Category Archives: Our Land and Home

Wounded

May 24, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Running Creek Moon

Dogs. Gertie chased a critter yesterday afternoon. Fast. Paying apparently quite close attention to the critter, but not to the downed tree in the way. She ripped open her right side, a good tear. She’s at the vets right now getting sewn up. Again. Wounds are her trademark. Since we’ve had her, she’s been into the vet many times for torn flesh. Part of it is her go for it mentality, part of it’s her bite first, bark later attitude. We’re good customers at Sano.

Spent some time this morning cutting up downed trunks into logs for Seth. Lugging the peavey and the chain saw around wears me out. I’m not as strong as I was last fall. Restarted my resistance work with modified P90X workouts on Monday. Between the logging and the P90X, my strength will improve. Better than what I was doing last summer this time, fussing about prostate cancer.

GeekWorld, Our Land and Home

Car Talk

May 24, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Running Creeks Moon

Told Holly, our across the street neighbor, the snow tires were coming off today. “Oh, It’s an El Nino year,” she said, “we got two feet of snow on Memorial Day once.” Even so. Off they come. This is the second season on the Blizzaks so they’ll be evaluated, see if we can get a third out of them. Two aging drivers can use the extra traction in the winter. Better to get new ones if there’s any iffyness about them.

Brakes, too, probably. Not primarily because of the mountain driving, we use all the gears for braking, but 70,000 + miles. We bought this Rav4 in July of 2011 when our Tundra had complete organ failure, spewed vital fluids all over 153rd Ave NW and never moved again. The Rav4 was, in retrospect, a mistake. It’s not a bad vehicle, but it’s not a good one either. It was affordable, does what we need, but I’ve never developed any affection for it.

When I get back, more fire mitigation. Mostly cutting up trunks into pieces Seth can manage. He’ll get rid of most of them. That will leave the tops and branches to move to the front. And, of course, the other trees to cut down. When I finished yesterday morning, I realized Memorial Day was too ambitious a deadline. I’ll work at it until I get it done.

Great Work, Mountains, Our Land and Home, Shadow Mountain, The West

Weeding

May 23, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Running Creeks Moon

Topped all the felled trees, finished the limbing on them, too. Began the hauling to the front. Wore myself out. Tomorrow I’ll start cutting them up.

Rain today. Cloudy. Our solar production is far behind what was predicted, due in large part to the heavy snowfall, but also to cloud cover. Payout may take more time than we have here, but the intimate connection between the sun and our electrical use is worth it anyhow; as is severing, to the maximum extent we can, the link between our electrical use and coal generated power.

Chain saws whir all over the neighborhood here on Shadow Mountain. Fire mitigation is the mountain spring equivalent of planting a garden. Weeding, really, on a large scale. A weed is a plant out of place. Of course, you could argue that those of us who live up here are the weeds. Perhaps the trees should be plucking us out. Which is, of course, exactly what a wildfire does. Complex, man.

Anoka County, Colorado, Faith and Spirituality, Jefferson County, Memories, Minnesota, Mountains, Original Relation, Our Land and Home, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, The West, Weather +Climate

Becoming Native

May 23, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Running Creeks Moon

“…I am at home in the West. The hills of the coastal ranges look “right” to me, the particular flat expanse of the Central Valley comforts my eye. The place names have the ring of real places to me. I can pronounce the names of the rivers, and recognize the common trees and snakes. I am easy here in a way that I am not easy in other places.” Joan Didion, California Notes, NYRB, 5/26/2016

Becoming native to a place implies the opposite of what Joan Didion recalls in this fine article taken from notes she made in 1976 while attending the Patty Hearst trial for Rolling Stone. The becoming process implies not being easy where you are, not knowing the place names as real, not knowing the common trees and snakes.

The Black Canyon of the Gunnison is not a real place to me. Neither is Four Corners nor Durango nor the summit of Mt. Evans, only 14 miles away. The owls that hoot at night, the small mammals that live here on Shadow Mountain. No. The oak savannah and the Great Anoka Sand Plain. Familiar. Easy. The Big Woods. Yes. Lake Superior. Yes. The sycamores of the Wabash. Yes. Fields defined by mile square gravel roads. Pork tenderloin sandwiches. Long, flat stretches of land. Lots of small towns and the memories of speed traps. Yes.

A local photographed yesterday near here. from pinecam.com by serendipity888

With the fire mitigation this property here on Shadow Mountain is becoming known. It has three, maybe four very fine lodgepole pines, tall and thick. A slight downward slope toward the north. Snow, lots of snow.* Rocky ground, ground cover and scrubby grass.

Denver. Slowly coming into focus. The front range, at least its portion pierced by Highway 285, too. The west is still blurry, its aridity, mountains, deep scars in the earth, sparse population. The midwest clear, will always be clear.

Becoming native to a place is the ur spiritual work of a reimagined faith. First, we must be here. Where we are.

*”Snowfall for the season on Conifer Mountain now stands at 224 inches (132% of average).” weathergeek, pinecam.com

Mountains, Our Land and Home, Shadow Mountain

Out on the Limbs

May 20, 2016 Charles 2 Comments

Beltane Running Creeks Moon

Got out this morning early to begin limbing. Still cool. Finished the front and went on to the back. Using my Gransfors’ limbing ax. Conifer Mountain and Black Mountain were in the distance, a breeze blew up Black Mountain Drive and through the Lodgepole pines. On it the scent of cut pine floated up as first dead limbs then limbs with green needles fell to the side. The thunk of an ax cutting wood, the vibration of the oak handle, the release as the ax head sails on beyond the cut. Primal. Direct. No internal combustion engines. Just wood and steel and muscle.

Dogs, Health, Mountains, Our Land and Home, Shadow Mountain, Weather +Climate

Go-go girls

May 20, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Running Creeks Moon

Rigel and Gertie are the go-go girls. Whenever we leave the house, together or singly, they get big grins, bump us, start moving toward the back door, then back to us, repeat. Into the truck they go, bounding up and into the back. Only to lie down and often go to sleep. They don’t seem to care how long the trip. On the way home Rigel always gets up, starts looking around. They’re having fun, so we enjoy taking them with us.

Dr. Repine sweeps into the room with her white-gold hair. Her examinations are thorough, practiced. She sweeps the various magnifiers over my eyes, the ones that allow her to see the inner parts of my eye directly, dons a headlamp that would not look like out of place on a miner and picks up a thick magnifier. Look up. Look down. Look to the right. To the left. Good. Everything’s looking fine.

Eyeball pressures are 14. Which is in the normal range. Glaucoma held at bay by Latanoprost. Cataracts, however, are advancing, changing my reading prescriptions. She says if they get much worse we’ll just take them out. Oh. Just? The good news is that cataract surgery often helps glaucoma by lowering the pressure in the eye. Something to look forward to?

Kate went with me. We went over to Whistling Duck, a furniture maker, to discuss beetle kill pine dining room tables. Kate had her measurements. She talked tables while I wandered around looking at the displays. We’re still in the early stages, getting quotes.

And, the sun. The sun. Blue skies. Winter to summer. Down the hill, that is. It was 78 in Littleton yesterday, but as we drove back up into the mountains the temperatures dropped, 54 when we got home. Ah.

Colorado, GeekWorld, Jefferson County, Mountains, Our Land and Home, Shadow Mountain, The West, Third Phase, Weather +Climate

Making Our Peace With Wildfires

March 24, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Maiden Moon

Figured out yesterday how to use Amazon’s Unlimited Photo cloud service. It comes free with Prime. Because I put so many images in my blog, I have an unusually large number filed away for future use. I began the uploading of the photos yesterday and the service is about 2/3’rds done this morning. It will finish sometime today.

Then, I sat down and learned how to use Dropbox. It’s free storage, about 2GB, is plenty for my novels, short stories, essays. I started copying files there yesterday, too. It will take a little time, but once I’m done, I’ll just have to update whatever current work I’m doing.

These two are in anticipation of a possible wildfire. No need to lose your work these days.

Today I’m going to work on putting together our emergency kit which will include the memory card which has the photographs of all our stuff. In there will also go insurance policies, titles, deed and manuals for various things since they will testify to exactly what we own. Our estate documents and our living wills. That sort of thing.

After a year of trying to put together an external sprinkler system, I’ve decided to not pursue it. Why? Well, for one thing nobody here builds the kind of simple system I want. I’ve investigated all the possible vendors in the state. That would mean I’d have to work with somebody who didn’t know what they were doing. Which would make two of us.

Perhaps even more to the point, I read an article by a wildfire expert who said that if you follow the firewise zone recommendations, which I am, that most houses will survive a fire. The deputy chief of the Elk Creek Fire district said that our house was well situated to survive a fire, in large part because we have a short, level driveway on a primary road, Black Mountain Drive. The perception of the fire department is important because during a fire they drive through the area and in essence do triage. These homes will be ok on their own. These can survive if we protect them. These homes will burn. You want to be in the first two categories. And we are no matter the sort of fire.

Also, I decided to make my peace with losing our house and garage. After I finish the fire mitigation work, taking down trees and making sure we have a our zone free of combustibles around the house, I’m going to rely on luck and the Elk Creek Fire Protection District. Should that not prove enough and we lose everything except our lives and the lives of our dogs, we’ll build again. What could be safer than an area that’s already burned out?

It felt freeing to come to this decision. Both Kate and I agreed that losing our stuff would be very, very far from a cataclysm. We could rebuild an energy efficient house suited to our needs.

All part of settling in.

Jefferson County, Our Land and Home, Shadow Mountain, The West, Weather +Climate

Still Trying to Get This Done

February 21, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Imbolc Valentine Moon

As the chinook winds have eaten our snow cover and dried out the grasses and downed trees, the fire hazard went up to a red flag warning on Wednesday. That means that if a fire happens, it has a good chance, a very good chance, of getting out of control. Not that I needed more to concentrate my mind on fire mitigation.

The chainsaw has sat idle for some weeks now as arthritis and snow cover combined to keep it in the garage. Though I could get out now, I haven’t. On some days the winds have been too high, on others I just didn’t feel like it. I still have several trees to remove, almost all now in the back, a few trees to limb and several trunks to cut into fireplace size logs for curing.

That I can do. What I also want are external fire sprinklers. They exist. It’s possible to imagine a system for our home, but external sprinklers are not part of the fire mitigation culture here. Even the Colorado State Forest Service recommended against one in a letter to me: “…too many variables that could go wrong with the system, including losing power during a wildfire, or forgetting to drain the system during cold weather and the pipes freezing.” Well, we have a working generator. At last! And, draining a system…well, we can get that done.

Still, because of this hesitancy, the folks who do fire mitigation have not developed products or services for homeowners. So this week I’m going to start contacting irrigation companies. They understand the technology and might be able to construct our system.

When I had the assistant chief of the Elk Creek Fire Protection District come out and do a fire mitigation analysis for our property, he said that external sprinklers do work and they would work here. Just not many folks doing it. Well, we’re gonna be among them, one way or the other, and I need to get this work done before May.

GeekWorld, Jefferson County, Our Land and Home, Shadow Mountain

Small Miracles

February 4, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Imbolc Stock Show Moon

I would like to report a minor victory. Patrick came out from Golden. He actually knows Kohler generators. He knows what it will take to fix it. At this point in the generator installation saga I’m agog with wonder.

He says the problem with electricians here in the mountains is that the work dried up several years ago and most of the electricians left. Now when work has begun to ramp up again there are too few of them for too many projects. He hires a lot of electricians as a primary solar installer and says he has a lot of problems, too.

Anyhow, sometime soon we will have a functional generator. Only a year and a quarter into the process. Yippee.

Family, Our Land and Home

Congratulations, Kate!

January 25, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Yule Stock Show Moon

Kate and her project: