Anasazi Pots

On Sunday we were out in Recapture Creek looking for Anasazi potsherds.  EDO found a nicely painted one (above).  After a while, I took a walk up the creek for two or three miles and started climbing around on some small sandstone walls.  When I dropped down to start back, I noticed a nearly intact corrugated pot under a rock (below).  It may have been sitting there for 800 to 1,000 years.  (Still is sitting there, in fact, because obviously I didn't touch it.)

Light Christmas; White Christmas

Like she did last year, VSO decorated The Homestead with luminara for Christmas Eve.  By the evening of Christmas, though, we had quite a different decoration:  A foot of snow.  It is one of the larger snowfalls we've had since we bought the place.  Arriving home from Grandma's house last night, we were confronted with a snow-plow berm over which I didn't feel like driving the car.  Quite a bit of shoveling was required to make space for ourselves.

Last Day of Autumn

 

It was one of the drearier days of the year.  The sky was gray from horizon to horizon.  It was spitting a little light snow.  The effect on this loaf of rock was to frost the top and streak the side.  White and black.

Where the Coyote Walks

Sometimes when you're out looking around, especially when there is snow, you'll start to notice that you're walking where the coyote walks.  I know this sounds vaguely aboriginal, but it's not.  It's just that, at least for me, I prefer walking where it is easy.  Evidently, he does too.  (The only difference is that the coyote doesn't mind low branches.  The coyote's preferred easy walking space is within two or three feet of the ground, mine is twice that.)

Cloudscape

It was a good day for a short walk.  Not in the woods like on Tuesday.  But out in the basin and range country.  Pinyon and juniper country.  After three or four miles of easy going, I got back to the car for the drive to town.  Through the Parowan Valley.  The late afternoon sky was billowing with clouds.  Towering clouds, virga draped below.  I stopped at the Little Salt Lake for a picture.

Too Close for Comfort

There is one thing that makes me feel better.  The tree was forked.  It had a double top.  It had a "V" shaped junction about 12 or 14 feet up.  This is a well known weakness in the stem of a tree.  It makes me feel better because I hope that we were not at risk from every tree in the forest.

It was dusk.  We were out in Center Creek looking for a stupid Christmas tree.  It was windy.  Not horrible, but steady 20s and 30s probably.  I was down in the wash near the truck.  VSO was up on the bank.  In the brush.  Picking her way along.  Looking for the perfect four-foot white fir.  A gust came.  A bad one.  Maybe 60.  I don't know.  70.  I was watching her.  I was thinking that it was hard-hat weather.  The people that work for me.  If they are in the woods when it is windy they'd danged well better be wearing their hard hats.  But this was a little family outing.  Getting a tree for Grandma and Grandpa.  I heard a terrific tearing ripping crash.  Out of the corner of my eye I saw two stems.  Falling.  I yelled at VSO.  Harshly.  Get outta the woods.  I may even have used the F-word.  It wouldn't have made any difference.  There was no way she could have outrun it.  Outrun them.  They fell to the side.  Obliquely.  She skittered down the bank.  The wind dropped.  We stood there.  Whew.  She said.  I've never seen wind-throw like that.  Yeah.  Neither have I.  We probably shouldn't be out here.

Last Try

As my reader may know, I like literary fiction.  In fact, along with oil painting, I consider it to be the finest of the fine arts.  While I try to keep an open mind, I have a strong bias towards the art as practiced in 20th century America.  I mean, Hemingway, O'Connor, Fitzgerald?  Sinclair Lewis?  Walker Percy?  Harper Lee?  Wallace Stegner?  C'mon.  It may be the best line-up in history.  The only problem I have is with William Faulkner.  Clearly influenced by James Joyce, I find him inaccessible.  Where Hemingway is lean and mean, Faulkner is meandering and verbose.  So why is this a problem?  Well, because Faulkner sits atop the pantheon.  A two time winner of the Pulitzer, he is widely considered to be the best of the best.  (Hemingway won twice, but the 1941 award was stripped when For Whom the Bell Tolls was found to be offensive.)

There are, of course, plenty of good things in life for which a taste must be acquired.  Probably Faulkner is one of them.  I'm going to give it one more try.  For the month of December, I'm removing everything from my reading list until I finish The Sound and the Fury and Light in August.  If I can't get the hang of it by then, I'll quit.  I mean, I've got Elmer Gantry sitting here unopened, so it is not like I'll be bereft without Faulkner.  But, I need to give it one last try.

Getting to Work

You know how some days you feel kind of lazy and just want to do something fun?  Well, I was having one of those days, just sort of goofing around on the rock bands above Bowery Creek, but I decided that I needed to buckle down and take the opportunity to do some learning.  For the past couple of weeks I've really been irritated by my inability to distinguish, on the fly, between the Utah (Juniperus osteosperma) and the Rocky Mountain (J. scopulorum) juniper.  As I'm sure my reader knows, sometimes this kind of thing just takes a little concentration.  So, I made myself work on it for a couple of hours.  I'm not confident I can do it from the freeway, but I got to be pretty good at species ID while walking briskly.  As you can see (from the image below), once you take a close look, the leaves turn out to be quite easy to distinguish.

Cmas Tree

Last year I forgot, evidently, to make a note of when we cut our Christmas tree.  I know where we got it:  Center Creek.  That is where we always go.  And I know what we got:  A white fir (Abies concolor).  That is what we always get.  Today we went to Center Creek.  And got a white fir.  A nice one, too.

Black (and White) Friday

In honor of the national holiday, I made this picture a little earlier today.  I'm not going to say where, but I will give two clues.  First, the tree is a great basin bristlecone.  Second, the picture was not made at Walmart.

Hornet's Nest

I very much dislike yellow jackets, or hornets, (which I consider to be the same thing, though probably they aren't).  I mean, I can see a reason for bees, by which I mean honey bees or bumble bees.  And, I don't mind wasps too much, given their slow flight and lack of aggression.  But, I can't stand those pushy yellow jackets—swarming and angry.  Whenever I detect the beginnings of a hornet's nest anywhere at The Homestead or on The Farm, I get rid of it.  While they are pretty bad actors, they are no match for a full can of hornet killer with a 30 foot spray—especially when deployed from inside an armored personnel carrier.

In any case, I thought I was pretty well on top of things this summer:  Vigilant and well-armed, I'd succeeded in keeping the dangerous insects down to just a pair of black widows in the corner by the door.  (I know, black widows and insects are not the same thing either.)  My false sense of security was, however, made alarmingly clear this week when the first truly cold weather of the season removed all the leaves from the shrubs around the house.  There, approximately eight feet from the front porch, was a large hornet's nest that had obviously been constructed, and inhabited, this very summer.  While no one was harmed by this colony, I'm sure it was due more to good luck than to any lack of malicious intent on the part of the yellow jackets.  Most importantly, I am wise to them now, and they won't be able to pull that trick on me again next season.

Snow Sports

The word from General Benson is that he is skiing fresh powder at Breckenridge; the word from Saurer is that it is snowing and blowing at Alta.  Well.  Right here in Parowan we tried one of our favorite snow sports:  Sledding.  There were only three or four inches of snow.  But, it worked out OK.  Just remember to close your eyes before you go over that little sagebrush.

First Snow

When we went to bed it was snowing.  So, I wasn't surprised to see an inch or two on the ground this morning.  What did surprise me was the temperature:  It was 8F when I got up.  Eight.  In southern Utah, two weeks before Thanksgiving, it is eight degrees.

Hiking Too Much

I was recently accused of "hiking too much."  Actually, I don't like hiking.  And, I don't think I do it very much.  Sometimes, though, I like to look at things.  For example, today I wanted to look at a pair of natural bridges.  So I did.  They were spectacular.  And, as I lay under one of them, with the sun dropping behind the ridge, I realized that I was a long way from the Chev.  It happens, you see, by accident.  (BTW, I know that no one cares, but if you look closely at the middle of the image (above) you can see a small bristlecone pine growing out of a crack in the rock.)

Shed Today Plus One

There was some digging; some jacking; some levering; some pounding; some lifting; and some pushing.  Afterwards, the shed, which had been leaning dangerously, appeared to be slightly more squared away.  I wouldn't call it pretty, but it should last another ten years.  (The only thing I'm still trying to figure out is why the general contractor told me I'd need "more lead in my pencil" if I wanted to be the one racking the walls?)

Shed Today

When we bought The Homestead five or six years ago, it came with a somewhat dilapidated old shed.  We have used the shed to store firewood, bikes, and gardening supplies.  There is, however, a chance that it will collapse someday—each year its splay-footedness becomes slightly more pronounced.  So, we asked M. Orton, who helps us with all of our home repairs, if he could rebuild it for us.  He thought he could, so he came over to discuss it.  We decided that the best plan might be to take it down, pour a small concrete stem wall, and then reconstruct it from the ground up.  After a discussion with the city building inspector—who said that taking it down would require us to move it back 25 feet to meet the city set-back requirement—and a cost estimate for materials—which started to make the project look like a five-figure boondoggle—we dropped the plan.  Instead, M. Orton is coming tomorrow with a collection of hydraulic jacks and a saw-z-all to see if we can't lift the walls, cut them loose, and push them straight, without moving the building.  We may end up with it on our heads, but it will probably be there anyway if we don't do something.

George Dobson's Aspen

On Tuesday I went out to look at some forest stands along a ridge between Peterson Flat and the boy scout camp.  It was a nice day and I ended up going almost all the way to the camp—a round trip of about eight miles.  There were a number of aspen groves on my hike, and, as always, I scoured them for carvings.  I am, of course, most interested in the oldest carvings because they provide a clue about the past.  The one pictured is from 91 years ago.  George Dobson hiked the ridge on August 2, of 1923.  The amazing thing to me is that the tree is only 10.5 inches in diameter.  It couldn't have been much smaller than that at the time of the carving, otherwise Mr. Dobson would not have been able to fit his name.  The tree is still alive, which means that over the past 91 years it has grown almost not at all.

Books, Made of Paper

Tablet computing has come to The Homestead.  First EDO, and then VSO, put money into Android and Apple, respectively.  I'm a tablet widow now.  When I come home, no one greets me.  The house is dark.  I look into the living room and see glowing halos around a pair of faces.  There is, periodically, a soft blipping sound.  "I sent you an email, Mom."  I go to the kitchen and open a can of cold spaghettios.  I go for my book.  I turn on a light and sit by myself.  I turn pages.  Made of paper.  I practice a lost art.

Actually, while some of the foregoing is true, what is not true is that books are being entirely replaced by tablets.  The Economist had a good essay on this topic earlier in the month.  Entitled, The Future of the Book, the article points out that real books—with paper—are tough to beat.  It is "surprisingly challenging to compete with a format of such simplicity."  Paper is portable, durable, visible, and doesn't need batteries.  The guy that runs Amazon's Kindle business admits that paper is a "competitive technology."

Amen.  Good point.  Books are still viable.  It's not all about tablets now.  I'd like to tell someone about this.  I guess I'll send my family an email.

Wolverine

 

We went down Wolverine.  The petrified wood was legion.  It was fun for a while.  Then it turned into a bit of a slog.  One of the books said that you could make it to Horse Creek in about five miles.  When we stopped for lunch my GPS said 4.5.  My left knee hurt.  It was a long way to the Chev.  We decided to go down for another 30 minutes.  Thirty seconds later, I turned the corner.  I was under one of the biggest blind arches I'd ever seen.  Magnificent.  Worth the walk.  And, it got better from there.  When the GPS said six, I turned us around.  EDO was moping; my knees were both hurting.  About the only one with any zip was VSO.  She powered us back to the truck.  Eleven miles over rough country in five hours.  There were a few sore feet in the group.  Fortunately, where sore feet go, yuppies, hippies, bobos, and euros do not.  We enjoyed a few minutes of silence.

LaSalle Goes Walking

"Therefore though the thaws of approaching spring greatly increased the difficulty of the way, interrupted as it was everywhere by marshes and rivers, to say nothing of the length of the journey, which is about five hundred leagues in a direct line, and the danger of meeting Indians of four or five different nations, through whose country we must pass, as well as an Iroquois army, which we knew was coming that way; though we must suffer all the time from hunger; sleep on the open ground and often without food; watch by night and march by day, loaded with baggage, such as blanket, clothing, kettle, hatchet, gun, powder, lead, and skins to make moccasins; sometimes pushing through thickets, sometimes climbing rocks covered with ice and snow, sometimes wading whole days through marshes where the water was waist-deep or even more, at a season when the snow was not entirely melted—though I knew all this, it did not prevent me from resolving to go on foot to Fort Frontenac, to learn for myself what had become of my vessel, and bring back the things we needed."

This from LaSalle, who walked, walked, from present day Peoria, Illinois to present day Kingston, Ontario, Canada in the winter of 1680.  He left his fort on the Illinois River on 1 March and arrived at his fort on Lake Ontario on the 5th of May.  LaSalle was accompanied by five employees or servants—four Frenchmen and an Indian—none of whom made it to Fort Frontenac.  I do not believe that any of them died, but they became so worn down from the exertion that they could not continue.  He left them to recover at various points along the way.  LaSalle was a hard dude.  Can you imagine working for him?

Harris Ridge

Awesome spot.  Sitting in the breeze under a gibbous moon with a pine fire at my knees.  I'm somewhere above Glendale, but can see and hear no civilization.  Got cell, though.  Said goodnight to the girls.  To get here required that I move a 20 inch white fir from the road.  It worked out OK, except that when I went to roll it, the branch broke and I impaled myself on the stob.  Might have had to go home but in the end it wasn't too bad.  As the sun set, I went out to the point and made some pictures of the Paunsaugunt.  I thought, as I stood there, this is the country of Fray Escalante, and J.W. Powell, and M. Dixon, and even Bishop Lamy.  But it isn't the country of the motor-head from Phoenix or the bobo from Salt Lake.  Please, God.

View from the Office

This past week, I found myself forced to work under onerous conditions.  I was required to walk all day, by myself, through the country-side pictured above.  I know that few would be committed to such a job, but I pride myself on the internal discipline to keep going when faced with uncommon challenges.

EDO's New Game

EDO had been hearing about this sport, or game, called geocaching.  She wanted to play.  I agreed to give it a try.  Geocaching is a treasure-hunt-type of game played using the Global Positioning System (GPS).  Cachers build a weather proof collection of stuff—it doesn't matter what, but it is usually composed of cheap trinkets—and hide it in the woods.  They then publish the cache coordinates on the internet for others to find.  It is pretty simple really.  And, normally, the cache isn't too far off the beaten track.  It is the searcher that makes things difficult.  For example, in looking around last week, we got the car stuck in the mud and then decided to hike cross country to find the cache.  I called it a "short cut."  Calling it that was, of course, certain to turn the whole thing into an afternoon long thrashing.  Which it was.  But, we did find the cache.

Beetle Trapping

This week we've been trapping pine beetles for a colleague in Louisiana. From what I understand, he is trying to determine whether the western pine beetle (Dendroctonus brevicomis) in southern Utah is, perhaps, its own sub-species. For that, he needs up to 50 beetles. I went out to an area where I knew there were multiple active Dendroctonus populations and hung the traps. So far, we've collected at least 60 or 80 beetles. Unfortunately, as you can see from the picture, many of them are roundheaded pine beetles (Dendroctonus adjunctus). I don't know if we're going to get 50 westerns.

Chainsaw Replacement

In 2003, needing to cut wood for our stove in Escalante, I went to Richfield and bought an MS250. Now in its eleventh year, the saw was starting to show signs of strain. In fact, during the Mother's Day Massacre, I was unable to start it and had to do most of the clean-up with a hand saw. While we've already got a partial supply of wood for the upcoming winter, I didn't want to get into the serious work of completing the pile until I knew I had a working saw. Last week, VSO felt that she had saved up enough money to afford a replacement for the MS250, so I called the dealer. He said that they were no longer selling that model, but that they had an upgraded version, the MS251. VSO brought one home on Thursday. I still had a mess of elm to cut up, so I went out yesterday and assembled all the saw paraphernalia. I had gas and oil in the old saw, so I decided to try that first—might as well run it into the ground. Of course, it started right up and ran all morning. I cut the whole pile of elm with it. Except for the last piece. I saved that for the new saw, just to see how it was going to run. Nice and smooth: Quiet running and fast cutting, just what you'd expect from a new Stihl.

Chev Turns 200

Thousand miles, that is. On Thursday, during my evening commute from Beaver, the Chev hit the 200,000 mile mark. I was on I-15 at Exit 100 in the northern end of the Parowan Valley. I pulled over to celebrate. Later, when I mentioned it to one of my colleagues, he said, "Well, I guess it doesn't owe you anything." I guess not.

View from the Office

We've continued to harvest limber pine cones this week. On Thursday, however, we moved around to a different area, working in the middle of the Tushar Mountains, just below Mount Belknap (12,119 feet). The view, above, was from my drive home yesterday.

Cone Cutters

There are four or five species of white or 5-needle pine in western North America. The most famous, because it is currently imperiled, is the whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis) of Idaho and Montana. The mountain pine beetle (MPB), a native pest, working together with white pine blister rust (WPBR), a non-native disease, has significantly reduced the population of whitebark pine across the northern Rockies. In southern Utah, we have two different, but closely related white pine species, the Great Basin bristlecone (Pinus longaeva) and the limber pine (Pinus flexilis). These species are also at risk from the double-whammy of MPB and WPBR, though WPBR has not yet arrived in our area.

In any case, I noticed earlier this summer, that our local 5-needle pines were having a good cone year—a real bumper crop. Because this only happens periodically, I called the regional plant geneticist to ask what we should do. She said, "Pick 'em." Collecting and storing seed allows us to grow seedlings to replant after natural disturbances and also allows us to isolate the seeds that are genetically resistant to WPBR. Because most of my favorite bristlecone grows outside my jurisdiction, so to speak, I decided to try harvesting limber pine cones.

You might think that collecting pine cones would be easy, but it isn't. First, there is a lot of competition out there. The squirrels will clean you out if you don't pick early, and the birds, while leaving the cones on the tree, will break the cone scales and steal the seeds. Second, the limber pine does not grow cones close to the ground, but prefers to put them at the top of the tree. Unless you intend to cut down the tree—which is a possibility in some cases—you have to find a way to harvest cones that are 20 to 40 feet in the air. The method we devised requires three people, the hooker, the cutter, and the bag man. The hooker finds a loaded branch, catches it, and bends it as far as possible; the cutter uses a pole pruner to snip the branch just inside the cluster of cones; and the bag man twists the cones from the cut branch. Voila.

Sink's Done

As I noted last week, we've been in the middle of project to replace the kitchen sink. Actually, with the exception of some painting, the project is finished and the kitchen is fully operational. The whole deal—from disconnecting the old sink to opening the tap on the new sink—took 10 days and cost just a little more than $4,000. We're really happy with it. It is a serious upgrade from the grungy old situation that we had. In addition to the new sink, we added a disposal and a dishwasher to the set-up. In one week, we jumped from the 19th century to the 21st. (I won't name names in this post, but the little local contractor that we hired to run the job does very nice work. Call me if you're looking for somebody.)

The Kitchen Sink

Like many parts of The Homestead, the kitchen sink and counter area have always been a little grungy, ramshackle, leaky, inconvenient, and run-down. On Tuesday, we had it all removed. Once it was gone, we found that the original floor—now covered by tile—was actually hardwood—nice hardwood, like maple or something. We also found that the chronically leaky, do-it-yourself plumbing of the sink had nearly rotted the floor away. Fortunately, by Friday, we no longer had to look at it. The guy we hired to manage the project had the new cabinets completely installed by 3p. We're ready for the counter top.

Baba and Poppop Paddle Yankee

This week, we had Baba and Poppop for a visit. They felt like trying the canoe, so we went to Yankee. The water was low, but we've seen it worse. They took the first turn while the rest of us goofed around on the shore. Then the girls went out. Then I joined them. Finally, Baba and Poppop had another try. It wasn't much of an adventure, but it was probably about right for the group we had. We made it home in time for dinner.

Idaho

While EDO was on the east coast visiting her cousins, VSO and I went to Idaho. On the way north, we wanted to avoid the long extension of California called I-15, so we went to Milford. From there, we headed west to Baker. The sun was out as we came into town, but a towering storm was building over Wheeler Peak. Spectacular. It was about the last we saw of the sun until we reached Twin Falls. From Baker to Ely to Wells to Jackpot, storm after storm rolled through. The temperature on the car said 47F and the smell was of bruised sagebrush. It was a pretty nice afternoon.

Idaho has some famous rivers. We spent a night by one of them. The Snake, near Twin Falls, has, well, some falls. The picture, above, is from one of them. Shoshone Falls. The Niagara of the West. I made a picture of the cascade. But I didn't post it here. It is nothing like Niagara. Well, it is like Niagara in that water is flowing, but Niagara is 10 times bigger.

From Twin we took the freeway west through the hundred miles of ugly sprawl that used to be Boise and turned north on Highway 95 to New Meadows. After a stop at Goose Creek, we met Keith at the Bear Basin trails for a short mountain bike adventure. It was probably made shorter by a somewhat bloody crash on Keith's part and a bit of a bonk on VSO's part. (I don't blame her. She'd been sitting in the car for 8 hours and went straight to riding uphill in 85 degree sun.) We followed Keith to his house for a good dinner with Karen and Bryce. Afterwards, Karen took us out to Payette Lake. If it weren't for the constant motor noise, it would be a beautiful lake. Clean, clear, refreshing, but not cold.

In the morning, after breakfast at the Fogg Lifter, VSO voted strongly for a return to Bear Basin. Karen joined us and we did another 60 or 90 minute ride. VSO loved it. Despite running out of gas the afternoon before, that was her kind of riding: not steep, not rocky, not tricky, just good, smooth single-track. By about 1p it was time to start back. We thanked Keith and Karen, and then joined the long line of traffic along the North Fork of the Payette. We suffered all the way to Banks. At that point, we turned up the South Fork. I'd never been there. It was really a beautiful canyon (below). Looks like a fun float, too. We turned south at Lowman and made it to Boise by 7p.

In the morning there was nothing for it but the long, hot, crowded, boring, ugly freeway run to Salt Lake City. I thoroughly enjoy that kind of thing. In Salt Lake we met Mark and Kristi for lunch at the Red Butte Cafe. The best part of the day: Pretty good food and really good friends. From there we drove to Nephi where we stopped for gas. We filled the car, but my tank was empty. I asked VSO to drive and I put my hat over my face. After about 40 minutes of semi-coma I felt a little bit better. By then we were in Fillmore, so VSO took us all the way home.

A Day for Bottling

Yesterday morning, I picked eight or 10 pounds of wild plums from a tree on the northwest corner of The Homestead. Together, VSO and EDO bottled eight or 10 jars (bottles?) of plum jam. Can you tell who made the labels? While the water was hot, they also made six jars of pickles. It was a lot of work, but we'll use every bit of it this fall and winter.

The Rain Arrives

In the Parowan Valley, the month of June is typically our driest. By the middle of July, however, we can expect to start seeing monsoonal moisture. In 2012, I noted that we waited 56 days for the monsoons to start, with our first notable rainfall occurring on 13 July. This year, it started a week early. On Tuesday, the 8th, we got so much rain in Parowan that our basement flooded. It wasn't a bad flood, but there was enough water outside the house to pool-up and run in our doors and windows. Two days later, on the 10th, I drove from Marysvale to Parowan in near constant rain. These weren't isolated showers, instead the sky was low and grey from horizon to horizon. It is hot and sunny again now, but I guess the June drought is officially over for 2014. (As a minor aside, when Willa Cather writes about drought—as she does in Death Comes for the Archbishop—she spells it "drouth.")

WSB

I don't know what it is like where you live (or, as foresters from the lake states like to say, "in your neck of the woods"), but in southern Utah we are experiencing a Western Spruce Budworm (WSB, Choristoneura occidentalis) epidemic. The adult is a moth, but the growing budworm is, well, a caterpillar. The caterpillar feeds on the new leaves of spruce, fir, and Douglas fir. In our area, Douglas fir have been particularly hard hit, and many of them are partially defoliated. But, the reason I mention this now is that I was working in an infested stand last week. I was alone and it was quiet. As I worked, I could hear a steady pit-pat like rain on the forest floor. This being southern Utah the sky was, of course, clear, and there was no rain in the forecast. Instead, it was raining frass—the poop of the caterpillar.

Grand Mesa

On Friday we loaded the canoe on the Chev and went to meet the cousins near Grand Mesa, Colorado. On Saturday we put the canoe and the cousins into a lake atop the Mesa. There were two of them. Cousins, that is. Which made three little monkeys. Uncle Keith tried to give the monkeys canoeing lessons. A couple of them were getting it, but they still need some practice. On Sunday we loaded the canoe, said Goodbye to the cousins, and came home.

Rock Squirrels

I don't really mind rock squirrels in the wild. But, I won't have them in my garden. I was out working on one of my Homestead fences yesterday when I saw one dash under an old wood pile. After I tried to smack it with a fence post, it became even more elusive. I moved all the wood, and an additional pile of pales under which it was burrowing, but I never could find it again.

When Grandpa had a problem with a squirrel bothering his bird feeder, he used a live trap to move the squirrel to another county. It seems as though I'm going to have to borrow the trap. Maybe the squirrel in the picture would like a neighbor. It lives on Circleville Mountain, with a burrow in the middle of the road. I don't care about that so much, I just don't want one in my yard.

Flat on a Ford

My work truck is a Ford F-250. On Wednesday afternoon, I was driving it down from Sawmill Bench when a rock punctured the passenger rear tire. It wasn't long before the tire was flat and I was parked. No big deal, right? Just put on the spare and keep going. Well. I don't know if you've had a flat tire lately, but this no longer the day of burly jacks and available spares. Evidently, automobile manufactures want to ensure that the buyer is never troubled by the need to fix a flat: The tiny jack will be hidden away in some secret compartment and the six or eight fiddly little tools to operate it will be tucked into a bag under the carpet of the back seat.

On Wednesday, I fooled around for a good while gathering all the pieces, starting the jack, and breaking the lugs free. Before going any further, I decided that I'd better remove the spare from under the back bumper. It was at this point that all the fiddling finally got the best of me. The spare on most pick-ups is on a cable that winds up tight against the bottom of the truck bed. To access it, you simply turn the crank that unwinds the cable, lowering the spare to the ground. Unfortunately, the cable crank is usually two feet in from the bumper up a narrow channel, and thus invisible to the operator. You are supposed to assemble a number of pieces from the bag and stick them up the channel so that you can unwind the cable.

I did all this on Wednesday, but I could not catch the cable crank and lower the spare with any of the tools in the bag. I pushed, pulled, kicked, cursed, banged, and pounded on it for 20 or 30 minutes. I had just started digging for the owner's manual when a couple of guys from the recreation crew pulled up next to me. "Are you using the key?" asked one of the guys. THE KEY? I had no idea what he was talking about. It turns out that Ford is saving the world from the scourge of spare tire theft by making the spare accessible only by use of a small round socket that sits in the bottom of the glove box. The socket "key" must be attached to the end of four or five of these fiddly tools and inserted down the channel of the spare tire winch. Only then can you catch the crank and turn it, releasing the spare.

Holy crap. What a pain in the butt. I can read, so I may have eventually found some instructions regarding THE KEY in the owner's manual. But, I'm sure glad that one of those guys knew about it. It makes me want to toss a lug wrench, a hi-lift, and a spare into the bed of the truck so that I can fix a flat in three minutes instead of 90.

VSO at South Hall

From now until the end of August, VSO will be showing on the campus of Southern Utah University. As part of Cedar City's "Art Walk," she will be displaying a collection of about twenty paintings at South Hall. For hours of operation and address information, click here. (Cedar City believes in saving the best for last, so scroll all the way to the bottom.) As always, VSO's work—some of the best in southern Utah—is for sale. You can purchase directly from the Braithwaite Fine Arts Gallery, which is also on campus, so don't worry about not being able to find someone to take your money.

Mr. Carter

On March 18, 1992, Barney Carter passed away. He was 43 years old. Those two facts are virtually all I know about Mr. Carter. The only other thing I know is the location where his family (or friends) put his ashes--under a pile of rocks on a ridge in the Great Basin. The hidden cairn is on public land where disposing of human remains is not exactly legal. But, I'm not telling the grave police. Nor am I telling my reader. You'll have to find it yourself. Until then we'll let Mr. Carter rest in peace.

The Big Tree

On May 28, 2012, I was working in the Sierras and I found a 64 inch ponderosa pine (or Jeffrey pine, it is hard to tell the difference). I made note of it at the time because that is a big ponderosa, even in the Sierras. On May 28, 2014 (last Wednesday), I was looking for a colleague on the Beaver Ranger District in southern Utah. I parked by his truck and started walking in the woods. I was near what they call "The Big Tree," so I wandered around until I found it: A very large ponderosa. I decided to tape it. 66 inches. Wow. In southern Utah. A new personal record that is larger than the one I found in the Sierras.

Cactus Time

It is cactus blooming time in the west desert. EDO found the first orange claret cup (Echinocereus triglochidiatus, I think) yesterday. The picture is below. I noticed the bright pink prickly pear as we were driving along the Blue Mountain Road today. The picture is above.

Can You Find the Fawn?

I don't really know very much about mule deer. And I don't really care to either. They are such a nuisance around the house and garden that I wish they would just go away. People used to tell me though—and I don't know which people, just people—that deer would protect their fawns by hiding them in the shrubbery. The fawn would lay perfectly still and the hunter would pass right on by. Well, I figured it was mostly something made up by the people who made Bambi. And maybe it was. In any case, I was walking down off a tailings pile at an abandoned mine yesterday and I kicked up a doe. She bounced away through the serviceberry and out of sight. A minute later, I stopped to look at a small brown rock in the shrubs. Except it wasn't a rock. It was a fawn. Maybe there is something to that Bambi story after all.

Botanical Rescue

In the years after the Great Depression, the USDA Forest Service constructed hundreds of small cabins in remote locations on National Forest System lands. These have generally been known as Guard Stations, and for many years they were inhabited by Forest Service employees and their families, especially during the summer months. These Forest Guards would manage livestock grazing, recreation, or forestry projects, and suppress fires as necessary. Usually the stations came with barns and bunkhouses for horses and work crews.

With dramatic improvements in communication and transportation over the decades, however, these Guard Stations became obsolete: It is just as easy to live in town and drive over to the project area in a modern four-wheel-drive as it is to move your family to a little mountain cabin for the summer. As a result, many of these cabins have been boarded-up, torn down, abandoned, or destroyed. Our local version of this story—the Vermillion Castle Guard Station (pictured here in 1941)—met its fate last summer. The Dixie National Forest had the cabin removed because it was becoming an increasingly derelict eyesore—full of trash and graffiti.

Before it went, however, I was up there looking around at what it used to be and I found that someone had once planted a couple of domestic iris bulbs in front of the cabin. They were dry- and yellow-looking and being crowded out by weeds and rabbit-brush. I decided to try rescuing (stealing?) a couple of them so I dug them up with my knife and brought them back to The Homestead. I put them in at the end of a row of other irises against a little portion of fence. They sat there, small and brown, for a couple of years. This week, though, they exploded. They are currently producing the most spectacular purple flowers ever.

The Vermillion Castle Guard Station is now gone. But, at The Homestead, we have salvaged one of its doors (that is another story) and three of its irises.

Natural Disaster

It's not that we've never had snow in May before. In fact, on exactly this day in 2010, we had a little storm. But, this year is different. After a short winter and warm spring all the trees were fully leafed-out. On top of that, this one came in warm, so everything was sticky. Finally, this was not a couple of inches of Utah powder, but a huge slug of heavy, heavy moisture. We may have had eight inches of snow, but it contained at least an inch of water. The result has been bad. "Natural disaster" may constitute hyperbole, but for a place that doesn't have hurricanes or tornados, this is probably as much tree damage as we are likely to see. The branches were breaking all night, all across town. It sounded like gunfire. And the thumping of branches hitting our roof and the ground all around the house kept me awake for hours. I kept waiting for the big one to end up in the bedroom. So far, though, I'm not sure we've had any roof damage. There is one big branch laying against the chimney, but I am keeping my fingers crossed. It's not over yet . . . still snowing . . . and we keep having power bumps, but I'm hoping that the final tally will be a lot of clean-up and some half broken trees, with no trunks on the house.

Fuel Free in 2014

My brother-in-law started the holiday, and I haven't had a report from him yet this year, but I'm going to call us Fuel Free on 4 May. Last year, the holiday fell for Rural Ways on 29 April. For any reader who may have forgotten, Fuel Free marks the first day of the year on which no indoor heating is required. The first time you can get up, not light the stove, not run the furnace, not use a gas heater, pellet stove, or anything else—all day—is Fuel Free. It doesn't mean you won't burn again during the season: At Rural Ways, we will, for example, almost certainly burn the stove later this week because snow is in the forecast, but it is sort of a milestone that gives you a day of rest from your labors. We reached temperatures around 80F yesterday, did not drop out of the 60s overnight, and will likely get back to 80F today. No need for heat.

But, back to the point about labor. Fuel Free is probably relatively meaningless to those who have a hands-off central heating system. If you are heating with wood, however, you end up doing a lot of work, so it is pretty noticeable when that chore drops off your list every day. I think this is especially true for my brother-in-law, the founder of the holiday, because he runs both a pellet stove (or maybe two) and a wood stove. For him, keeping the house warm requires hauling wood to two or three implements each day (and that doesn't even count buying it or cutting it and dragging it up to the porch). The other problem that my brother-in-law has is a really nice, clean house. Heating with wood is dirty. If you live in a big, old, ramshackle dump like The Homestead, you can sort of ignore all the ash and sawdust on the floor. But, if your house is nice and new and neat and clean, it is probably a lot of extra work to keep it that way with all the wood going in and out. So, hats off to Uncle GCK and a warm welcome to the start of the fuel free season 2014.

Bee-Dee-Vee

(Fair warning to Bernard DeVoto devotees: This post will feature some mild criticism of the great man.) VSO came home from the Parowan Library yesterday with a copy of Across the Wide Missouri. How she was able to put her hands on it when I've searched high and low over there at least a dozen times is a mystery to me. But, that is beside the point. What I really want to do is wish her luck. I mean, there is no denying that DeVoto was one of the great historians of the American west—certainly in the top rank with Stegner, and perhaps Bolton and Bancroft—but he can really wear you down. You can get into it, and really be enjoying it, just plugging away, filling your head with facts about DeSoto, LaSalle, Meriwether Lewis, everybody you've heard about before and many you haven't. Then, you stop and look at the clock, and it's been an hour and you've read five pages. You do that every day for a month, renewing it at the library twice, and then a second month, until there are no more renewals on your library card: When you go to return it you're on page 300 of a 700 page volume. Whew. Defeated.

The last time it happened to me, VSO was dismayed. "I've seen you read Atlas Shrugged," she cried. "And War and Peace." "I've seen you read door stoppers by the likes of Alvin Plantinga and Sydney Ahlstrom." "If you can't get through it, nobody can." Well, as I said, I wish her luck. It's not that DeVoto was a bad writer; he wasn't. (Though Stegner was clearly better.) And, it's not that his knowledge was anything less than encyclopedic, but there is something about the combination of writing style and overwhelming information that can turn it into a bit of a grind. I joked with VSO that BDV probably never had an editor: Not only was he notoriously prickly, but there isn't a person on earth that could have gotten through all his material. In any case, I'm not saying that DeVoto should be left on the shelf: He is a one man history machine. But, I may take the month off and read something quick and easy, like Gibbon's Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Four Hundred

I know that we've already celebrated one publishing milestone this year—the fifth birthday of Rural Ways—and I don't want to be constantly interrupting the flow of wisdom by marking inconsequential events, but this one has got me thinking. This is Rural Ways' 400th post. Four hundred? Wow. Does anyone really have that much to say? Evidently so, and to prove it I'm going to attach links to six former posts. The first three are, by Google's page-view count, the most popular ever published. (Well, they are the most popular posts at Rural Ways. I recognize that Arianna Huffington may have a few more readers in general.) The second set have, by Google's count, never been viewed. Given that my loyal fan base has recently surged to three, I find that hard to believe. But, I'm going to repost these because I think they deserve something better than zero. How about one?

The Jotul
Home Made Cages
Highway 14

Waiting for Spring
Chickens or Eggs
Don't Let the Chimney Fall on You

Burning Fir

In some places, there is such a tangled mess of pinyon, juniper, mountain mahogany, white fir, ponderosa, Douglas fir, and everything else, that it is hard to know what to do with it. Here is one solution. It actually seems to work pretty well. With a band of snow packed aspen above, and an uphill breeze, you can put the drip torches to it without worrying about where it is going. We burned just outside of Beaver this week—consumed a fair amount of thick, dead material, too. It's good work if you can get it.