I took County Road 11 south from Manzanola, Colo., toward part of the Comanche National Grassland. I had driven nine or ten miles when something struck me — I had seen only one small herd of cattle, maybe six head, no more. The rest had all gone to the sale barn, apparently.

I was right about where the red arrow is pointing in the graphic from the United States Drought Monitor, and what was in theory a quail-hunting trip was, admit it or not, turning more into disaster tourism.

Outdoor writer Chad Love blogs from a location downwind of that location, and he has posted some photos that, once converted from color into black-and-white, evoke the Dirty Thirties.

I didn't photograph those six cows, nor the herd I saw somewhere on Colorado  Hwy. 10 grazing in the slanting sunset light in a pasture that was about half dirt, even though it would have been nice and National Geographic-y. Like something from East Africa.

Windmill on the national grasslands. Not pumping.

Fisher the dog and I took a walk around this windmill. There was no water in the tank, no bird tracks of any sort in the dust.

We drove on to another spot closer to the Purgatory River where there was a little water, but all we saw was a single mule deer slipping away. Very quiet. Very dry. Just a general sense of absence.

Chasing scaled quail involves a lot of a windshield time—and to be honest, I have done better in more agricultural areas, but this trip was degenerating into disaster tourism.

So I admitted that I was doing that, ate a late lunch of crackers and coffee, and drove around.

We drove past the Huerfano River Wind Farm outside Walsenburg—as usual for wind farms, not all the blades were turning—and Fisher got a piss break at Huerfano Butte.

And there is the mystery of those deserted commercial buildings on the gravel road in totally misnamed Apache City.

It was good to be back into the mountains and seeing snow.

Blog Stew for Free-Range Kids and Tactical Barbequers

¶ A northwest section has been added to the Colorado Birding Trail. The "trail" is a series of wildlife-watching stops and driving loops. Here is the site for all the "trails."

¶ Exurban Kevin rounds up some of the "tactical" Christmas-gift ideas out there. A MOLLE-gear barbeque apron? Tactical paper? I never go hiking without it.

¶ It snowed last week in Walsenburg too. With photos.

¶ No MOLLE gear, but check out "A Terrible Mother's Holiday Guide to Dangerous Gifts," via Lenore Skenazy's Free Range Kids blog.

Wildlife Taxi, July 11

Crappy cell-phone photo of young flammulated owl.

Time on the meter: 4 ½ hours.

Distance: 195 miles

Fare: three young flammulated owls, whose aspen-trunk nest was brought crashing down by a rural Huerfano County homeowner who said that he had been cutting trees along his power line.

Two of the owlets seemed vigorous. One stayed curled up in the nest and never moved. It may be the one that does not survive.

We brought them to the Raptor Center late in the afternoon. Since the little owls chiefly eat insects, the director was trying to locate some crickets, stat!

I will post an update in a few days if I can.