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.

Colorado Drought Map July 5, 2022

Right now I call this good news, getting upgraded to "abnormally dry." And there was more good rain the evening of the 6th as well.

Your Backordered Snowstorm Has Arrived

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What the Spring Breezes Bring Us

Some National Weather service video from Saturday afternoon, April 30, 2022. As three fires burn west of Las Vegas, New Mexico, a dust storm rolls south from Baca County, Colorado, the heart of the 1930s Dust Bowl, and continues across the Oklahoma Panhandle.

Blog Stew: Who Has Enough Water to Cook It?

 

 

 • A new drought map. January-March 2022 precipitation hit some record lows. I am relieved to be living in one of the green areas on the map.

 • If you grow up in a city grid, your navigational skills are not so good, says Science.

 • Navajo law enforcement jammed up by the "lure of outdoor recreation":

More people are visiting tribal lands throughout the West and adjacent public lands to hike, bike or boat, and they’re accompanied by concerns about trespassing and vandalism at cultural sites, as well as traffic accidents and other issues. 

The Wisdom of the Hackberry: Reflections on a Weird Gardening Year

One day this past week our little hackberry tree turned golden. It was alone in that—true, the aspens are turning at higher elevations, but here the lanceleaf cottonwoods, the Gambel oaks, the various berry bushes, are  all still green. 

We got it a few years ago at some nursery in Taos, possibly the now-closed Blossoms in Ranchos de Taos, or possibly Petree, but I think it was Blossoms.

I nearly lost it one year to drought, but it has come back up to where — although the picture does not suggest great height — it is a couple of feet taller than I am. Hackberry is supposed to be fast-growing. That is true in the good years.

"Hackberry," says the University of Nebraska Extension Service, "Celtis occidentalis, is a native tree to the region. It grows up to 60 feet tall and has a spread of 50 feet. It is in the same family as the elm tree, Ulmaceae."

Another site notes that hackberry "can withstand high salt, acid, sand, clay and alkali levels in soils, as well as survive extended flooding and drought." 

"Flooding and drought" summarizes the 2021 growing season. Spring and early summer were soaking. In an article celebrating this year's hay harvest, one of the county weeklies said the core growing area received more than 19 inches (4.75 hands for the horsey set, about one cubit for you Mesopotamians) of rain in the spring in summer. At my place, I saw water running downhill in places where I had never seen water before, not even when big spring snow dumps melted.

"Ah," I thought, "this will recharge the soil moisture, and we will have wildflowers and vegetables and mushrooms and all of it."

Not so fast, hopeful foothills gardener!  

Our "Holderness" (that's its name) clay soil holds water if you apply it slowly, which nature often does not. As my old Soil Conservation Service book on local soils says, 

Holderness "loess and residium that derive from sandstone . . . . the native vegetation is mostly foothills grasses. . . . . Permeability is slow, and the available water capacity is high. . . . runoff is moderate or rapid, and the hazard of erosion is high. Gully erosion is common. This soil is suited to pasture and grazing. (Description updated here.)

M. was at the grocery store two days ago, and someone else was describing her vegetable garden this year as "crappy." I think that happens when you plant late because it's cold and wet — and then the weather goes dry and hotter than average in late summer, making it almost impossible to keep up with watering plants.

As for the local wildflowers, they were not all that spectacular. Maybe they need more recovery time. Up a little higher, about 8,500 feet, I saw amazing flowers in an area that burned in 2016, however, with aspen saplings coming up everywhere.

Mushrooms down here were not. The usual Agaricus campestris never popped (well, there was one I left alone) and the normal Suellus "slippery jacks" never appeared. 

But up in our usual mushroom grounds, the harvest was spectacular, so no complaints.

Instead, this was the Year of Tall Grass. To come up our driveway is to experience driving between banks of grass like grain waiting for the scythe — I say scythe because I mean tall stuff, not like dwarf wheat bred for combine-harvesting.

I let much of the cabin lawn go unmowed (the deer bed down in that high stuff, feeling hidden). It was a tough choice—tall grass is more of a fire hazard, but I wanted all those seeds! It sure beats buying seed, and now the mower can spread them. 

Everywhere, grass thicker than I have ever seen. What Holderness wants, it gets.  It wanted the early summer lambsquarter and amaranth; it did not want beets, and it was sort of indifferent to tomatoes, which are bearing but not heavily.

Meanwhile, the hackberry, in its weather wisdom, is one of the last trees to leaf out in the spring, and now it is the first one to cash in its chips when autumn comes. It knows that abrupt changes from cold to hot and back again are commonplace and always have been, as long as there have been hackberries. As the saying goes, "normal is just a number."

Will This Be Mega-Mushroom Year? Or, Foraging Texas-Style

 

I was hiking on June 25th with my wife and my niece when I found the giant puffball on the right.  I cut it in half to make sure it was still fresh enough to take home—and it was.

Then as we were driving the little road out from the trailhead, my niece, who was in the right-hand back seat, starts shouting, "Wait! Wait! Stop!"

She had spotted the other puffball. She has good instincts — she spent her teen years on my sister's farm, where aside from electricity and motor vehicles, it was pretty much 1890 — hand pump for water by the sink, wood heat, and the privy was out back. You blast the kudzu with a shotgun when it tries to crawl in through the screen door, that kind of thing.

"I never foraged from a car before," she said, climbing back in. 

"That's doing it Texas-style," I said.

But seriously, while the Western Slope is baking, here in southern Colorado we are getting early tastes of monsoon weather, and I have never picked so many mushrooms this early at this altitude (below 8500 feet, give or take). It was the first year that we had the dehydrator running in June.

M. and I will be heading for higher country soon. We have hopes.

Ghost Birds in the Sky

Nick Vinciguerra collecting dead
Violet-green swallows in Velarde, NM.
(American Birding Assn.)

The unusually strong storm that swept through the southern Rockies and Plains the second week of September pushed " a spectacular array of fall migrants to Albuquerque," as one biologist noted. 

Smoke from West Coast forest fires may also have forced some southbound birds further east as well.

The sad part is that many died — not so much from the smoke as from hunger, one New Mexico researcher, doctoral student Jenna McCullough writes for the American Birding Association website.

Sudden and dramatic unavailability of food caused by a historic and drastic cold snap is, I believe, a more parsimonious explanation than a widespread, smoke induced, mass mortality event. While we do not have data on how fast smoke inhalation would kill birds hundreds of miles away from the fires themselves, what we do have are data from the 258 Violet-green Swallows that Nick and I collected in Velarde this week. . . . .

If a lack of food contributed to the mortality event, birds would have less fat and no protection against hypothermia. Indeed, of the hundreds of birds we assessed, none had fat stores on their bodies. Furthermore, Though we have yet to perform any toxicology analyses or inspect their lungs for signs of smoke inhalation, I think it is safe to say that these birds were starved and succumbed to hypothermia. When USFWS autopsies of other birds are reported in the coming weeks or months, we suspect they will reveal a similar cause of death.

Cold and snow mean no flying insects, which is bad news for swallows and other insectivores.

Here in southern Colorado, I found one Lesser Goldfinch dead in the driveway, uneaten, during that brief cold weather. Considering it was only five seconds' flight from a sunflower seed feeder, it should not have been hungry. But M. and I both were briefly sick that week, which I blamed on the sudden shift from about 94° F to °27 F (34°C to -3° C). Maybe something hit the little goldfinch too.

A Strange Summer for Southern Rockies Gardeners

The Green Roof Farms honor-system farm stand.
Your money goes in the white-painted ammo box at lower right.

Scott's working 1950s Farmall Cub tractor, perfect for the small operation.

M. was at the hair salon last week, and her stylist, who lives in Colorado City, was lamenting how her garden had produced poorly this summer. Well, join the club. I have been hearing that a lot.

Let's review the year.

After a cool wet spring. Colorado was declared drought-free. I expected a great spring wildflower show, and while that was true at higher elevations, it was not true here in the ponderosa pine forest. Some regulars, like wild geranium, hardly showed up at all. Subsoil moisture still not replenished?

Then it got hot in July, but that was followed by a decent "monsoon" that gave us an adequate if not great mushroom harvest in early August and the usual flash floods below the recent burns.

Wild bee on some kind of
groundsel, at about 9800 feet,
early August.

Then more hot and dry weather all through September and into October. Up near Poncha Pass, a lightning-caused forest fire, the Decker Fire, that was burning up beetle-killed timber in the Sangre de Cristo Wilderness, has now crossed control lines and is moving towards foothills subdivisions and little communities along the Arkansas River like Swissvale and Howard.

The violent changes have been hard on garden plants and flowers. In some cases, we have just cut back perennials and let them go while focusing on collecting seeds from annuals. No hard freeze yet at this elevation, but the dryness is as good as a freeze. I have rolled up hoses and pronounced the season over.

In Florence, where there is irrigation water, truck gardeners Scott and Robin have been supplying us from their farm stand, which often just operates on the honor system. (M. says that reminds her of her girlhood visits to the Vermont side of her family.) If you are in that area, you can find them under "Green Roof Farms" on Facebook.

Thanks to them, we are drying tomatoes and have plenty of squash, peppers, and onions.

Some migratory birds left on schedule (black-headed grosbeaks, for one) while others are hanging around way past their usual departure dates (band-tailed pigeons, broad-tailed hummingbirds.) But that is another topic.

Wildflowers in a Scrambled Spring

Penstemon virens, low penstemon — I think.

This spring has been unusually cool and wet. The "wet" means that all of Colorado is now officially out of drought. I kept thinking locally that the soil moisture was still not what it could be—I was not seeing the spring melt trickles in the little draws—but the last May snowstorm produced some, so hurray for that.

The early wildflowers (spring beauties, pasqueflower) were nothing much, but these penstemons came on strong. M. and I were in south central Texas in April when the bluebonnets (which are lupines) were blossoming—the slope behind the house is almost like that.

Clematis hirsutissima, hairy clematis or sugarbowl.

These hairy clematis (I say Clem-atis, you say Cle-mat-is) usually bloom by late May; this year there are just getting going now. Ditto the wallflowers, not pictured.

Rocky Mountain locoweed, Oxytropis sericea. They are blooming in full force too. On the other hand, the apple trees in the neighborhood had a very few blossoms. It was chilly for so long.

Four-nerved daisy or "Perky Sue"

Perky Sue? Isn't that an old rock 'n' roll song? No, that was "Peggy Sue," as first performed by Buddy Holly — video here. (Supposedly its name commemorates this  Texas lady.)
 
Its botanical name is Tetraneuris Ivesiana.  Photographed at Trinidad Lake State Park on the first of June.

Hummingbirds Co-Existing Peacefully

I was going to relax with some blogging yesterday afternoon (I really was), and then the rain started falling all up and down the Wet Mountains, leading to some stream-flooding, rock slides, and waterfalls appearing in unexpected places.

The fire department was called out, mainly for traffic control — we were shutting roads down left and right, based on radio calls to the effect that "the water is over County Road XX."

All that took up four hours or so, then it was time to go home. This morning, the county Road & Bridge crews and various local residents — especially everyone with an irrigation ditch head gate to maintain — are out moving mud, tree trunks, etc. out of the roads and culverts.

And this afternoon, it might be "lather, rinse, and repeat."

Meanwhile, in the morning sunshine, the hummingbirds are demonstrating how they can live in harmony, which to them means "All against all."

You can see the ultra-aggressive rufous males flashing copper, hear the buzzing broad-tailed males (the females of both species wade right in there too), and slipping through the crowd, there is one male calliope hummingbird, something of a rarity here. The calliope hummingbird is the smallest bird found in the United States.

Not-Gardening in a Time of Drought

Lamb's quarter, self-seeded in a big tub.

It rained three nights ago, boosting our total for the past four weeks to a magnificent 0.2 inches, or about 5 mm. Coming after a dry spring, it's serious drought time.

The creek had already gone dry, although the sandy bottom was moist. Since our well is in the creek aquifer—somewhere—the state of the creek is always a concern.

Some areas upstream got more rain than here, and a trickle of flowing water has returned, muddy water that must be coming off an upstream burn scar.

Knowing these conditions were coming, thanks to the shamanic prophecies of the National Weather Service, we did not even try to garden like normal. Almost everything we planted is in containers—some tomatoes, some herbs.

And there there is the Zen of not-gardening.  Instead, we took what showed up on its own.

One is lamb's quarter a/k/a goosefoot, a Chenopodium, which means "goose foot" in Latin. How lambs get into the story, I do not know. I assume that sheep would eat it. When it's too dry even for Swiss chard, these are our greens.

Another edible volunteer is wild amaranth, when it's young. Call them both quelites, if you prefer.

A third is nettles, which M. planted several years ago and which have firmly established themselves, putting them in the class of feral greens. Lots of hippie/Greek nettle pie is eaten in this house, "hippie" because she insists on making a whole-wheat sort of-phyllo dough.

We were going to try growing a similar plant to lamb's quarter, "Good King Henry," Blitum bonus-henricus, this year, but put it off. (In case you were wondering, it was apparently named after Henri IV of France, which just goes to show that you can preside over decades of religious wars and still have a tasty pot herb named for you. He did apparently encourage tree-planting.)

In the woods, brush, and pastures, not much is happening. A few tiny acorns. A scant handful of wildflowers—and what does bloom seems to come early and is stunted, as though the plants are trying to get through an abbreviated life cycle. Even my bomb-proof penstemon is just hanging on, barely existing.

A couple of days ago I thought I saw some Liatris about to bloom, which rocked me back, because its normally a flower that marks the end of summer. I need to go back and double-check. Maybe the plants just want this summer to be over.

"One of Our 50 Is Missing"

Click to enlarge.

The current Southwestern drought does not stop at the border but extends into northwestern Mexico. Sitting here with a mid-day temperature of 98° F., humidity of 8 percent, and only a tenth of an inch of rain, if that, for the week, I was wondering When will it end?

So I went looking online for 2018 Southwestern monsoon forecasts and found one from The Weather Network. Pretty informative — but also geographically "challenged."

I scrolled down through the charts and graphs and found this video: "Must See: Time Lapse of the Monsoon Season in Mexico."  Late summer rains do start first in Mexico and then move northward. And ponderosa pine trees do grow in the Mexican Sierra Madre.

But wait — that logo says "Angel Fire Resort," which is in northern New Mexico, admitted to the Union in 1912.

And who will appreciate that error more (I hope) than the editors of New Mexico Magazine, which for decades has run an item in every issue titled "One of Our 50 Is Missing" (archived here).

Even today, traveling in the USA and elsewhere, New Mexico residents are complimented on how well they speak English, while postal clerks in other US states tell people that they must fill out a customs form to send a package to Las Cruces. And so on.

Should we cut TWN some slack because they are headquartered in Ontario?

Where the West Begins — The Line is Moving

John Wesley Powell, 1834–1902 (Wikipedia)

Driving across the country, I like to play the game of "Where does the West begin?" (westbound) or "Where does the Midwest begin?" (eastbound).

For instance, on US 20 in Nebraska, Valentine is definitely in the West, but anything east of Ainsworth feels like the Midwest.

Driving west across South Dakota, the Missouri River makes an easy marker. From downtown Pierre, I see the dry hills to the west and feel at home. (It helps that I lived as a kid in western South Dakota.)

Another tradition is just to use the 100th meridian of longitude as the marker. John Wesley Powell, Civil War veteran and visionary Western geographer, made this one popular.  (In this New York Times article, the writer ventures among the natives along the 100th meridian.)

Some climate researchers, however, are now saying that the arid/wet boundary is shifting eastward. "Whither the 100th Meridian? The Once and Future Physical and Human Geography of America’s Arid–Humid Divide. Part I: The Story So Far" is an article published by the American Meteorological Society.

Its abstract (summary) states,

The aridity gradient [east and west of the 100th meridian] is realized in soil moisture and a west-to-east transition from shortgrass to tallgrass prairie. The gradient is sharp in terms of greater fractional coverage of developed land east of the 100th meridian than to the west. Farms are fewer but larger west of the meridian, reflective of lower land productivity. Wheat and corn cultivation preferentially occur west and east of the 100th meridian, respectively. The 100th meridian is a very real arid–humid divide in the physical climate and landscape, and this has exerted a powerful influence on human settlement and agricultural development.

This boundary has moved before. An archaeologist friend pointed out to me that in part of the Middle Archaic period (3000–1000 years ago), trees extended farther east onto the plains. Think of of the "pine ridge" country of the Palmer Divide (eastern Douglas and El Paso counties, Colorado) extending clear to Kansas! "Those were the good times," he mused.

Part II of the article makes this prediction for the 21st century:

It is first shown that state-of-the-art climate models from phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project generally underestimate the degree of aridity of the United States and simulate an arid–humid divide that is too diffuse. These biases are traced to excessive precipitation and evapotranspiration and inadequate blocking of eastward moisture flux by the Pacific coastal ranges and Rockies. Bias-corrected future projections are developed that modify observationally based measures of aridity by the model-projected fractional changes in aridity. Aridity increases across the United States, and the aridity gradient weakens. The main contributor to the changes is rising potential evapotranspiration, while changes in precipitation working alone increase aridity across the southern and decrease across the northern United States. The “effective 100th meridian” moves to the east as the century progresses.

The Anderson Creek fire burned almost 400,000 acres in Oklahoma and Kansas in March 2016.

Back in the 1930s, the Dust Bowl ripped through the Southern Plains, as plowed land just blew away. So we stopped plowing so much, let it go back to vegetation, and now it's burning. In the long run, that is probably less destructive — more of a natural cycle —but a prairie fire is a scary thing.

In "Why is Oklahoma Burning,"  weather writer Bob Henson discusses the recent Rhea Fire, which burned more than 242,000 acres.

May 2015 was the state’s wettest single month on record, and 2015 was its wettest year. “The November-December 2015 period was the wettest on record as well, and the sixth warmest. So the growing season extended into winter to some extent that year,” said McManus. The result was an unusually lush landscape going into the first part of 2016 that dried out quickly in the weeks leading up to the Anderson Creek fire.

Likewise, the summers of 2016 and 2017 were on the moist side, said McManus. “We also had a pretty severe ice storm during January 2017 that left lots of big fuels on the ground waiting for that spark,” McManus said. Later that year came the the state’s second-wettest August on record. “August would normally be a time we'd get rid of some growth in our typical summer burn season,” said McManus.

The landscape of the Southern High Plains has been extraordinarily dry over the last six months. The western third of Oklahoma has seen little more than 2” since October—only about 20% of average—and most of the Texas and Oklahoma Panhandles have received much less than 1”, making it the driest six months on record in some locations. Any moistening of the landscape has been all too brief, which has left the landscape highly vulnerable to a spell of fire-friendly weather.

Some good photos there too.

Remember the Dust Bowl?

You probably don't remember it, unless you are over ninety. But see the right-hand blob of the red area? That's pretty much the center of the "Dirty Thirties." Compare it to this map.

In January, Missing Summer Storms

Better in full-screen mode.

Early 2018 Drought Forecast — La Niña Winter

Click to embiggen

It's snowing this solstice morning here at Owl House, but judging from the radar, we are not going to get more than another little two-inch storm, enough to keep the fire danger down for a few days.

If you want more information on weather predictions, visit the National Weather Service's Climate Prediction Center for a whole bunch of maps.

Yes, it is definitely shaping up to  be a La Niña winter:

La Niña is predicted to persist through the Northern Hemisphere winter 2017-18 by nearly all models in the IRI/CPC plume [Fig. 6] and in the North American Multi-Model Ensemble (NMME; [Fig. 7]). Based on the latest observations and forecast guidance, forecasters favor the peak of a weak-to-moderate La Niña during the winter (3-month Niño-3.4 values between -0.5°C and -1.5°C). In summary, La Niña is likely (exceeding ~80%) through the Northern Hemisphere winter 2017-18, with a transition to ENSO-neutral most likely during the mid-to-late spring (click CPC/IRI consensus forecast for the chance of each outcome for each 3-month period).

La Niña is anticipated to affect temperature and precipitation across the United States during the upcoming months (the 3-month seasonal temperature and precipitation outlooks will be updated on Thursday December 21st). The outlooks generally favor above-average temperatures and below-median precipitation across the southern tier of the United States, and below-average temperatures and above-median precipitation across the northern tier of the United States. 

When Lightning Strikes, Survivors Are Changed Forever

When I was a college student working a summer construction job in Taos, New Mexico, there was an old man next door, Eloy M., who people in the areas said had been struck by lightning.

They said that that was why he was shy, kind of reclusive — he worked his corn field, but never seemed to go anywhere.

Was it the lightning that changed him? According to this article in Arts Technica,

The changes in personality and mood that survivors experience, sometimes with severe bouts of depression as well, can strain families and marriages, sometimes to breaking point. Cooper likes to use the analogy that lightning rewires the brain in much the same way that an electrical shock can scramble a computer—the exterior appears unharmed, but the software within that controls its functioning is damaged.

It's a fascinating article both on the mechanics of lightning and what happens to survivors of lightning strikes.

Some quick Internet research turned up differing answers as to which U.S. states have the most lightning strikes.

Some say Florida is number one; others say Texas. New Mexico makes the top ten.

Geoffrey Chaucer Understood Our Weather—If You Change One Word

When that aprill with his blizzards soote
the droghte of marche hath percèd to the roote,
Than dogges go they forth to play,
And what they thinke, Ich ken ne say.