Why Supermarket Tomatoes Have No Taste

It's an unintended consequence of breeding for that nice red color.

This Is What a Wildland-Urban Interface Fire Looks Like

Watch this in full-screen mode. It is a time-lapse video of the Waldo Canyon Fire from its discovery on Saturday, June 23 through its run toward Rampart Reservoir on June 25, its big blow-up in the afternoon and evening of Tuesday, June 26, and on through Thursday, June 28.

Thanks to reader Darrell for the link.

Readers from Southern California will please refrain from invidious comparisons. Colorado Springs, unlike, say, San Diego, is not used to this sort of thing.

Noonday Heat

T-shirt and jeans? Is this the 1950s? No, he's a volunteer who was working nearby, heard the call on his radio, which is on his belt, and came straight away.

Foaming the smoldering stump, which is on the other side of that cottonwood tree.

It's so hot, and I woke up too early this morning, so I thought that I would grab a quick nap, only for the telephone to ring: "Fire at Mile Marker 22."

Up on the national forest, an illegal campfire, although extinguished, had still managed to set a stump and a cluster of saplings on fire.

A man passing by (as I understand) saw smoke, drove up the little dirt road, and attacked with a stick (!). Then three of our volunteers who live nearby got the alert and arrived with a fire extinguisher, hand tools, and buckets. A neighbor and I were the next wave, coming from about three miles away.

And then two brush trucks, ours and another department's—and a Forest Service brush truck somewhat after the fact, but they had to come 25 miles. And our sheriff and two deputies. Lots of response, but it shows how nervous we are.

An hour later I was home drinking a cold beer in front of the electric fan, thankful that I don't have to be working outdoors all day in this heat, which is about 98° F / 38° C. Extreme heat and I are not close friends.  

Route 66 Still Attracts Travelers

Your tax dollars at work: there is federal money available for restoring businesses along the "mother road."

And you can still trace U.S. 66 when no one steals the signs. There are tips for driving it.

And then there was that television show with the two guys in the Corvette. Wounded veterans ...

I plan to hit the part around Joplin and Springfield, Mo., later this fall.

Support for Brown's Canyon Wilderness

A brief video showing why Backcountry Hunters & Anglers support the proposed Brown's Canyon Wilderness (or national monument).

Distracted by the Waldo Fire

Webcam shot from downtown Manitou with smoke from the Waldo Fire.

Of all the fires burning in Colorado today, the out-of-control Waldo Fire west of Manitou Springs, Colo., has the most of M.'s and my attention.

Manitou Springs is where we met and where we lived for our first years together — a total of fourteen years for her, eight for me. It is a still a sort of home town for us — a Charles Rocky painting of the town hangs on the wall of the room where I am writing this.

The idea that the town is completely evacuated (not to mention Cascade, Chipeta Park, Green Mountain Falls, and the rest) is completely astounding. Nothing like this ever before, despite its location in a forested canyon.

Add to that the fact that well could be an arson fire, perhaps set by the same serial arsonist who has been setting fires in Teller County, immediately to the west.

What's Wrong with Young People Today?

 

. . . asks writer and bowhunter Dave Petersen of Durango in this magazine ad for Backcountry Hunters & Anglers. 

Keep going, Dave.

The Old Mose Memorial Tour

Black Mountain. Old Mose was killed just over the horizon and outside the frame to the left.

The Jeep rocked and pitched as we rolled slowly down a two-track dirt road coming off Black Mountain.

I wondered if Wharton Pigg's ranch wagon lurched down this same drainage — or one parallel to it — laden with a thousand pounds of dead grizzly bear, headed for his ranch, the Stirrup, still the largest in Fremont County.

With it went several ranch hands and James Anthony of Cañon City, who had shot the bear they called Old Mose, and the dogs who tracked him on Anthony and Pigg's final hunt: Ray, Dummit, Penny, Ginger, Ring, Prince, Jet, Gale, Zepher, Dowey, and Bluff, no doubt with tails high, knowing that they were Important and Successful Dogs.

It was the afternoon of April 30, 1904.

Old Mose, the Denver Post reported a few days later, was the "King of the Grizzlies." He was 45 years old, had killed three men (or four, or five) and countless livestock. The Cañon City Clipper called him "the largest and oldest bear criminal of Fremont County." He was the "terror of stockmen."  He ranged clear to the San Juan Mountains, over eleven Colorado counties, said the Post.  Moving more slowly, as befits a magazine, Outdoor Life, then published in Colorado, hyped Old Mose's reputation more later that year.

None of it was true. Except that he was a grizzly bear, and he might have killed two Hereford bulls — but no people.

According to later lab analysis of his teeth, he was 10 or 12 years old, but he was blamed for deaths occurring as far back as 1883.

The Stirrup Ranch today, with a newer, grander residence.

His range covered only parts of two counties, Park and Fremont, and with his death the population of grizzlies in Colorado, perhaps 800 in 1880, continued to plunge until it flickered out (as far as is officially known) in 1979.

When I lived Cañon City, I read and heard about Old Mose, the terrible mankiller. Periodically the Canon City Daily Record trotted out the story, and it was in the little local-history books as well.

But one writer had gone back to the original sources, walked the ground, and even arranged for the Arizona Fish and Game Department to analyze a tooth taken from Old Mose's head, now at the University of California, Berkeley.

Stirrup Ranch cattle. Waugh Mountain in background.

That was James E. Perkins, author of Old Mose: The King of the Grizzlies (2002). It contains a couple of errors (black bears do not have retractable claws), but it still ranks far above many works of local history that I have seen, because Perkins' narrative is supported by actual research instead of merely copying.

He makes a convincing case that the lives of at least three bears were conflated to produce the legend of Old Mose — and his argument is worth reading.

It is from him, to give one small example, that I got the names of the dogs. As Abbey Quillen said in her review for Colorado Central, it is "easy to read in one sitting, but you’ll probably find yourself flipping back through it again and again."

I have indeed been flipping through it again and again, for last week M. and I decided to tour Old Mose's home ground, at least by Jeep. Call it a mini-staff ride.

He deserves a shrine. Instead, I left a geocache on the nearest county road. So far, no one has looked for it.

Foxy Blog Stew

Red fox checks to see if the dogs are behind the fence.

• Red foxes are native to North America, yet some were introduced from European stock to the Atlantic seaboard. What do genetics say about the result?

• Please press "1" if you can no longer keep your dog.

• Fiighting fire in the 21st century—an operations chief explains strategy on the Little Bear Fire in SE New Mexico (9 min. video). Everything and everyone is a "resource," of course, and "IA" (initial attack) is used as verb. Still a good look at current Forest Service thinking.

More New Mexico Barbies

Socorro Barbie: Now an occasional tour guide to the Trinity Site, she comes with a roadhouse music CD and a waitress uniform. Favorite pastime is to park out by the Very Large Array, drink, and get nostalgic or regretful depending on circumstances.  Optional Ford Ranger pickup and Barbie Dream Quonset available.

Los Alamos Barbie: This Barbie is a homemaker who makes Martha Stewart look lazy.  Head of the PTA and the carpool driver to all after school events. Comes with a maxed-out Hobby Lobby credit card, a Dodge Caravan, and your choice of either Workaholic Ken or Pussywhipped Ken. Used to be classified, but was mistakenly leaked a few years ago.

Española Barbie: This recently paroled Barbie comes with a 9mm handgun, bowie knife, ‘78 El Camino with tinted windows, and a DIY meth-lab kit. El Camino may be traded at any time for a Chevy lowrider. This model is only available after dark and can only be bought with cash, preferably small bills.  Unless you are a cop. Then we don't know what you are talking about.  Hairspray and fake fingernails sold separately.

Read the rest.

Earlier models here.

Kenyans Don't Always Want Your Old Clothes

I believe in recycling. But we kid ourselves sometimes about how effective it is.

Take those bins for recycling plastic bags that are in supermarkets nowadays. Are they really about saving plastic stock, or are they chiefly a defense against anti-plastic bag laws.

"Look, we care! We're recycling!"

Supposedly they go into plastic decking. or into more plastic bags, but if the market dropped—especially in China, which is entering its own recession—they would probably going to landfill while we keep stuffing more of them into the collection boxes.

Then there's clothes. We drop them at Goodwill or Salvation Army or ARC, knowing that people with little money to spend—or college students looking for something ironically retro—will buy them.

Or not. The fact is, there are more used garments than buyers. So they go to a different kind of recycler.

There are thousands of secondhand textile processors in the United States today, mostly small family businesses, many of them several generations old. I visited Trans- Americas Trading Co., a third- generation textile recycler in Clifton, N.J., which employs 85 people and processes close to 17 million pounds of used clothing a year. Inside Trans-Americas, there is a wall of cubed-up clothing five bales tall and more than 20 bales long. “This is liter­ally several hundred thousand pounds of textile waste, and we bring in two trailer loads of this much every day,” Trans-Americas president Eric Stubin told me. The volume they process has gone up over the years alongside our consumption of clothing.

Without textile recyclers, charities would be totally beleaguered and forced to throw away everything that couldn’t be sold. Charities might even have to turn us away. The only benefit to this doomsday scenario is that our clothes would pile up in our house or in landfills, finally forcing us to face down just how much clothing waste we cre­ate. . . . . After the prized vintage is plucked out and the outcasts are sent to the fiber and wiping rag companies, the remaining clothing is sorted, shrink-wrapped, tied up, baled, and sold to used-clothing ven­dors around the world. The secondhand clothing industry has been export-oriented almost since the introduction of mass-produced gar­ments. And by one estimate, used clothing is now the United States’ number one export by volume, with the overwhelming majority sent to ports in sub-Saharan Africa. 

But even poor Africans do not want or cannot use it all. Now when every little kid in the smallest village in the bush has a Chicago Bulls shirt, what happens to the rest?

Read the rest.

"Summer Canyons"

At Tenkara Tracks, an evocative video of early-summer backpacking and tenkara flyfishing.

I think I know where it was made, but I'm not saying.

Wildlife Taxi: Two Typical Fares

Diana Miller examines a kestrel as a visitor looks into the Raptor Center's ICU.

I put about 250 miles on the wildlife taxi (volunteer wildlife transporters) yesterday and today.

First was a call to pick up a fawn — M. and I were the third leg of the relay that brought it three hundred miles from Durango. These are all volunteer wildlife transporters — no Colorado Parks and Wildlife official vehicles.

The Fawn

Fawn getting a bottle.

The backstory as it was given to me: Some rafters (on the Animas River?) found a fawn struggling in the mud by the water. When they tried to help it, they discovered that it had a broken leg.

The leg was wrapped in an elastic bandage, but the fawn herself (as we later learned) was alert. In fact, she made soft "mewp" noises during much of the remaining forty miles. Someone had given her some colostrum supplement and milk replacement — and sent the remainder along with her. But she was less than a week old, still showing her dried umbilical cord, and she was hungry.

At the rehabilitation center (a private home) she got more milk and water and was left to to rest in a quiet, carpeted shed.

We got the news this afternoon that she had gone to the vet — and it was not a broken leg at all, but a knee dislocation. The bone was re-set, and the leg was placed in a temporary cast to keep it in place. So her prospects are pretty good.

The Hawk

This morning's call came from the Raptor Center — could we go to a different southern Colorado town and pick up a red-tailed hawk that had "fallen from the nest."

OK, we could. (Insert long drive.)

The hawk was at a warehouse / operations center belonging to San Isabel Electric Association. But it was no red-tail, it was an American kestrel. That is sort of like confusing a pickup truck with a Smart Car.

The SIEA manager had it in a cardboard box, which was good. Its nest mate was flying in the same roofed-over, open-sided storage area, landing on coils of wire and old transformers leaking PCBs into pans of kitty litter. A sign on the wall said that that was the storage area for PCB-problem equipment.

The sibling seemed stronger, although not yet fully confident about this whole flying business. Nearby on a wire one of the parents (I assume) was giving the kestrel "killy killy killy" call.

So kidnapping one offspring was enough, it seemed to us. I told the manager not to worry about the other bird, that it would probably be all right.

Back at the Raptor Center, director Diana Milller lifted the kestrel from the box in front of a group of kids who were on an educational visit. "American kestrel!" shouted one. Give that girl a prize.

Diana said the bird had grease or oil on one wing and set about washing it. Other than that, it looked all right, and I hope that with a little food, rest, and some time in a flight cage, it will be ready to be released.

There's More
  

As I was typing this, the telephone rang. It was the local rehabber. "Our" fawn already has a roommate, as two more came in today. And another might have to be shuttled down from Lakewood. Could we be available tomorrow?

UPDATE, JUNE 20: We picked up the fawn. The relay system worked, so we had to go only twenty miles for it. It was healthy—apparently seized from some ignorant person who had found an "abandoned" baby.

A Real Camera-Trapping Trophy

Forget what I said about ringtails and mountain lions. Now this was a trophy.

Journalists Discover How Few Air Tankers There Are

Today's Denver Post might have been mistaken for "Wildfire News," with the High Park Fire west of Fort Collins having reached the status of Colorado's third-largest ever.

And the mainstream media have discovered the gradual shrinking of the nation's firefighting air tanker fleet, which Bill Gabbert at Wildfire Today has been blogging about obsessively. 

At least the Post quoted him.

Another irony is that Air National Guard C-130s with retardant-dropping capabilities sit on the runways unused, thanks to rules that restrict their use in favor of private contractors.

Still, the eight Air National Guard C-130 cargo planes fitted to drop slurry sit in Wyoming, Colorado, California and North Carolina. The Forest Service says it may request the eight planes only when all private tanker planes already are fighting fires or are unavailable for use. The C-130 crews insist they're ready to roll on 48 hours' notice.

So we have to wait until all the private planes are in use and there is a complete firefighting crisis before the Air Guard can be called up. Ah, bureaucracy.

As Gabbert  has written repeatedly, there are fewer private tankers available than there were in 2000, and some are nearly sixty years old. The Forest Service has produced lots of studies about the problem, however.