Small Flies, Small Fish, Red Columbines

South Fooses Creek — tangles and pocket water

When I think of South Fooses Creek, a small stream in western Chaffee County, I think of three things. Two of them are pleasant.

Red columbine

One is that in summer I always find red columbines growing in its canyon. I have the hardest time with these at home — granted, home is a little low in altitude, a little dry, and a little alkaline of soil for optimum columbine cultivation, so I have to baby columbines along.

For some reason, the yellow varieties that I have seem more robust than either red ones or the official-state-flower blue-and-whites.

There are other flowers too: I think this one (right) is bitter cress, Cardamine cordifolia, in the mustard family. At least it looks like the picture in the field guide, and the habitat is right: "Grows in wet areas, such as stream banks, meadows, and forest depressions."

Bitter cress

And there are fish, mostly little brook trout, the kind that are mature and reproducing when they are six inches long. Once you venture off the Colorado Trail, which has been cleared of winter's blowdowns, the forest is full of fallen logs, and about every third fishable pool has a dead tree lying across it ready to grab your line with a hundred gnarly hands.

The rest of the pools you sneak up to — "Indian up on them," as Dad used to say — and drop a dry fly in for a short float that might produce a strike from an undersize brookie.

I keep a couple of the "trophies," but I don't photograph them.

When I return to the Jeep, I am standing by where we pitched the tent on Dad's last camping trip.

I had come down the same trail with some fish in my pack, only to find a clothesline rigged above our campfire with some underwear and socks drying on it.

He told me that he had gone down to the creek to fill a water bucket, but even though he had a walking staff, the boggy ground had thrown him off balance, and he ended up sitting in the shallow water. Hence the change of clothes. He seemed a bit annoyed.

And when he dropped me off at home, he opened the tailgate and started unloading stuff — the tent, the Coleman lantern, and so on. "It's yours," he said, "I'm through with camping."

After all those years. But If he couldn't trust himself to walk down to the creek without a fall, it was time to quit.

Sometimes I stand in the basement looking at the shelves of camping gear and I wonder, what should I get rid of?

The Winners: Penstemon and Flax

Bed of penstemon and flax

Next to our driveway, behind a stone retaining wall, is a demanding place to grow flowers. The soil is thin, and the site, which faces WSW, bakes in the afternoon sun.

Various plants, even succulents, have failed on that site. Two survive, however.

One is a purplish-blue penstemon, I forget which variety, which has established itself and even survived last summer's drought, although it was happier this spring.

Gardening sites talk about stratifying the seeds, but I just let it seed itself in the fall, which seems to work best for wildflowers.

The other is a blue flax, and I forget where I got it. Plants of the Southwest?

Here is how it looks on a grand scale. We've encouraged it to spread by tossing seed around.

Yes, they still need watering, but their ability to take the heat, wind, and dryness is impressive.

If I had room for a big flower bed, I would just grow every variety of penstemon that I could lay my hands on.

Gray Fox in Daylight

Click to embiggen.

I get a lot of nocturnal pictures of gray foxes on the scout cameras, but this was a rarer shot—a fox moving through the woods in mid-morning on May 31st.

If the Sky Seems Hazy . . .

. . . bookmark this page, so that you can see where the smoke is coming from. It shows fires in Canada and northern Mexico as well.

For a close-up on Colorado and New Mexico, bookmark this page.

The Hayman Fire, a Decade Later — and a Gender Issue

It has been ten years since the deliberately set Hayman Fire burnt the heart of the Pike National Forest and gave a good scare to such communities as Woodland Park, Deckers, the Air Force Academy, and the southwestern Denver suburbs.

I blogged a drive through the burn in 2008. This year, the newspapers are doing retrospectives: "Hayman, Then and Now" in the Colorado Springs Independent, for example.

The Denver Post has a package of stories. Today's focuses on how today's firefighting focuses more on property protection in the "wiildland-urban interface" and less on aggressive fire attack.

Another headline, "Questions Linger about Fire's Start," is simply pussy-footing around the truth.

Everyone in the wildland fire service with any knowledge of the investigation agrees, as far as I can tell: Terry Lynn Barton started it deliberately. The story about burning her ex-husband's letter at a campsite and the fire then getting out of hand was simply fiction.

"[Her ex-husband] denied that he gave her a letter," [Forest Service investigator Luke] Konantz testified in 2008. "And he said he was sleeping on the porch when she would have left for work and didn't see her."

But if she started a little fire in order to be a heroine by putting it out, that is atypical too. 

It is not unknown in the fire service for someone — often one of the newer firefighters— to think like this: "We've trained and trained, but we haven't had an actual fire. If I started one in this vacant building, it would be a great experience, and no one would get hurt. (And it would be tremendously exciting.)" 

Then there was the rural tradition back when the Forest Service hired people off the street of starting a little forest fire in order to provide some temporary employment. Not so much any more.

Frankly, you don't often hear of a woman doing that. It's more of a "guy thing." But maybe not always?

Mysterious Radiation in 775

It's already in Wikipedia: Something happened in or about 775 CE — a burst of radiation that affected Carbon-14 levels.

The only known events that can produce a ¹⁴C spike are floods of γ-rays from supernova explosions or proton storms from giant solar flares. But neither seems likely . . . because each should have been large enough to have had other effects that would have been observed at the time.

A massive supernova, for example, should have been bright enough to produce a 'new' star visible even in the daytime, as was the case for two known supernovae in ad 1006 and ad 1054. Such an explosion would have needed to be brighter than either of these . . .  because those events were not large enough to leave traces in the ¹⁴C record.

Read the rest.

Passing of Ed Quillen, Newspaperman & Expert on Victorian Undergarments

It was a small item on the Denver Post website, and it did not even register at first except semi-subliminally: "Denver Post columnist Ed Quillen dies at age 61 in his Salida home."

Well, crap. At least he went out without any hospital torment: a sudden heart attack as he sat in his easy chair.

A journalist since high school, later a columnist, and the founder of the still-published regional magazine Colorado Central, as a columnist, Ed was often the Post's only non-button-down, non-Denver-metroplex voice — a voice for the rest of us.

Quillen, who hated attending events where he couldn't appear in jeans and a sweat shirt, jabbed the moneyed set as "Brie and Chablis elitists." Homes thrown up in sprawling developments he called "plywood hutches." A certain class of politician he referred to as "rich, white guys."

He knew about water law, mining, agriculture, and Colorado railroads —the fundamentals— in a way that most reporters did not. 

As editor of Colorado Central, he used to come talk to my magazine-writing class about the business and freelance writing in general. And he published a few quirky articles that I felt like writing.

He told us that one trick to column-writing was to take a commonly accepted idea and extend it to the point of absurdity, or take an absurd idea and treat it matter-of-factly.

He published a collection of his columns in 1998 and co-wrote or ghost-wrote a number of books on such diverse topics as cocaine [The White Stuff, co-authored with reporter B.J. Plaskett—CSC] and mainframe computer programming. (Quillen may have come across as a country boy with his shaggy beard and rusty pickups, but he had been building his own computers for years.) 

As the Post article mentions, he and his wife, Martha, also wrote a string of "adult Westerns," which Ed defined by saying, "When Marshall Dillon and Miss Kitty go upstairs, the book doesn't stop there," and he used to toss out obscure terms like "balbriggans." At least in his imagination, he knew all about 19th-century undressing.

There aren't enough like him, and now there is one less.

Clearing Trails in the Sangres

I mentioned concern in the Wet Mountain Valley that blocked trails in the Sangre de Cristo Range from last winter's windstorm would discourage visitors.

The Forest Service has been working clearing trails, but the job is not yet finished.

M. and I took a walk on the Rainbow Trail in late May between Venable and Hermit creeks.

We could hear chainsaws running further up the slopes, and the Comanche Creek trail was closed completely, as was Alvarado Campground.

On the Rainbow, some blockages had been removed, but there were still a number that looked like this.

At one creek crossing, falling trees had smashed the handrail of the footbridge.

A Guide to Field Guides for Birders

Laura Jacobs surveys the current best North American bird guides for The Wall Street Journal.

I'm sticking with Sibley's for now, but her mention of Richard Crossley's new one for Eastern birds brought back memories of his visit to our house.

He was not too sociable — it was a little like he was the sahib and we were the "natives." I don't know whether to put that down to his being English or to his being a professional photographer and consequently very focused. (Sorry, couldn't resist).  I've known a few like that.

Bigfoot Sighting Claimed in Idaho

Crypto-critter or senior class prank? You decide.

I might have some more Bigfoot stuff later.

Fly Fishing with a Cultist

Crappy cell phone photo of Paul with his tenkara rod on Grape Creek near Westcliffe, Colorado.

My friend Paul Vertrees is a cultist.

A bumper sticker on his pickup truck says so — he follows the tenkara cult.

Tenkara (from the skies) is a Japanese style of fly fishing in which the line is attached to the tip of the rod — no reel — and the angler depends on a combination of casting, wind, and current to put the fly (often a nymph or wet fly) in front of the fish.

Of course, that is the way that everyone fished until some European invented the reel, first for storing line and later for playing the fish.

I tell Paul that tenkara is just Izaak Walton in a kimono — or more accurately, Charles Cotton in a kimono — but he ignores my jibes.

Here's Cotton, fly fishing in the old style with a rod of "five or six yards":

In casting your line, do it always before you, and so that your fly may first fall upon the water, and as little of your line with it as is possible; though if the wind be stiff, you will then of necessity be compelled to drown a good part of your line to keep your fly in the water: and in casting your fly, you must aim at the further, or nearer, bank, as the wind serves your turn: which also will be with and against you on the same side, several times in an hour, as the river winds in its course; and you will be forced to angle up and down by turns accordingly; but are to endeavour, as much as you can, to stand as far off the bank as your length will give you leave when you throw to the contrary side: though, when the wind will not permit you so to do, and that you are constrained to angle on the same side whereon you stand,---you must then stand on the very brink of the river, and cast your fly at the utmost length of your rod and line, up or down the river as the gale serves.

That sounds pretty much like tenkara-style fly fishing to me.

We fished a small creek together a couple of weeks ago, followed by a couple of hours on the Arkansas RIver.

I borrowed his rod on the creek — and I had a couple of strikes — only the slight different rhythm of fishing the tenkara rod caused me to miss the trout. (That's my story.)

It is a clean, simple, and ultralight technique, and for small-stream fishing, it makes a lot of sense.

In fact, I envied him when we were on the river, and while I was dragging streamers through a big slow bend, I had a spool mishap (a screw came out), causing the spool to fall off the reel unless I held the reel gangsta-style, on its side.

Paul, meanwhile, was fishing upstream, following the old technique of breaking the river into smaller "streams," and he had no reel problems because he had no reel.

Of course, like any other recreational activity that Americans take up, tenkara has its disputes between the purists and the innovators.

Articles about tenkara technique are starting to show up in the fly-fishing magazines, although I doubt that it will be endorsed too whole-heartedly, because reel manufacturers are major advertisers.  What, you don't need a $500 Ross reel? Heresy.

Whitewater-Baldy Fire Satellite Photo

Bill Gabbert at Wildlfire Today posts an interesting photo of yesterday's smoke plume from the Whitewater-Baldy fire in the Gila country of southwestern New Mexico.

Our winds have shifted to the west, so the smoke is not as thick today here, but you can follow it on this University of New Mexico website.

Blog Stew, Hold the Vinclozolin

• Common agricultural chemical has multi-generational effect on rats, suggested as cause of rising autism rates, obesity.

• "Green jobs" are not appearing as promised. In fact, this article says that wind-energy jobs have fallen, although wind energy production is up. (So it's a mature industry?)

• To live today means balancing beauty and destruction: Chris Clarke on the Golden Gate Bridge.

Memorial Day: Ensign William Bailey

William Bailey was a Navy reservist when the United States entered World War 2. A college graduate (University of Kansas) employed by a large insurance firm, he was headed for intelligence work when he was first called up, but somehow ended up in the little-known Navy Armed Guard, commanding a detachment on the freighter SS Wichita.

I don't know if that switch was a Navy decision, or if someone told him that by changing over, he could get to the war sooner.

Since WW2 German submarines often attacked unarmed targets on the surface rather than submerged, the idea was that a four-inch deck gun on a merchant ship could hold them off. Sometimes it worked. It did not work for the SS Wichita in September 1942.  Ensign Bailey and his (probably) green crew of gunners were outmatched by Gerhard Wiebe, skipper of U-516.

The Wichita was lost with all hands.

William Bailey was my stepmom's first husband. They were married for six months. When settling her estate, I found all the papers, etc., that she had saved, including correspondence from her struggle to collect on his life insurance. Because he was lost at sea, the government would not declare him officially dead until the war ended in 1945, so she did not get the money when she really needed it.

I wrote a little piece about them for  the Armed Guard website. They had no children, but if he has any relatives surviving, I would be happy to hand over everything to them.

Go, Team Vulture

Today M. and I had the assignment of releasing a rehabilitated turkey vulture who had spent a few weeks at the raptor center.

 It had been captured in Cañon City after being hit by a car, but although it had some internal injuries and abrasions, it had been doing well, so the staff judged it ready to go. We decided to take it back to its former summer range.

We let it go from an overlook on the Oak Creek Grade, for those readers who know Fremont County, and it was last seen soaring high toward the Royal Gorge — where I know there has been a large vulture roost in the past, although I have not looked lately.

I put on the official Colorado Parks and Wildlife volunteer shirt in case someone stopped and asked, "What have you got there? What's in the carrier? You're not dumping your dog, are you?"

Only one car went by, but did not stop. M. shot the photos.

Meanwhile, the "stargazing owl"  from ten days ago did not make it. The vet diagnosed a virus, possibly Newcastle disease. The bird's condition started to deteriorate, and it was euthanized. To be honest, they lose more injured birds than survive, which is why a release is always a happy event.

Ok, vulture, this is your cue.

There goes the turkey vulture. Those are actually dark feathers reflecting light.

Turkey vulture taking flight.

Gaining altitude over the Oak Creek Grade.