Cabin Fever, the Hidden Blog-Killer

New Year's resolutions: get my email inbox below eighty items and make progress on various writing and editing projects. The usual. Not much blog-fodder there, though.

It snowed thirty inches (76 cm) here the week before Christmas, and we had a Dallas family coming on the 26th for a week at the rental cabin. But they assured me that they were renting a 4wd vehicle for the trip. I spent hours behind the snow-blower, clearing my 100-yard driveway, the driveway up to the cabin, and a neighbor's.

Since these are all bumpy gravel roads, I don't try for a bare surface but leave a remnant of three or four inches of snow that you easily can drive over. (Martha Stewart says that that is more elegant anyway. These rules are a parody, but #1 is true.)

For a three days or so, skis and snowshoes were the way to get around, especially cross-county skiing on the county and Forest Service roads before they were plowed.

By Christmas Day, our driveway looked like a long white trench speckled with dog turds. But a  series of bright, sunny days and below-freezing nights were rapidly converting it to something slipperier. Wherever you drove or walked froze quickly, and soon it was instead a ribbon of ice—speckled with dog turds.

The Texans arrived after midnight, so technically on the 27th. I walked out later that morning with the dogs and found a front-wheel-drive minivan skewed diagonally across the driveway, in such a place as to block us in too.

They had been unable to rent the planned SUV, they said. Probably everyone wanted one to go to New Mexico or Colorado for their ski trips.

It was one of three vehicles that I had to help get unstuck that day. By the 30th or so, the road had thawed enough that they could drive it all the way up to the cabin.

I like to get some winter visitors—ours is mainly a May–September rental business—but it is always more worrisome then. Like when the power went out for about six hours on December 31st because of the pole-snapping high winds.

Meanwhile, wood! I was more Grasshopper than Ant last summer, nor did I buy a couple of cords, split and delivered, from Harry the Firewood Guy. So we hit winter with less than a cord stacked, plus several beetle-killed pines uphill from the house that I had my eye on.

I sawed and I hauled, and we burned through at least three trees before the snow  got deep. Then I could not even get up the road to the "back twenty" in the Jeep. We ended up hauling pine tree "rounds" down the hill on sleds. It sometimes was too much like Captain Scott goes to the South Pole.

And one that part is done, the splitting is done. M. will haul a sled like Lt. Oates, but the chainsawing and the swinging of the Monster Maul (TM) is my part. To use the phrase I picked up from the Atomic Nerds, it's the New Hampshire Home Gym.

Free weights bore me, unless they are on a 30-inch steel or hickory handle. And a little of that goes a long way.

But soon I'll be off to the SHOT Show, and I have been pointedly reminded that there must be enough split wood on the veranda to cover my absence.

Meanwhile, walking in the woods means snow drifts, treacherous crusty snow, or mud. My favorite quail-hunting-for spot has silty soil that turns to goo when it's wet. I will check tomorrow to see if it has dried enough to be walkable. Because I am getting the fidgets bad.

I do have some newsy posts in draft. Expect those soon.

Top Food News for 2011

Food writer Mark Bittman offers a list of links at the New York Times, including why not to trust "organic" food from China, on-camera cannibalism in the Netherlands, dumpster-diving, and the return of olive trees to Georgia.

Cotter Uranium Mill to Give Up Operating License

I would call it a Christmas present for Cañon City. The Cotter uranium mill is giving up its operating license. (It employs only a small crew these days.)

Read between the lines of this news story, and they seem to be saying that now that the state of Colorado has put some teeth in its regulations, in order to keep operating, General Atomics (Cotter's current owner) would actually have to, y'know, clean it up.

This after thirty-plus years of leaks, of groundwater pollution, of "notice violations," of lawsuits, of corporate foot-dragging, etc. Some people have seen it all go by.

Places like Cotter Mill are, unfortunately, the part of "clean nuclear energy" that its proponents never talk about.

Top Colorado Nature Photographers

Colorado Outdoors contributor Vic Schendel offers some photography tips.

Meanwhile, the Denver Post lists its five top Colorado nature photographers, leading readers to suggest plenty of others in the comments.

Blog Stew for Carnivorous Squirrels

• A geologist explains the formation of the "teepee buttes" of Pueblo and El Paso counties (Colorado).

• I cannot think of any job more frustrating (assuming that one took it seriously) than to be director general of  Afghanistan’s National Environmental Protection Agency. On the other hand, the news about Persian leopards is surprising.

• Myths about carrying concealed weapons. There is one that I tend to be guilty of too.

• From National Geographic, the economic and conservation effects of hunting:

 When you buy a camouflage camisole ($24.99) from the Ducks Unlimited catalog, a portion of the proceeds goes to conservation projects. If you visit Bozeman, Montana, and buy a pair of Schnee’s Pac boots, you will find a tag dangling from the laces, along with a promise that the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation will receive some of your money for elk conservation projects.

“It’s the hunters who keep most of these species going,” said Jim Clay, a middle school English teacher, hunter, and maker of turkey calls in Winchester, Virginia. “They put in the money, and they put in the hours. Hunters really care about what happens.”

• You probably did not know that sometimes squirrels are carnivorous.

Piled Higher and Deeper

Our little greenhouse gets the Thomas Kinkade treatment—or it would if there was a blazing orange light shining from inside it.

More than two feet of snow this week.

Waiting for Snow on Tennessee Pass

Map from Channel 4, Denver.

My informal aggregate snowfall total for this year as measured on hood of the Jeep CJ5  is 66 inches (1.68 m).

So it was a shock to read that Ski Cooper, up on Tennessee Pass at the top end of the Arkansas River drainage, still has not opened.

Owned by the city of Leadville, Cooper developed from the 10th Mountain Division's World War 2 training area. It relies on natural snow—and usually has plenty.

Just the opposite of last year, when there was good snow up high but nothing here in the foothills until January—and then not enough.

Spring is always "the decider."

UPDATE: Ski Cooper to open December 24th, 2011.

Tracking Feeder Bird Behavior

The director of Cornell University's Project Feeder Watch discusses using RFID tags to gain data about the behavior of common "feeder birds" like chickadees—at least as such behavior involves bird feeders.

A Night Out

M. and I are going to the thea-tuh later, but it is Pueblo thea-tuh, so formal evening dress is not required.

In Pueblo, "evening dress" means that you wear your black jeans.

Blog Stew with Link Dumplings

• Eclipse-chasing in the badlands of New Mexico.

From the Colorado Springs Gazette

• Eleven-year-old boy gains some understanding of the larger world, dresses himself, and rides a bicycle for a mile. His actions gain wide praise in these nanny-state days.

• Some people make fun of mounted deer heads in the living room. Yet they can be useful!

• How to pronounce "Casa Grande," Arizona.

• How to pronounce street names in Colorado Springs. Having also lived in Portland, Oregon, I have to stop and think about "Willamette Street" before I say it.

• Colorado Division of Parks and Wildlife seeks photos taken at state parks for a "Best of 2011" contest.

• Pressured by lawsuits, the U.S. Forest Service draws up new rules about dropping fire retardant into waterways.

Leather gaiters or not?

And the dog is "wrong" too.

A minor dust-up in The Telegraph over alleged anachronisms in the costuming of a shooting party during the British stately-home soap opera Downton Abbey.

I am sitting here with my first cup of coffee only half an inch down, trying to think of American equivalents.

A group of Colorado big-game hunters in the mid-1960s, all wearing blaze orange? Back then, a red cap was considered sufficient for safety. It probably still is in Vermont.

Conversely, duck hunters all in brown coats or tan coveralls in a scene set any time after the 1970s?

Help me out, the caffeine has not yet kicked in.

Why Not Occupy "Over The River"?

Although there is still a lawsuit pending, and some regulatory hurdles to be jumped, it appears that zee artiste Christo is well on the way to disrupting life for many people in Fremont, Chaffee, and Custer counties for two and a half years.

Nothing but fawning in the local news media.

This Franco-Bulgarian multi-millionaire has gotten the feds, the state government, and local governments to give him use of public lands with which to make more money.

It's a bail-out for "art."

Is there any better definition of being part of the "1%," as the Occupy protesters say?

Of course, "Over The River" will benefit us poor peasants by raising our artistic consciousness. Or something.

Motel owners stumble around mumbling "400,000 visitors, 400,000 visitors." Yay for them.

Father Christmas in the Wild

You don't think that Santa Claus/Father Christmas just happens, do you? Someone has to find him first.

Want more?

(Via The Suburban Bushwacker.)

Preparing for the SHOT Show

Call me un-American if you like, but I have never visited Las Vegas, Nevada — as opposed to Las Vegas, New Mexico, many times. This is true even though I worked in the "gaming" industry at one time as a slot-machine repairman—in Oregon. (Yes, legally, mostly.)

The conventions that I usually attend do not meet there, and my short time in the industry cured me of any delusions of glamor about gambling.

But my old friend Galen Geer, a long-time outdoor writer and editor, has persuaded me to go to Las Vegas for the 2012 SHOT Show next month.

The Shooting, Hunting, and Outdoor Trades Show is enormous. People say it takes days to see all the exhibitors' booths. It is so big that there are applications to help you plan your time and routes in the exhibit halls.

Its sponsoring organization, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, recognized bloggers as news media several years ago, leading to much more mention in the blogosphere of new products and developments in those industries.

And while I am not a shooting-sports blogger like Michael Bane or a hunting blogger like Holly Heyser, NSSF extended me the same credentials. Maybe it helped that I agreed to lend my illustrious name to The Pines Review's masthead as associate editor as well.

So free admission to a "trade-only" event + relatively cheap hotel rooms + the chance to gawk at the entertainment machine that is Las Vegas means that this year I'm going to do it.

There ought to be something to blog about.

"96 Hours to the Stone Age"

That's the title of an article about the breakdown of "connectivity" during a massive power outage.

In other words, how long until your cell phone becomes a paperweight?

When the power goes down, cell service “gets shoddy.” That’s going to happen when everyone grabs their phones at the same time. It’s the wireless equivalent of everybody getting on the same roads at the same time. But when 3G systems get congested, the coverage area of cell sites can actually shrink, resulting in potentially bigger coverage holes in addition to capacity issues.

 The title comes from writer's discovery that the diesel generators providing back-up power to a central switching facility for one of the wireless companies have four days' worth of fuel.