The one-question Colorado native quiz

Colony Baldy, Sangre de Cristo range, March 26, 2007
The photo shows

a. A beautiful, inspiring snow-covered mountain that lifts my spirit and makes me glad to live in Colorado.

b. A pretty decent snow pack for late March, but a couple more spring blizzards would be good. We could sure use the moisture.

Answer Key: If you answered (b), you are either a native or naturalized. If you answered (a), let's just say that you are not here for the long term.

Slime mold runs a robot

This is a little off-topic but still fascinatng: A robot controlled by slime mold.

The Physarum polycephalum slime, which naturally shies away from light, controls the robot's movement so that it too keeps out of light and seeks out dark places in which to hide itself.

Earlier, there was the robot that generated power by catching flies.

I am waiting for the robot that digests tamarisk. I can see it, a twenty-foot high hexapod, slowly grazing along the Arkansas River somewhere downstream from Pueblo, gently raising its mechanical legs over the barbed-wire fences.

The rats in the walls are laughing

When tickled, rats can laugh, says researcher.

What's wrong with corn-based ethnanol?

Conservation writer Ted Williams has it here.

First, no crop grown in the United States consumes and pollutes more water than corn. No method of agriculture uses more insecticides, more herbicides, more nitrogen fertilizer. Needed for the production of one gallon of ethanol are 1,700 gallons of water, mostly in the form of irrigation taken from streams either directly or by snatching the water table out from underneath them. And each gallon of ethanol produces 12 gallons of sewage-like effluent.

And then there is the question of whether we get a net gain or net loss in energy from ethanol. I'm still dubious.

Irony and a long-handled round-point shovel

I should not have reminisced about clearing irrigation ditches in spring.

Walking the dogs last night, M. and noticed standing water where there is normally none. With a sinking feeling, I realized that it was near where a valve on the water line from the well to our next-door rental cabin is located.

This morning I dug down a couple of feet (through waterlogged Holderness silt loam, for those of you keeping track of soil series) to determine that, yes, the water was coming up from below. It was not from melting snow.

Then I called the "backhoe guy." Now there is a six-foot-deep muddy hole waiting for the "well guy" to put in a new valve. (I could do it, but it would take me three times as long, and I have to teach classes.)

And at the end of the day, I was trudging in high muddy boots back up my driveway, shovel on my shoulder.

Just like irrigation days.

Signs of Spring

¶Crotch rockets: A warm weekend brings out the crotch-rocket yuppies from Colorado Springs, looping down through the Wet Mountain Valley. (In Florence, by contrast, the Harley owners seem to drive up and down Main Street.) Every year a couple are killed on Hardscrabble Hill or the Bigelow Divide, sacrifices to two-wheel tourism.

¶The first meadowlark singing down on the prairie between here and Florence.

¶Mourning-cloak butterflies.

¶Northern flickers yammering and hammering on utility poles--they have been doing it for two weeks now.

¶Some crocus bulbs that I planted at least two years ago have bloomed, thanks to this winter's snows. And in the woods the spring beauty (Claytonia) are blossoming. (Photo)

¶So let's have a another spring blizzard. We need the moisture.

¶But the one that still affects me is the smell of burning grass. At once I think, "Ohmygod, I've got to clean the ditch."

But it has been fifteen years since I owned ditch shares in Canon City. That wandering lateral ditch along the bluff is no longer my concern. But something in my memory gets me looking around for a shovel and a propane torch come March and ditch-cleaning season.

Is this like post-traumatic stress syndrome for gardeners?

The Piñon Canyon quandary

The proposed expansion of Fort Carson's Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site (PCMS) makes a lot of southeastern Colorado residents nervous.

Coming back from last weekend's class trip to Vogel Canyon, we saw several versions of "this land is not for sale to the Army" homemade billboards.

Colorado's Congressional delegation has been hearing from them. Senator Wayne Allard has made some noises. Is he trying to slow the process--or just make it more palatable?

Some Colorado legislators want to limit the Army's ability to condemn land, although they know that the bill might not stand up in court.

A lot of wildlife and botanical research takes place there.

SE Colorado was wracked by this same issue in the late 1970s, when the Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site was created. In the 1990s, I went quail hunting there several times. You had to buy a special permit, but it was not much trouble.

Once my friend and I strolled into one of the former ranch houses--we could tell that the owners had just packed and left without tidying up at all. Perhaps they were some of the unwilling sellers whose land was taken by eminent domain. A 1978 Sears catalog still lay open on the kitchen counter. It spoke of pain.

Yet despite the Humvee tracks and the occasional bit of military debris, PCMS had lots of wildlife when I was there--maybe more than when it was grazing land. Windmills were maintained to pump water for wildlife. Certain sensitive areas were cordoned off and treated as "minefields." Like Fort Carson itself, PCMS was turning into something of a wildlife sanctuary. (Some hunting and fishing at Fort Carson is open to the general public.)

As a visitor, I was able to go places and explore things like the ruined stage stop that I probably could never have done before, unless I was the previous landowner's cousin or something.

On the other hand, expansion could restrict public access to areas in the Comanche National Grassland that are now open. And of course the ranchers who lease grazing rights there would lose them, further cutting into their economic base.

Colorado kids who stay indoors

If you come from Colorado, people elsewhere assume that you are a skier, at the very least.

But most Colorado children never get into the mountains, says the Denver Post.

In the Denver Public Schools, the figure is 90-95 percent.

Unless parents make the effort--and obviously many cannot or will not--only organized clubs and programs can get kids off the asphalt.

When thunder wakes

The day started clear, and I heard flickers, robins, and blackbirds singing when I left home to travel to the university.

Around 3 p.m., a snowstorm swept through. A north wind blew big, wet snowflakes horizontally across Pueblo's Baculite Mesa and through the university buildings, while thunder boomed.

Thunder speaks, and winter--on some level--is over. Now come spring snows.

A walk in the Mason Gulch Burn

I took this photo yesterday along the north edge of the Mason Gulch Burn, which burned in July 2005 and which covers at least 11,000 acres between the communities of Wetmore and Beulah, Colorado.

Heavy rains in July 2006 tore through the burned area. What had been a tiny trickle of a stream in Mason Gulch is now, in places, a wider, flat, graveled trench several yards across.

Between the localized flash flooding and the loss of trees, walking a trail that I had not taken since before the fire is a disconcerting experience. It's like seeing someone you know who has shaved their head--the contours are the same but the visual experience certainly is different.

The burned area calls me, though. I look up at little ridges that used to be hidden from sight, wondering what lies behind, seeing routes that could be hiked once the snow and mud dry.

This spring and summer I hope to make more of a photographic survey of at least this end of the burned-over area.

Winter claustrophobia

In his latest column for Colorado Central, also available through High Country News, my neighbor Hal Walter faces winter claustrophobia, growing older with snow shovel in hand, and a friend's falling sick during a snowstorm.

This winter’s series of snowstorms has sent me shoveling day after day, and for some reason now that I am 47, this doesn’t seem as much fun as it did when I first moved to the mountains. While my neighbors gear up with snow-blowers, truck-mounted snow blades and tractors, small and large, I shovel away, wondering how much of this stuff has to fall to stockpile enough water for summer.

When not snowed in, Hal is a serious competitor in the Colorado niche sport of pack-burro racing and also writes about it.

The end of an era in serious boots

Southern Colorado is thawing out a little bit this week. My rubber snow boots, caked in mud, sit drying on the front porch. Fifteen inches tall, they are still not tall enough for some of the lingering snow drifts.

M. swears by her Sorels with the felt inner liners and rubber/nylon outer layer. I go for laced shoepacs with removable liners when I have to walk a long distance; gumboots with thick socks when I don't.

But none of that compares with the World War II German and Russian infantry who marched in pull-on boots and no socks. Instead, they wrapped their feet in pieces of cloth (an art in itself) that could be rearranged when holes wore through, thus outlasting any pair of socks. Today's Russian army, however, appears ready to drop that system. (See photo.)

Advocates of the tradition say cheap and virtually indestructible boots and foot bindings suit the cold Russian climate better than the refined footwear of Western armies. And in the marshland, there is almost no danger of water making its way inside.

On a related note, this story from a January 1945 issue of the military newspaper Stars and Stripes describes how American soldiers adapted to winter weather.

Back to the Stone Age! (Beginners welcome)

The Cottonwood Institute in Crestone, Colorado, offers a "Back to the Stone Age" week-long camp for high-school students.

We will experience first hand how we used to live, thrive, and survive in the natural world by learning and practicing stone age survival skills. We will focus on shelter, fire, cordage, and stone tools. We will discuss the environmental impact of these skills, look at the waste we produce, and contrast that to the way we live today.

The philosopher Paul Shepard, writing in his book The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game, suggested that all teenagers should have at least a one-time experience of hunting large game with primitive weapons. He regarded the experience as part of human maturation and development--much of his critique of our culture revolved around Americans being stuck in adolescence.

So is this "Stone Age" camp at least a start?

Quite a few nature writers and others say that Paul Shepard changed their lives.

Fur hat tip to SLV Dweller.

A grim movie of high-altitude wildlife protection

KeKexili: Mountain Patrol is simply stark.

Stark plot, stark scenery, stark cinematography. As stark as one of John Ford's classic Monument Valley Westerns.

Its plot is based on recent history on the Tibetan Plateau, where a rag-tag group of volunteer game wardens attempted to stop poachers killing Tibetan antelope for their fur, which is woven into soft, luxurious cloth: shahtoosh.

It was made in 2004 by National Geographic Films, who have been criticized for soft-pedaling the Chinese takeover of Tibet. On the other hand, without Chinese government cooperation, Mountain Patrol could never have been filmed on location.

Watch the trailer.

A warning: The film's first five minutes are pretty brutal. M. walked out. But after that the story takes over.

What is the 'wrong type of snow'?

We step outside our usual Colorado/New Mexico milieu for this one.

Heavy snow (6 inches/15 cm--don't snicker) has fallen in Britain, and people are asking questions about it. The First Post online newspaper has the answers.

Here is the British take on "champagne powder:"

What's the "wrong type of snow"?

Made famous by British Rail back in February 1991, this is powdery snow that gets sucked into engines or trapped in points and electrical gear on tracks, causing short-circuits.