K. Knowlton Little

It's funny where you find these.  At least, it is to me.  This one is just outside the power line right of way southwest of Jacob Lake, Arizona.  The tree is still alive.  Just barely.  But, again, it makes for an old aspen.  It had to be big enough for the carving in 1917, which means it must have been there for 30 to 50 years already.  Ninety-eight years later, it is still standing.  I found the carving on July 16th, so I was about three weeks too late to celebrate the anniversary.  I should probably make a list of these so I can visit them on important milestones, like when they turn one hundred.  Anyway, I'm thinking the carver had three names, but I'm not sure because I can't make out the vertical carving.

Big Sky Country

One thing that I've really noticed at the trailer farm, now that I live there, is that the sky is huge.  At The Homestead, we have a nice southern Utah sky.  But it isn't necessarily all that big.  There are the hills, the plateaus, the mountains, the trees, the houses, the buildings.  Each of them contributes framing to a sky that is present, but not omnipresent.  On the Arizona strip, aside from scattered double-wides and the buttes, as A.B. Gurthrie has it, "swimming clear a hundred miles away," there is nothing to break up the sky.  When you go out in the morning, or, in the case of these pictures, on the evening of a storm, the sky is visible from flat horizon to flat horizon.  It makes up half your world.

View from the Office

For now, Rural Ways is working in northern Arizona.  This is not exactly the view from my office, but it is the view from my front door.  I'm living in a trailer.  Trailer trash.  None of the other trailers in the picture are occupied—except by, perhaps, rodents.  They are simply stored here in the weeds and trash for I'm not sure what purpose.  The truck is, however, mine, and is parked, yep, in the front yard.

It's Not Hot Everywhere

We are, evidently, experiencing the heat wave of 2015.  Temperatures in the low 100s are to be anticipated.  It's not that bad everywhere, though.  If you have time to swim or paddle at Pine Lake, the worst of it can be mitigated.

Take Plenty of Fluids

 

The Chev is like me:  It doesn't much like crowds or hot weather.  This week, though, it put up with both.  It not only took six people and a canoe to Powell Point (above) in the middle of a hot spell, but it took the same six people, minus the canoe, Between the Creeks (below).  Along the way, it used one pint of power steering fluid, one quart of oil, one gallon of coolant, and one length of bailing wire to reattach the tailpipe.  Fortunately, two of the six passengers were Tennessee natives (one of them is in the Powell Point picture), so they were unfazed by my mechanicing style.