Motor Fuel Costs

A few days ago, I was able to buy gasoline for the Chev at the rate of $2.99/gallon. How nice. Filling the truck costs $65 at that rate, instead of the $80-plus that I've been used to. With all the commuting I've done this year, it feels as though we've spent most of our income on motor fuel. To see if that was true, I ran some numbers. As you can see from the graph (above), we spent around $4200 on petrol in 2013. I'm not going to go into detail about our monthly income and benefits, but let's just say that $4200 comes out pretty close to 10% of our take-home pay. Wow. It seems like a lot of the cash that comes in the door goes straight into the fuel tank. On the other hand, when I researched this topic before, I found that the AAA holds that the costs of car ownership are second only to the costs of housing for most families, so maybe it shouldn't be such a surprise.

What did surprise me about my data, though, is that our 2011 and 2012 costs were around $3900 for both years—only about $300 less than 2013—even though I wasn't commuting in 2011 or 2012. What can explain that? Well, there are probably three factors right? 1. Vehicle fuel efficiency; 2. Miles driven; 3. Price of motor fuel. We did switch vehicles between 2012 and 2013, swapping the defunct Sable for the Saturn. The Saturn is slightly less efficient than the Sable was, so we've used more gallons of fuel for every mile driven in 2013. But, again, with the amount of commuting I've done, this should argue for a significantly higher gasoline bill in 2013 . . . which we really didn't have. So, if our petrol costs are not being driven (no pun intended) by fuel efficiency or miles behind the wheel, what is left? Yep. The price at the pump.

Indeed, when I do a simple regression using the standard international benchmark (Brent) for crude oil prices against our gasoline spending, I get a good correlation, with an "r" value of 77. When I drop 2010 from the regression because it is an outlier (we drove to Montana in the Chev at least two times), the correlation is even stronger: my "r" is 86. Granted, I have only a few data points, and I've not taken the time to generate any measures of variance, but I feel pretty comfortable with the explanation. (If you want to double check my regression, I'll send you the data.)

Even more interesting (at least to me) than the foregoing is that, by the local benchmark crude, West Texas Intermediate (WTI), gasoline should have been cheaper in 2011, 2012, and 2013 than it is. For the first time in history, these two benchmark prices for crude oil have deviated, with Brent being significantly higher than WTI for the past few years. (You can look at the data here.) This is because, as The Economist points out, the United States is producing a significant amount of domestic crude that has been stock-piled in Cushing, Oklahoma. There are bottle-necks in domestic transport and refining capacity that have created a glut of unrefined crude. The glut pushes down the price of crude, but the refining and transport bottle-necks keep the price of gasoline high.

Creative Lighting

VSO used luminara—candles in paper bags—to light The Homestead on Christmas Eve. I think it looked pretty good. (You just have to ignore the junk appliance on the front porch.)

Christmas Eve

My Christmas Eve tradition is to take the skis out for an afternoon or evening tour. With afternoon temperatures reaching the mid- to high-40s for the last two or three days, however, this year's performance had to change. Don't get me wrong, it is nice to be outdoors in the afternoon, but the snow is melting fast and what is left is pretty sloppy and gloppy at 48F. The solution was to take a lap before the sun cleared the canyon wall this morning. So, that's what I did. I went out to Center Creek at 8:30a while everything was still frozen. Between VSO and me, we'd built a pretty good track through both the lower and the upper meadows over the last couple of weeks. The entire loop is just a shade over two miles in length. The snow was firm and I was cold, so I went out hard. I'm not trying to intimidate anyone who is hoping to make the team traveling to Sochi later this winter, but I clocked in at 30 minutes on the nose—a 4.1 MPH moving average. (If the Organizing Committee wants to give me a call, I will talk with them, but I'm pretty much retired, and I think we ought to let the younger athletes go to Russia.)

Rural Ways Exclusive

It has been a while since we featured our favorite painter in a post. With this new work (above) coming off the easel, we thought it was time to highlight the local talent again. VSO has not shown this picture anywhere yet, so I'll give my readers the first shot at it. Make me a five-figure offer and I'll see if I can get it for you. (I assure you that my commission will not exceed 40%.)

Speaking of our favorite painters, VSO has also made a page on this website called "Look-at-Me." Rural Ways has not visited Look-at-Me because it seems faddish, especially when compared to cutting and splitting wood for the stove. In any case, I've been told that you can make friends on the site. If you want to make friends with a famous artist, click HERE.

Texas Wants You Anyway

I was pretty far from the road when I heard someone coming up. Revving and grinding and carrying on. They got pretty close to where I was parked and then the noise stopped. I couldn't see them, but it made me a little nervous. Were they trying to park in my spot? The snow was deep and I was afraid that if they tried to pull in there they'd hit me or something.

After another ten minutes of climbing around, I'd rimmed out. Couldn't go up, couldn't go down. I went back the way I'd come and tried another route, but had no luck. The sun was down, so I decided to call it a day. When I got back to the road, there was no one in sight. But there were no new tracks in the snow, either. Whoever had been there had gone back down when they got to the Chev. I wondered why.

On my way out, I watched their tracks. They were obviously struggling. In and out of the ditch, and a lot of footprints. Finally, I saw them. The young lady was on the road and the guy was driving . . . sort of. They were gangsters. Hat backwards, hoodies, tattoos, cigarettes. They were also stuck. I pulled up and got out. They had a two-wheel drive sport ute (rear wheel), a little dog in a sweater, and nothing else. No coats, no hats, no gloves, no boots, no shovels. Nothing. At least they were wearing pants and shoes.

I offered to pull them out. They took me up on it. The guy pointed to his license plate. Texas. "I've never driven in the snow," he said. (I hate to do this to Lyle Lovett, another Texan, but at this point in the story, I have to steal one of his lines: "As if I couldn't tell." Actually, that might be the second line of his that I've stolen for this post.)

It took me a few minutes to get hooked up to them, to pull them back onto the road, and to make sure they were straightened away. During that time, they talked a lot. They told me about how they had planned to move to Utah. And so on. But, by the end of the monologue (duologue?), the young lady, through a haze of cigarette smoke, concluded that, "We're going back to Texas. We're not cut out for this."

First Tracks

While I've used the skis to do a little recon at work this fall, I'd not yet taken them out for a holiday lap. So, yesterday, during the second big snow storm of the week, I went up to Center Creek. I parked at the ford, which was frozen, and skied across the ice. The road was untracked. I broke trail to the upper meadow and put in one loop. Then I skied back to the ford. While I was in the upper meadow, some yayhoo drove over the ford on his ATV and flipped a couple of donuts in the lower meadow. He (or she) was gone by the time I got back. I don't really care what ATVers do, but this genius had to thrash my track. I don't understand it. The whole road is empty, he has a motor, he can go anywhere, but he has to drive up my track. Why? I guess it is typical modern American behavior: When you see someone else out in the woods, you can't leave them alone, you have to follow them. Are y'all lonely? Anyway, this motorhead gave me the opportunity to break trail twice, once going up and once coming down. But, my three readers are not here to listen to me complain all day. They want the data. So, here they are: Total Distance 1.86 miles; time 39:08; moving average 2.9 mph; maximum speed 5.1 mph.

Phenomena

If you have more then one phenomenon, you have phenomena. At The Homestead, we've had two in as many days. Yesterday it was the snow; today it is the temperature. When I left the house for work, the thermometer said minus eight. By the time I passed Paragonah on the freeway, the car thermometer said minus 28. Twenty-eight below zero on December 5th? I won't say it has never happened, but it has certainly never been recorded. In fact, the low temperature record for this day at the Cedar City airport was set in 1972 at minus five. Today, 41 years later, the Cedar City airport reached minus 18, beating the old record by a whopping 13 degrees. The other thing is that we've gone through this already during 2013. In January, we had a record cold snap that took us to minus 22. I honestly didn't think we'd see that again, maybe ever. But now we've beaten it, and it isn't even January yet.

Phenomenon

Yesterday EDO returned from school with a new word: Phenomenon. She told us that it stood for an unusual occurrence, often associated with a rare weather event. Before Elijah noticed the still small voice, for example, he witnessed three phenomena: Wind, earthquake, and fire. Well, at The Homestead we had another example overnight. Snow. We awoke to nearly 10 inches of fresh powder. I won't say that it has never happened, but it was certainly an unusually large storm for the first week of December.

No Name Mesa

This time we drove through east Zion and into Springdale for an art festival. From the park tunnel to I-15 (and beyond) it was one long stream of bumper to bumper traffic. The line may have been unbroken all the way to San Bernardino. I didn't check. But, I would just like to post this word of encouragement: This is great. This is Utah. Please enjoy Zion. Do not limit yourself in any way. Drive as fast as traffic will allow. Throw your trash on the ground. (That strip of hair growing under your lip is revolutionary—how did you think of it?) We hope you love the lodging in Springdale. We're building a lot more of it. See? Stay as long as you like. And when it is time to go, you'll want to use the southbound ramp at I-15.

In the meantime, EDO and I went up the Smithsonian Butte road and found a two-track going out to the edge of the mesa. We parked about half way down and found a little wash to explore. There was petrified wood, there were rocks to climb, and there was a lot of cactus. The roar of traffic from the valley was faintly audible, but it was quiet in the wash. I could hear the call of the canyon wren and sometimes the familiar "hoooo-oot" from Ellen when I'd been out of sight for too long. We each ate a sandwich and EDO stuffed her pockets with tiny crystal-filled rocks that sparkled in the strong light.

Just as the sun—low in the sky—began to swing around to our side of the butte, it was time to go back to the crowds. Sure enough, we picked up a tailgater from Los Angeles within five minutes. (My apologies. I hope I didn't dampen your enthusiasm for Springdale. Please visit often.) We also picked up VSO from art show duty just in time to join the stream of traffic through Rockville. It was bumper to bumper all the way to La Verkin. Fortunately, based on my advice, many of our friends turned south towards Hurricane, and I could finally drive really, really fast.

Johnson Canyon

We made it about five miles up the Nephi's Pasture Road today. It is usually a horrible sand trap, but last week's snow actually helped. Instead of mud, we had firm sand. I hiked to the foot of Spring Point with EDO, while VSO turned in a couple more paintings. After some sand surfing, we went back out to Johnson Canyon. While VSO worked (again), EDO joined me on the yellow sandstone.

Mudded

The thing about this country is that when it is wet it is wet. There is nothing you can do. Best stay on the oil. It always catches me by surprise, though, and I think it will get better if I just try again further down. After mudding out three times in a row, I gave up. VSO sat on the roof of the Chev and cranked out a couple of paintings while EDO and I explored a (sloppy) little canyon. Not the day I had planned.

Homesteader Milestone

At Rural Ways we have The Homestead (where we live and pay high taxes) and The Farm (where we just pay high taxes). Despite these rustic appellations, we are plainly not hard-core modern homesteaders. We live in town, and the two properties combined are less than one acre. We buy power, water, and sewerage from the municipality (at high rates), and buy most of our food from the grocery store.

My sister and brother-in-law, on the other hand, have gone a greater distance down the road to the Jeffersonian ideal—yeoman farmers all. They have 30 acres, their own well, and a flock of chickens. While they still buy food, Rural Ways is taking a moment this week to acknowledge a homesteader milestone:

At the weekend, my nephew visited the field behind the family (log) home with a couple of friends. Within one hour he had shot and killed his first buck. (My brother-in-law would like his son to know that things in life are generally not that easy.) That night the family dined on venison backstrap—evidently the finest cut available. During dinner, my sister looked around the table and noted that every dish—every crumb of food—had been grown, raised, or hunted on their own land. Congratulations.

Destructive Sampling

This week I was walking along a ridge in the Tushars thinking that I was seeing the same old high-elevation spruce-fir when I suddenly realized that there was charcoal on the ground and a fair amount of ponderosa pine. Ponderosa. At 9300 feet. So, I started giving things another look. In contrast to many of the other stands, this one had clearly been shaped by fire. I found evidence of some very old timber cutting, too. Plus, just where you would least expect it, there were large blue spruce. Not Engelmann spruce, but blue spruce. It really made me wonder what was going on. What kind of stand was this?

I thought about it all night. In the morning, I had an idea. Right in the thick of things I had noticed a large ponderosa that had been killed by a mountain pine beetle attack in 2012. Why not go back there and cut it down? It would allow me to slice the stump into a couple of cookies that I could use to date not only the tree, but the fire history of the stand.

So, I did. I climbed all the way back to the ridge with a chainsaw that must have weighed about 300 pounds. I felled the tree, and got a couple of cookies. But, I couldn't bring them home. At least not both of them. They were too heavy. I took the thinnest one . . . and the 300 pound saw . . . and made it back to the truck with, I think, both of my knees intact. The other cookie is still up there. It is a nice one, too. It is up for grabs. (If you want it, the location is printed on the card in the picture: UTM, Zone 12.)

What is it that a scientist says when the actual outcome does not match the expected outcome? "It will likely take decades before we understand the full impact of these events on this fragile ecosystem." (BTW, I'm not a scientist but I've read about them.) In any case, my sample tree germinated between 1842 and 1849 and my cookie displays not a single fire scar. This was not what I expected, so it required a trip to the library.

European settlement of the area around the Tushars began by about 1860 and, this being Utah, we have pretty good written records of everything that has happened since then. At the library I skimmed through a couple of fairly detailed histories and did not find a single mention of wildfire. Given the reliance of the early pioneers on the natural resources of the area, along with the fact that most of them were outdoors for about 90% of their lives, I would have expected some mention of wildfire. Unless there were no fires. Which is what my cookie tells me. Could it be that the obvious charring that I am seeing pre-dates 1840?

Caught With the Ole Pants Down

I suppose it is only fair that I tell this story. I mean, I would be really critical if I caught someone else with their pants down like mine were, so I'd better admit my own short-comings. It was like this: I went to pick up the girls at church last Sunday. They go to one of these california-seeker-sensitive places that is full of gangster-looking punks and Harley guys. I can't stand the place. But, the main point is that the church doesn't have a regular order of worship, so they might finish at 11:00 or 11:30 or noon or anytime. When I go to pick them up, I bring something to read and sit in the car waiting, sometimes for a long time.

Anyway, last week I was playing a CD on the car radio and I left it playing while I waited for the service to end. In order to have the radio on, I had the key turned. It might have been turned far enough for the headlights to come on, I don't know. (The car has automatic headlights. When you turn the key, they come on. It is kind of annoying, but I understand that we live in a nanny state now, ain't nobody expected to take care of their own business.) In any case, whether the lights were on or just the radio, it shouldn't have mattered because I didn't have to wait very long. It was probably 10 minutes that I sat there with the key turned—not long enough to kill a decent car battery.

When the girls got in the car, however, it wouldn't start. It wasn't getting enough of a shot from the battery. The starter would tick a little, but it wasn't enough to turn it. I popped the hood and took a look. I think the battery was probably fine, but the terminals and posts were obviously corroded. You know how they'll develop a thick green layer of semi-dry, battery-acid looking crust? Well, that is what we had. With the battery drained down a little, and the corrosion pretty thick, there just wasn't enough juice getting to the starter to kick it over.

How does that Billy Joe Shaver song go? "I got a good christian raisin'/and an eighth-grade education/I wasn't born no yesterday." Well, I've surely dealt with this little problem before. All it takes is a wrench and a wire brush: You pull the terminals off, scrub the corrosion off the posts, clean up the terminals, put it all back together, and, bingo, two minutes later you're on the highway. Well, and this is where things started getting bad: I suddenly realized that all my tools were in the Chev . . . back home in the driveway. I always carry a toolbox, and a bunch of other stuff, like jumper cables, tow straps, and a can of fix-a-flat. (The fix-a-flat really saved our bacon in the middle of the San Rafael Swell one time. We were about 50 miles from Green River on the gravel when we got two flats at once. The spare went on one and the fix-a-flat went in the other. It probably saved us a week of shooting flares at passing airliners.) We've had the car for most of a year now, but somehow I'd never stocked it with the basics. There was not one tool in the car. Not one.

This was the point at which things went from bad to worse. I reached for the pliers that I always carry in my pocket, but they weren't there. For some reason I'd left the house without them. I had my pocket-knife, of course, but that was it. I was reduced to begging the girls to look through their purses for a pair of tweezers or something. I'm not kidding. It was desperate times. I started imaging what it would be like to spend a week living in that crumby church parking lot. Then, just as I started really worrying about it, we were rescued.

It was awful. It really was. One of these Harley guys had left the motorcycle at home, so he pulled over next to us with his pick-up truck. Out came his little tool kit. It had jumper cables, pliers, a week's worth of rations, everything. It was terrible. While we hooked up the jumper cables, he sort of lectured me on what I should do. I'm not kidding. Here was Rural Ways standing in a suburban parking lot getting a speech from a california-harley-guy about how to keep my battery posts clean. I couldn't say anything. I mean, he was right. My pants were down around my ankles (figuratively speaking) and I had been reduced to begging. I just kept my head down and agreed with everything he said. Fortunately, the instant we put his cables on our battery the car started.

We beat a hasty retreat. I practically ran the guy over just trying to get out of there. I drove straight home, grabbed the wrenches, pulled the terminals, cleaned up the posts, and got the whole thing back put back in operational order. Since then, I've gone through all my tools and built a little care package: cables, tow strap, channel-locks, screw-drivers, a flashlight. You know, the basics. We might need help again someday, but it won't be because I am standing there empty-handed wondering how long it is going to take me to walk home.

Standard Time

The shift from daylight savings time to standard time is, I suppose, almost universally treasured. I mean, doesn't everybody enjoy that extra hour of sleep you get from falling back? At Rural Ways there may be less enthusiasm for the change than is typically assumed. The first of us, and I don't mean the girls, gets up at 5:30 every morning to start the coffee and the fire. Whichever one of us that is does not need an alarm clock because he is generally awake at 5:00 am anyway. Setting the clocks back simply means that a certain person now awakes automatically at 4:00 am. Four in the morning is a gawdawful time to get out of bed. On the other hand, laying there for two hours waiting for the rest of the world to stir starts to feel pretty boring.

View from the Office

This week we've been working in the high elevation (10,000 feet) spruce-fir stands of southern Utah. There is, of course, no lack of fir, in this case subalpine fir (Abies lasiocarpa), which is taking over the world, so the species of interest is spruce, Engelmann spruce (Picea engelmannii). With their thin soils and short growing seasons, Utah's high plateaus do not grow spruce quickly, but they can grow 'em long and large. I found a number of specimens, or their stumps, that were almost 40 inches in diameter and more than 300 years old. While I would guess that an Engelmann spruce could live to 400, anything over 300 years is beginning to exhibit signs of decadence. The trees in these stands are starting to blow over, break off, and fall down. It puts a lot of wood on the forest floor. With about five inches of snow on top of all that downed wood, the reconnaissance conditions this week were treacherous. I found that they were frequently putting me on the forest floor, too.

Mistakes Were Made

We drove as far as we could and left the Chev in a patch of tumbleweed. The plan was for me to return it to our basecamp later in the day before my final hike to the river. That was the second mistake. The first mistake was loading my backpack with certain necessities—the tent, for example—that did not include the kettle.

We made our slow way down the tributary canyon with a number of stops to make adjustments to what everyone was carrying, especially EDO who had an uncomfortable old backpack that wasn't fitting her very well. (Do I need to count that as a mistake, too?) After about two miles, I started to make encouraging noises to the girls about how we were most of the way there. Um. No. The three miles I had in my mind turned out (for some strange reason like reality) to be just over five. By the time we reached our river camp, it was after 2pm. We were all tired.

This was the point at which the first two mistakes came into sharp focus. One, we didn't have the gear we needed. Two, my plan to make a quick round-trip to basecamp to collect the gear we needed was looking like a 10 mile death march late in the day. VSO suggested making do with what we had, but I felt that the missing items were critical. (Did I mention that my sleeping bag was in waiting for me in basecamp?)

Anyway, I'll spare my three readers the story of my agonies, but let's just say that I was back in our river camp after the sun was down but before it was dark. It was a rough 15-mile day for the old man, but it seemed like we had all the necessary gear at that point. (Fortunately the missing spoons were replaced by utensils carved from a juniper branch.)

Our family experiment in backpacking came with some mistakes. But, it put us in one of the more spectacular places I've ever been. (And, actually, that is saying something.) The girls loved it, too. We'll have to fix some problems if we want to go back, but, for a few hours, it was worth it.

Coyote Bounty

There is a bounty on coyotes in Utah. It is $50. The bounty was introduced as part of the Mule Deer Protection Act (MDPA) of 2012. The MDPA came with $500,000 to be used against coyotes. (Because, well, coyotes eat, among other things, mule deer.) By my calculations, that money would pay for 10,000 coyotes. Dead coyotes. Scalped coyotes. To collect your money, you need to turn in a pair of ears (paws work, too). So, the best way to get your cash is to scalp your coyotes. Like the ones in the picture above. 13 scalped coyotes. Dumped in view of the Love's truck stop. Worth $650. Good money in my world. I wonder if I can get in the coyote business? I've always been lucky when it comes to killin'. Of course, I'd need a coyote rifle, some ammunition, and gas in the truck. I wonder what that will cost. Besides, then I'd have to find some coyotes. Live ones. With ears and everything.

Beauty

Climbed with VSO to the ridge of red hoodoos above Bowery Creek. After that we went and cut a load of firewood. She looks good for all that, doesn't she? Better'n me.

Got a Dinette Set?

We were on the south side of Cedar City the other day, returning Tiger's ladder. Down near his house I noticed a big box under construction in a sea of parking lots. "Boulevard Home Furnishings," the sign said. (Or something like that. Maybe it was "Freeway Mattresses." Who knows?) "My Gosh," I shouted at VSO, sitting next to me. "Is Cedar City big enough to keep a Costco-sized mattress store in business?" "And sofas, . . . and dinette sets," she replied.

As my reader knows, our sofa was on the way to the dump in the back of Don Evan's pick-up truck when he decided to stop at our house. So we don't have any experience buying sofas from big boxes. Our mattress was, likewise, acquired from Deseret Industries. Each of these furnishings has lasted for more than ten years. Which brings me back to the question: Can a small town like Cedar City consume that much furniture?

I was still pondering this question when I pulled into an old gravel pit on the north side of Cedar City. It is a common dump site now, and people use the area to jettison everything from auto parts to yard waste. I go there once a week to pick chunks of broken concrete that I use for pavers at The Homestead. When I got there this time, I found a sofa. A nice, white sofa; nicer than ours. The only problem with it was its styling. It was horribly unattractive.

Well, I thought. That is how you do it: Sell furniture so ugly that we will want to throw it in the gravel pit. Then, sell us more.

A History of the Pines

OK, now that we’ve got the entire team involved, this is turning into a long story . . . and a lot of research. From what I can tell, Meriwether Lewis was the first white person to observe the lodgepole pine. This was, perhaps, in Wyoming, where the tree grows straight and slender. But, I am speculating to some extent here because Lewis never used the word "lodgepole." In fact, in all his journals, he named only three "pines"—white, balsam, spruce—and I'm not sure which species these really are. The spruce pine, for example, grows only in Georgia or Florida, so Meriwether Lewis didn't see one of those on his exploration. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that he saw lodgepole, ponderosa, pinyon, whitebark, and western white pine. He may even have seen the shore pine when he reached the Pacific: "[The] species grows in low grounds, and in places frequently overflown by the tide, seldom rising higher than thirty-five feet, and not more than from two and a half to four in diameter . . . ."

After the Lewis and Clark expedition, the next note we have is from about 20 years later when David Douglas began his work for the Royal Horticultural Society of London. He started collecting in 1823 at Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River. (David Douglas was one of the greatest explorer/botanists in North American history. He collected more than 500 species of trees and plants in the early 19th century, including the Douglas fir, which is named for him. He died young in Hawaii—killed by a bull in a bull trap.) As Kass mentioned in his comment about the Oregon coast, the first thing Douglas found was the shore pine. He gave it the scientific name Pinus contorta. Here is his description of the leaves: “Leaves in pairs, rounded on the back, concave on the inner side, rigid, acute, 2 to 2 ½ inches long, having a very short ragged or ciliated sheath.” For the branches, this is his description: “Branches drooping, greatly twisted in every direction, remarkably tough, the younger ones covered by acuminate chaffy brown scales.”

There you have it. I think that is the answer. The first written botanical record of the lodgepole pine calls it “contorta” because its branches are twisted, not its needles. That is not quite the end of the story though. It is not clear to me that either Meriwether Lewis or David Douglas recognized that the twisted shore pine and the skinny lodgepole pine were the same species. It wasn’t until 1871 that another giant of botany, George Engelmann, showed that the Rocky Mountain lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta var latifolia) was a variety of the shore pine (Pinus contorta var contorta).

Overlook

Like she has for each of the last ten years, VSO competed in the Escalante Canyons Art Festival's plein air competition. And, like she has for about eight of the past ten years, she took home an award. This year, it was for a painting she called "Overlook" (pictured above). The painting was purchased by a collector on the spot, so it never made it to the wall of The Homestead. Which is disappointing. But, on the other hand, when you're married to one of the best painters in the state, you never lack for fine art to enjoy by the fire each night. (Yeah. I'm bragging. But, the need to bathe in reflected glory is a common affliction of the talentless.) In any case, this week she has been channeling Maynard Dixon on a series of dramatic oil sketches of Wildcat Point. They are aggressive. There is no other way to put it. I'm looking forward to what she does with the final product.

White Fir

It's that time of the year again. As my reader knows, I spend most of my free time in October and November foraging on the plateau for firewood. Mostly I manage it, but I'm not always satisfied with the result. Sometimes I spend an inordinate amount of time carrying the wood across three acres of downed brush; sometimes I bring home a truckload of punky junk with all the BTUs of a paper grocery sack; and sometimes I cut white fir in the creek. This week, I've been stuck with all three. I found a pretty good dead tree not too far from the road, but it was leaning over Center Creek. I didn't know what species it was—it can be hard to tell when there are no branches or needles—but I thought I could drop it onto a gravel bar where I could buck it up. Not too many seconds after the chain punctured the bark, I had an answer to both of my questions. If you kick a chunk of bark off the stem of a white fir (Abies concolor), you will find that it has both reddish and whitish coloring. It reminds me of a cross section of peanut butter and jelly. As the first piece of peanut butter and jelly bark flew off the subject tree, my sub-conscious registered "white fir." At the same instant, my sub-conscious registered the lack of resistance on the tip of my bar. POP. The tree simply broke where I was cutting it and sent me running through a thicket of alder and wild rose to get away from the flying butt. The tree missed me, but it didn't miss the creek. When I went back to buck it up, I had to stand in the water. Then I had to carry all those rotten pieces across three acres of alder and wild rose to the Chev. By the time I had a truck load (with all the BTUs of a paper grocery sack), I was so tired that I could barely drive home. Is it normal for a grown man to need a two hour nap each day?

A Reader Writes

After our post on lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta) we got a comment from Jess Clark regarding the origins of the tree's scientific name. The comment ended with a question: Are lodgepole needles twisted? And, could that be the reason for the species name, contorta? This is the kind of question that we love at Rural Ways. It shows that our readers are beginning to think like foresters. It is, of course, widely acknowledged that forestry is at the apex of the natural sciences, and, indeed, may be at the pinnacle of all learning. There is, surely, no one who knows more about how the world works than a forester. Be that as it may, the question about the shape of the needles had us stumped. You see, we don't have lodgepole pine in southern Utah, so there was no way to gather a sample of its leaves in order to analyze their shape. We had to resort to the internet for a clear look at the needles. The picture, above, was provided by Oregon State, and shows some fairly straight needles. There is a slight twist to a few of them but it is not pronounced. While we are still open to the possibility that needle shape had something to do with the species name, the evidence at this point seems to be against it.

Extending the Extension Ladder

After being gone again for part of the summer, it was finally time to make some progress on the trim painting job I'd begun earlier. As I noted in July, part of the delay was the lack of a suitable ladder. Tiger loaned me a pretty good one, but it still wasn't enough to reach the peak. So, my in-laws encouraged me to try this set-up: You back the Chev up to the wall and then put the ladder in the bed of the truck. If that doesn't work, you put it on the roof. By the time I got up there with the paint, the wind had picked up (they didn't tell me about the 40 MPH forecast). With my sewing machine leg going and the springs on the truck rocking, it was more like a trapeze than a ladder. Do you think they want to get rid of me?

Heating Season

In 2012, we started our first fire on October 12th. It was a cold, wet day—the start of our last heating season. This year, while I was in Oregon, VSO pulled the trigger on September 26th—starting this heating season two weeks early. She is, admittedly, cold blooded, and is typically wearing a sweater while I'm sweating through my T-shirt, but there was some justification for her early start. Southern Utah saw a three day run of overnight temps in the high 20s/low 30s. The afternoons have been warm and sunny, but it takes a while for the sun to do its work. As a result, the morning temperatures in the house are generally in the 50s. While that sounds adequate to me, I can understand that not everyone has Swedish blood.

Lodgepole Pine Surprise

I thought I knew most of what there was to know about lodgepole pine. It is an early seral species that grows in the Rocky Mountains in dense stands of straight stems. Hence the name "lodgepole." We are, however, working this week along the Oregon coast. And, much to my surprise, there is lodgepole pine growing right down along the beach. These lodgepole do not, however, have straight stems. They are twisted by the wind coming off the ocean and tend to be stunted and bushy. Hence, noted one of my colleagues, the scientific name "Pinus contorta." Very interesting. The common name makes it sound like the tree is tall and straight, while the scientific name makes it sound like the tree is bent and twisted. Now I know why: It depends on where you find it.

Beetle Traps

As a favor to an entomologist acquaintance of ours, a colleague and I recently agreed to try trapping a few specimens of western pine beetle in the mountains near Beaver, Utah. I went out there yesterday to set up the traps. You can see one in the picture above—a series of black funnels with a white cup on the bottom. The trap itself wasn't too complicated, but the bait confused me. Actually, the bait was ready to go, and all I needed to do was install it, but I did too much thinking and ended up spilling the bait all over myself. Because beetles are baited with a pheromone, I was thinking that I probably smelled pretty good to female beetles for the rest of the day. (It is nice to have something going for you.) On the other hand, screwing up the bait may mean that our traps remain empty. Of course, the area that we selected for beetle trapping had only a single beetle-killed tree, so I'm not sure the beetle population would have been high enough to fill our cup anyway. We'll give it a week and see what happens.

Rain Forest Living

When Rural Ways went to bed last night, it was raining. It rained all night. When we got up this morning, the trees were dripping, there was standing water in the yard, and the sky was full of heavy clouds. Today's forecast is for more rain. None of this would be noteworthy in Costa Rica, but this is southern Utah. Moreover, this has been going on for much longer than 24 hours. In the past month there have been parts of Iron County, where we live, that have received more than five inches of rain. In fact, over the last two weeks, Parowan has reached a level of precipitation that is more than 300% of "normal" for this time of year (pictured). It is nice to be out of the drought, but I can't keep up with the weeds.

Grape Harvest

In the past I've speculated about what it would take to make a batch of jam from the Oregon grape (Mahonia repens). In my experience, it generally produces about three or four fruits per stem, and the labor of collecting enough material to feed ourselves has seemed overly expensive. Until now. This week, I was walking around in Indian Creek and I noticed that the ground was covered with Oregon grape. Not only that, but every stem had a cluster of fruit like you'd see at Safeway—fifty to a clump. I'm tempted to send the girls out there to collect a couple of full buckets. They say it takes only about three pounds of the fruit to make a batch of jam. (Of course, the "grapes" are so sour that each batch also calls for about five cups of sugar.)

Minor Kitchen Renovation

The Homestead was built in three to five phases, starting with a one-room adobe cabin (circa 1880) and concluding (we think) with an indoor bathroom sometime after 1930. The building phase that created the most indoor square footage was completed around that same time (~1930) and included a fairly large (200 sq. ft.) kitchen. It is the same kitchen we are using now. In fact, the kitchen cupboards and cabinettes were built on site (in situ) by the same man who built the kitchen, and they are still in place.

What the '30s era construction did not include was insulation or heating. At the time it may not have mattered because it looks as though the cooking was done, for many years, on a cast iron wood burning range. Rural Ways has not had the priviledge of living with one of those, but they look as though they must have given off a great deal of heat. It seems as though the work of cooking would have kept that end of the house warm all the time—probably too warm in the summer.

In any case, at some point during the 1950s though 1970s, the wood-burner went away and was replaced, at the same location, by an electric range. The picture above shows the set-up. The current electric range is an old Gibson from some other era—probably the 1970s. Notice, however, that the wall is tiled with a heat resistant or heat reflective brick. The tile has been painted over, but each piece consists of an outer layer of brick with an inner sandwich of some other heat resistant material. (It does not look like asbestos.)

The reason I know the tile's composition is that I have started to remove it. (See the upper right section of the wall.) VSO doesn't like having it there because it is grungy. You can see from the picture that dirt and grease get into all the cracks and can't be cleaned out. Under the tile is plaster, mostly cracked, and then lathe. What I'm going to try to do is remove the tile while leaving as much of the plaster in place as possible. Then, I'll skim coat the plaster with drywall mud and we'll have a cleaner looking—though textured—wall behind the range. Speaking of the range, Grandma and Grandpa have recently donated a newer model that we will try to install.

Reisner v. Mitchell

The only thing, said Marc Reisner, in Cadillac Desert, his seminal work on the arid American west, that we are running out of faster than water is oil. Mr. Reisner's view was common among Malthusians of the 1970s, who liked to say that America had reached the era of limits. Reisner's belief was that the water necessary to settle the eleven western states was over-allocated by the 1970s, and that the extractable volume of fossil fuels used for energy had peaked. I don't know where we are with water, although I do know that the western states have added approximately 20 million residents since Reisner wrote his book. But, the thing that really struck me as I read his comment was that America is, today, on the cusp of energy independence, and will likely become a net exporter of energy soon. This is, admittedly, something that could not have been foreseen, even ten years ago, and Reisner has been dead longer than that, but it gives fresh strength to one of the key arguments against Malthus: That he failed to account for human ingenuity.

Likewise, Reisner. While he was writing his book, George Mitchell was working to extract oil and gas from the Barnett Shales beneath Fort Worth, Texas. For thirty or forty years Mr. Mitchell labored to perfect a pair of drilling techniques—directional drilling and pressurized rock fracturing (fracking)—which have come to revolutionize energy production, not only in the United States but around the world. There is now essentially no limit to the volume of fossil fuels available to provide energy to the American public. Mr. Mitchell is dead now, too—he died last month—but, in an obituary, The Economist noted that, before he died, he changed the world. Whether that change is "good" or "bad" will undoubtedly be debated for many years: Burning fossil fuels is blamed for climate change, and fracking is blamed for water pollution. (These are problems that, evidently, concerned Mr. Mitchell, too.) The fact, however, remains that where Mr. Reisner saw limits, Mr. Mitchell saw opportunities.

View from the Office

This week we've been working, you guessed it, on the Routt National Forest in north central Colorado. Much of the area is good moose, elk, and deer habitat. Unfortunately, I mostly just see deer, which isn't very interesting. Every once in a while I get a glimpse of an elk, which is a little better. But, this week, we found three moose, which was kind of fun—a cow with two calves. In this picture, one of the babies is laying down, so it is difficult to see.

House Painting

As any good house painter should know, you always start the job at the top and work your way down.  That is, the first thing to paint is the highest peak, and the last thing is the ground floor.  So, what is wrong with this picture?  Well, we are converting the trim at The Homestead from green to white, not the other way around.  It looks like our job is progressing backwards.

Part of the problem is that we can't reach the peak.  We have a pretty good aluminum ladder, but it only reaches to about the top of the second floor window.  We will certainly need to rent, borrow, or buy a longer ladder to finish (start?) the project.  But, the bigger problem is that we don't like working from the ladder—from any ladder.  There are some who don't mind it, but they don't live here.  For us, the progress is so slow on the ladder, that we prefer to get something done on the ground.  Unfortunately, it looks like we are running out of ground work.

Ironically, after both Tiger and Preston commented on the paint job, I got up there yesterday to make a big push.  By the time I had about 72 square inches primed, a big thunderstorm settled in.  I couldn't believe it.  My patch of wet paint (water based) got sluiced by two-hours of rain.  I guess I learned my lesson:  When the job is difficult, it is best to procrastinate.  Why do something today, that you could just as well put off until tomorrow?

Killing Yellow-Jackets

When I returned to The Homestead after a couple of weeks in Colorado, I was dismayed to find an active and growing yellow-jacket nest inside the corner of the shed.  Now, I know that some people have a live and let live attitude about yellow-jackets.  But not me.  I don't want 'em anywhere around me or my family.  The problem is that once they are well established, it is hard to get rid of them without getting stung.  So, I thought about it all day, and finally came up with a brilliant solution:  An armored attack.

The way the nest was positioned in the shed door, I could drive the car so that the front passenger window was almost directly underneath it.  So, I waited until dusk, and then got in the car with a can of bee spray.  I started the car, and drove it over to within five or six feet of the nest.  I put the car in park, left it running, climbed into the passenger seat, and opened the spray can.  From where I was sitting I had a perfect view up into the nest.  With my left hand on the power window button, and my right hand on the spray trigger, I was ready.  I opened the window about one inch, stuck the spray nozzle through it, and fired.  Direct hit.  I drenched the nest with a full blast of bee spray for about two seconds, withdrew the nozzle, and closed the car window.  I climbed back into the driver's seat, pulled the car away, parked it, and went into the house for the night.  Victory.  With 3000 lbs of steel, gasoline refined in Texas, and a can of toxic aerosol, I had outsmarted and overcome several dozen yellow-jackets.

Coincidentally, I had a chance to see this done another way when I was out walking in the woods yesterday.  Granted it was just one yellow-jacket, not a nest of them, but I watched a black widow make short work of a large hornet that got too close to her nest.  I had expected an epic battle of biting and stinging, and I wondered which of them had the more potent venom, but, instead, the black widow simply tangled the yellow-jacket into submission.  Where he was caught, she was free to move, so she simply wound him around and around with her web until he was totally immobilized.  Then she collected the bundle and carried it down into her larder.  In contrast to my mechanized attack, the whole operation was simple and silent.  There must be a lesson here about harmonizing the ways of man with the ways of nature, but I don't know what it is:  Today I will be going to Walmart to buy another can of bee spray.

Talented and Productive

I was trolling through the website of Southern Utah University the other day and when I clicked on the link to SUMA, the Southern Utah Museum of Art, I found that VSO was the headliner. She is doing an "art hike" on Saturday and the museum has posted a nice write-up about it. Not only that, but if you click the top "Announcement" on the SUMA website, just to right of the main panel, you will find that VSO is noted in the Southern Utah Art Invitational's flyer as one of Southern Utah's most celebrated artists. Speaking of celebrating, the next website you'll want to check out is VSO's own. Every once in a while I click through the ten galleries she has posted there just to make sure my opinion is properly calibrated. And it is. VSO is one of the most talented and productive painters in the state. If you want to see for yourself, stop by the wine store in downtown Salt Lake City for a show of some of her current work. Of course, to my reader I always offer exclusive deals so if you are interested in the painting posted above, contact me directly and I will try to talk her down under five figures for you.

View from the Office

This week we're back on the Routt National Forest in north central Colorado.  We're working in  lodgepole pine stands, which likely originated in the aftermath of a severe wildfire.  Because such fires have been absent from these stands since the late 19th century, the forest is generally converting to subalpine fir.  (There is not much fir in the photo, above, but you can see it starting to come in at lower left.)  I'm sure that subalpine fir is beloved by many, but I think my reader knows that Rural Ways prefers pine.

In any case, one mystery that I was able to solve this week involves subalpine fir cones.  Have you ever stood in a subalpine fir thicket and wondered why there were no cones on the ground?  Have you ever wondered what the cones would look like if you could find them?  Tada.  See the picture below.  The cones of the subalpine fir develop at the very top of the tree.  When mature, they open and disseminate seed without dropping from the branch.  The cones then disintegrate in situ.  As a result, there is never a pile of fir cones on the ground under the tree.  I found the pictured cones residing at waist level in a tree that had blown over.  Notice the growth habit?  Instead of drooping down like most cones, they grow straight up, pointing at the sky.

Opposite Ends of the Earth

Well.  Despite yesterday's post about 100 degree temperatures on The Homestead, Rural Ways actually spent the week experiencing another climate entirely.  A family reunion in Lake George, New York took us to the other end of the country.  It might just as well have been the moon.  Instead of 50 days of drought, the Adirondacks were in the middle of 50 days of rain.  The deluge was so heavy that nobody laughed when one guy started loading his boat with two each of every kind of animal.  Ha.  The thing is, in that climate, it doesn't even need to rain:  You can be wet just sitting in the house.  The other thing that stood out to the dry land farmers from Utah was the obvious floral aggression.  If you don't cut it, mulch it, mow it, spray it, or dig it up, it will take over your property.  Every living plant grows with such vigor that your main problem is keeping it from tearing down your house.  Quite a change from The Homestead and The Farm where nothing will grow if you miss even one turn on the irrigation spigot.

In any case, the point of the trip was to enjoy the classic Adirondack camp experience while celebrating the 50th anniversary of the patriarch/matriarch.  And, enjoy it we did.  There was basketball, tennis, canoeing, archery, sailing, swimming, hiking, craft-making every hour of the day—interrupted only by the time necessary to heap our plates at the dining hall.  We sat on the porch, walked in the woods, and, of course, enjoyed the white pines . . . between massive down-pours.  It has been nice to return to southern Utah for a bit of drying out, but here we could actually benefit from even a small portion of the daily rain falling on Lake George right now.

New Heat Record

There were no triple digit days at The Homestead during the summer of 2012.  There was at least one triple digit day at The Homestead during the summer of 2011.  For 2013, we have a new record:  The thermometer on the shed topped out at 101F at around 3p this afternoon.  It is bad out there.  We're coming up on 50 days without rain.  And, just like that long dry spell we had last year, this one is going to coincide with the 4th of July.  Put away those fireworks my friends.

Survey

When we purchased Parcel Four a couple of months ago, we became the owners of three different tax ID numbers.  That is, The Homestead, The Farm, and Parcel Four were all being taxed as individual properties despite being contiguous and under unified ownership.  The property taxes in Parowan are ridiculous (unless you're comparing them with those from the east coast) and we knew that we could save money if we had one parcel instead of three.

So, I talked with Cleve at the city office, and he told me that I'd need to have the property surveyed so that the new legal description could be recorded with the county.  He also advised me not to combine all three parcels.  The Farm is a legal, buildable parcel in Parowan with a pressurized irrigation connection.  Cleve told me that each parcel is allowed only one irrigation connection.  Since we also have one on The Homestead, combining The Farm and The Homestead would mean we'd have to give up an irrigation connection.  He said that there are currently no new irrigation connections available . . . and never will be.  He said that the connection is very valuable, and that we would be throwing that value away.  Besides, Cleve said, it would be really difficult to ever sub-divide again.  Well.  We aren't property developers and don't care about subdivisions, but, in southern Utah water is worth more than gold, and we don't really want to give it away.

Still, we don't need (or want) three parcels, so we called Steve Woolsey, a licensed surveyor, to help us.  His recommendation, which we accepted, was to combine Parcel Four with The Farm.  We will now have two pieces instead of three, but probably won't get a very big tax break because most of the land will be part of The Farm . . . where we don't actually live, so the rate is higher.  In any case, Steve came over this week to do the survey.  The Farm will now be about 1/2 acre, flat, fenced, and connected to the city irrigation system.  If we ever decide to sell it, we should be able to move to Monte Carlo on the proceeds.  Or, well, if not Monte Carlo, at least Milford.

First Peas; First Nineties

Last year, we were eating from the garden—just a little bit—in the last ten days of May.  This year, our first bite came on 7 June when VSO found a handful of peas.  Garden production in 2013 is probably about two weeks behind what it was in 2012.  Of course, 2012 featured an exceptionally warm spring, with temperatures nearing 90F in May.  That obviously had a lot to do with the early garden production.  Well, for 2013, the hot weather has now arrived.  Along with the peas, we've got nineties.  I'm happy to see the former, but not the latter.

Demise of the Bristlecone?

Western five-needle pines, especially those that typically grow at high elevations, are currently facing the triple whammy of a warming climate (approximately .5 to 1 C), a major insect epidemic (mountain pine beetle, Dendroctonus ponderosae), and an exotic fungus (white pine blister rust, Cronartium ribicola).  In fact, the combination of pine beetle and blister rust has killed so many whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis) trees in the past ten years that the species has become a candidate for listing under the Endangered Species Act.  Mercifully, however, our own Rocky Mountain bristlecone pine (Pinus aristata) has thus far been spared, though it seems only a matter of time.  (White pine blister rust has been found on a bristlecone in Colorado.)

All of this brings me to the question that has been bothering me all week:  If we don't have beetles or blister rust in our southern Utah bristlecone, what is killing them?  EDO and I were out walking in a locally famous bristlecone stand called the "Twisted Forest" earlier in the week (see top picture).  I'll grant that this is not a nice site, but these trees have been here for a thousand years.  And, when I was walking here a year or two ago, they all looked normal.  Now they don't.  They are dying at an unsustainable rate.  Look at the foliage on the specimens to the left of EDO's head:  going, going, gone.  Inside of two years, these trees have died from the tips of the branches in.  The pattern seems to be discoloration and dropping of needles from the ends of the branches.  Slowly the whole branch dies.  Eventually the entire tree is defoliated . . . and dead.

I thought about this for a couple of days, and then I ran out to my local (lower elevation) bristlecone pine, the one nearest to The Homestead.  It looks a little better, but is losing leaves just the same.  The big surprise, though, is that the die-back is happening in the local pinyon (Pinus edulis) forest (lower picture).  I really did not expect that.  The bristlecone and the pinyon are not generally susceptible to the same pathogens, so what is going on?  The only thing I can think of is a climatic effect:  drought?  winter desiccation?  frost?  But, if my reader knows the answer, I'm all ears.

Honestly, I don't really care about the pinyon pines.  They are prolific seeders, and can be found from sea to shining sea.  But, the bristlecone is fairly rare, and regenerates slowly, if at all.  On my walk through the Twisted Forest, I looked for cones and seedlings.  I found two cones, and about the same number of seedlings, but the seedlings were affected, too.  I hate to say it, but that particular stand is dying quickly and does not have the ability to replace itself.  The Twisted Forest is so named because of the gnarled, krumholtz forms of the older trees.  Those stems will not be going anywhere for a long time (dead or alive), so I suppose that the name of the area doesn't have to change.  But, this will soon be a skeleton forest.  If you want to see it while there are live trees, don't wait until next year.

4 July 1826

I just finished David McCullough's biography of John Adams.  I'd like to recommend it, but at 650 pages it is too long for anyone with a social life.  John and Abigail Adams were patriots and public servants the likes of which have not been seen in America before or since.  I'll just leave it at that.  But, the thing that really caught my attention was that both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.  Maybe everybody else knows this and I just missed it in history class, but it is a very interesting fact (at least, it is if you have no social life).

On the first of July 1826 there were three living signers (out of 56) of the Declaration of Independence:  Adams, Jefferson, and Charles Carroll (about whom I truly know nothing).  Jefferson was the author of the Declaration and Adams was its most powerful proponent in the Continental Congress of 1776.  On the fourth of July 1826, at 1pm, Thomas Jefferson died at Monticello.  On the fourth of July 1826, at 6:20 pm, John Adams died at Quincy, Massachusetts.  That strikes me as a remarkable coincidence.  John Quincy Adams, John Adams son, who was President at the time, did not think it a coincidence, but called it a manifestation of divine favor.  And perhaps it was.

Job Done

It was back to (fence) post pulling today, and I was able to finish the job.  My previous (blog) post, however, generated mass confusion.  My explanation of the pulling mechanism was inadequate.  A helpful reader suggested that I take a picture of the system.  Knowing something about how to make a bad picture, I figured that the camera would only add to the confusion.  So, I asked my personal graphic artist to generate a sketch.  Here it is.  The key to the whole thing is setting the fulcrum (pole) so that it leans against the post.  Then, as the cable pulls forward, the fulcrum (pole) stands up, exerting a vertical pull on the bottom of the post.

Pulling Posts

There is an old fence on the eastern border of The Farm.  I've wanted to replace it with something newer, but haven't done much with it so far.  Part of the delay has been my reluctance to take on the manual post removal job.  I mean, have you ever tried to dig out an old fence post?  And, there were more than thirty of them.  I was imagining buckets of sweat.  On the other hand, farmers remove fences all the time, and they do it without any sweat at all, using a bucket loader on the tractor.  I thought maybe there was something to that, so yesterday I rigged up a system using the Chev, a piece of choker cable, and an old chunk of telephone pole.  One end of the cable went around the base of the post, the other attached to the trailer hitch on the Chev, and in between I put the telephone pole.  The pole was tilted against the fence post such that, as the cable pulled tight, the pole rocked towards the vertical, exerting an upward pull on the base of the post.  It took me a few minutes to fix the system on my test post.  When I got in the Chev, I didn't even use the throttle, I just let the idling motor pull forward.  Pop.  Out came the post.  Wow.  First try.  That never happens to me.  My work-saving ideas generally succeed only about half-way, leaving me to sweat, and swear, and kick at it for the rest of the day.  In a couple of hours, I probably pulled 20 posts.  Not every one of them was as successful as my test post, and I needed four-wheel drive for a couple of them, but I saved myself several days (weeks?) of labor.  There are about 15 left to remove, but I no longer fear them.

UP II

After another week at Michigan Tech, I was hoping to paddle the Potato River.  In the event, the wind and waves on the lake blocked our approach.  Instead, we decided to do some forestry on the Cranberry, and back up the river of chocolate milk we went.  At the little "S" curve just downstream from the small bridge there were three or four trees in the water that were making for a tricky run.  Mark used a couple of saws to do some thinning.  After that we paddled to the upper end of navigability and sipped some bourbon while skipping stones.  Mark and Kristi had promised me a barbeque and bonfire on the beach, but the winter weather squashed our hopes (there are still no leaves on the trees).  So, we had dinner inside by the fireplace in our long underwear.  Another great day at Camp Rubens.

The Upper Peninsula

The past week has been spent in the UP.  Which mostly means taking a class at Michigan Tech.  But, sometimes means paddling Camp Rubens with Mark and Kristi.  (Don't be fooled by the pictures.  It is winter here ten months out of twelve.)

Reforestation

Last week we were burning; this week we were planting.  (Or, I should say, the guys in the picture below were planting.  This crew of, well, non-English speakers, planted more trees, in worse conditions, in a shorter period of time than any, well, English speakers could have.)  The plan was to put 25,000 native Douglas fir and ponderosa pine seedlings on some of the steep slopes above the North Fork of North Creek that had burned during the Twitchell Fire.  Did I say steep?  Fifty and sixty percent slopes.  Rocky, too.  It will be interesting to go back in a few years to check on the survival rate.  On the other hand, there were plenty of large trees growing on these slopes before the fire, so we know that the site can support them.  It was also nice to see all the sprouting—aspen, oak, mahogany, kinnikinnick, rose, elderberry.  The early seral sprouting species certainly benefited from the fire.

Rx Fire in Pinyon-Juniper

The plan was to ignite a slash line built by the fuels crew last summer.  The heat and flame from the slash would ignite the adjoining tree crowns and the wind would push it from crown to crown.  There wasn't enough ground fuel to sustain a fire, so it had to be a crown fire.  Besides, it's always windy in southern Utah.  So, we each grabbed a couple of drip torches and hiked in to the slash line.  It was sunny and warm, but still.  Very still.  I got out my wind gauge:  Wind speeds of zero, with gusts to three.  The spot weather forecast had the winds picking up later in the afternoon, so we waited.  And waited.  By about 1500, I was getting winds of three, with gusts to seven.  Feeling like we had to do something, the firing boss sent me one way on the slash line, and sent Matt the other way.  It was a test fire.  I lit about 30 yards of slash and stopped to wait.  It didn't work.  Where the slash was piled directly against a tree, part of the live crown was consumed, but then it just went out.  Some gentle breezes swirled around, but not enough wind came up to push the flames.  Actually, I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it.  Conifer leaves are always flammable, and I figured we'd put enough heat into them that they'd pop, starting a chain reaction.  But, I guess the live fuel moistures were too high.  In any case, the burn boss called it off, and we hauled our nearly full drip torches back to the road.  That, as they say, is why you have a test fire.