Category Archives: The West

Colorado, Humanities, Latin, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., The West, US History

Stock Show Weather

January 8, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Yule New (Stock Show) Moon

The Denver metro has Stock Show weather. Stock Show weather is cold as opposed to snowy, not surprising since the Stock Show runs the three weeks after the first week of the New Year.

We got 5 or 6 inches of snow overnight. The next few nights will be in the single digits or low double digits, cold by Colorado standards. Just getting cool by Minnesota’s. It rarely gets chilly here, that is well below zero, though it does happen. Still, as I told Greg, my Latin tutor, this morning, I wouldn’t care to visit Minnesota during a chilly period. Not anymore.

A couple of weeks ago Greg gave me an assignment. Match my English translation against other English translations, then figure out where and why we differ. This means I’m moving closer to the sort of translating I sought when I began this long journey. In order to proceed honestly I still have to translate the Latin first, then check others. This way I don’t engage in cheating, making my translation fit someone else’s interpretation. But, done in the proper sequence this method allows me to begin polishing my language, getting beyond a more literal translation to a more literary one.

Getting back to regular, that is daily, Latin work has been frustratingly slow. I’ve allowed holidays and illness to intrude. Understandable, not helpful. After this morning’s session though, I have a feeling I’m back at it. Greg said I did very well with the material I prepared. That means, when we sight read the Latin, I easily and accurately translated what I had put through the English translation match.

With my workouts somewhat regular now, illness and holidays again, it feels as if I’m returning to the productive rhythm I had in Minnesota. Now I need to add writing on a novel and/or the reimagining book. Working out, Latin and creative writing are the three legs to my stool, each necessary in their own way.

The art will come along, too.

Politics, The West, US History

A Bird Sanctuary? Come on.

January 5, 2016 Charles 1 Comment

Yule Christmas Moon

Malheur National Wildlife Refuge | Oregon

People and wildlife have been drawn to the resources of this oasis of wetlands in the high desert of Oregon for thousands of years. With over 320 bird species Malheur is a mecca for birdwatchers.

Birdwatchers?

The militia (sic) occupying the bird sanctuary. My solution? Cordon them off, leave them alone. Arrest them when they come out. Invoke laws focused on terrorist acts on American soil. Try them. Lock’em up.

As to the inciting cause. Geez, guys and gals in the federal judiciary. Don’t let somebody out, then say, oops, we need more of your time. That’s cold. No matter what the crime. Also, makes you look like the gub’ment. That makes us all look bad. A bit of understanding would have stopped this incident before it began.

Sage Brush Rebellion. Revoke their grazing permits and other land use permits for federal land. Arrest them for all violations of state and federal law. Prosecute. Jail or fine. Repeat as necessary.

However. When both the protesters and the government act like the Three Stooges, maybe it would be best to call NBC, declare all of this reality tv and make a little money. Vote them off the bird sanctuary. That sort of thing.

A new westerner’s two cents on this silly issue of our time.

Jefferson County, Mountains, The West

Where the Wild Things Are

December 2, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Samhain Thanksgiving Moon

A video from 2:30 am today. This is very close in a straight line from our house, though that straight line goes over Black Mountain. The saying here is that if you have deer, you have mountain lions. We have plenty of deer and elk.

Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., The West

What Is Life?

November 18, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Samhain Thanksgiving Moon

What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the Sunset.

Crowfoot, a leader of the Blackfoot Nation

Colorado, Mountains, The West

Foxy

October 25, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Mabon Moon of the First Snow

After some ice cream, we left Georgetown and, since Ruth wanted to go back a different way, we drove the Guanella Pass south out of Georgetown. It comes out in the very small town of Grant on Highway 285 about 25 miles from Shadow Mountain. The pass reaches 11,669 feet at its highest point and includes several overlooks, national forest campgrounds and a large Xcel energy hydroelectric station.

As we climbed, the snow cover got heavier and heavier until we reached an area where the snow was thick on the ground somewhere close to the treeline. 24 miles long the Guanella Pass takes a while to drive because it’s both narrow and twisty.

Along the way we saw this guy sunning himself on the road. He never moved when I stopped the car, rolled down the window and took several pictures. A healthy looking red fox.

This is wild, forlorn country reachable, for now, by car. One socko storm though and the Guanella Pass will close for the season. The Mt. Evan’s road, which traverses a similar route further east, climbs one of Colorado’s fourteeners.

Colorado, Mountains, The West

Tesla and Georgetown

October 25, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Mabon Moon of the First Snow

Ruth wanted to go to the Argo Gold Mine. We saddled up the Rav4 and drove through Evergreen, caught I-70 and found Idaho Springs. The Argo, in spite of its website, was closed. So, we had to regroup. Ruth thought Georgetown, a historic mining town, further west on I-70 might be fun, so we headed over there.

An Energy Museum caught Ruth’s eye, so we parked and wandered over to the smallish wooden building on the edge of downtown. It looked closed. Ruth had seen an open sign, but I was dubious. She still has faith in the veracity of signage. She was right.

It was open and turned out to be a fascinating place. Jason, the onsite employee, was an enthusiastic guy near my age. He explained that this was a working museum. Working? Yes, the museum was built around a functioning hydroelectric plant installed over a hundred years ago and still producing electricity with the same equipment today.

And, Jason said proudly, “It doesn’t produce any of that Edison direct current crap! It’s AC from the git go.” The first commercial AC plant was in Colorado, too. The Ames Hydroelectric Generating Plant outside Ophir, Colorado. It was built in 1890 and the Georgetown site came online in 1906.

This confluence of AC power generation probably has something to do with Nikola Tesla, inventor of alternating current. From 1899 thru 1900 he lived in the Alta Vista Hotel in Colorado Springs, carrying out experiments focused largely on the wireless transmission of energy. He liked the dry air in Colorado.

“What does it feel like to be the smartest man in the world?” a reporter asked Albert Einstein. “I don’t know,” Einstein replied, “You’ll have to ask Nikola Tesla.” Tesla is a protean figure whose relative absence from the public mind puzzles any who know the remarkable things he did.

Not only did he invent alternating current and champion it as an alternative to Edison’s direct current (AC maintains its strength much better while being transmitted from power station to consumers), he invented radio, though Marconi would eventually get the credit for it. Other notable Tesla inventions: Neon signs. X-Rays. Remote Control. Electric motor. Robotics. Laser. Wireless communications and limitless free energy.

Tesla has fascinate me for a long time and I’d like to see him get some attention here.

Colorado, Great Work, Jefferson County, Mountains, Plants, Shadow Mountain, The West

Verticality and Aridity.

October 18, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Mabon Moon of the First Snow

When I went into Evergreen yesterday, just after turning off Brook Forest Drive I went past a house that had a bull elk and his harem resting in their front yard, maybe 15 does. A stream runs between the highway and this house. The trees gave shade from the brutal morning sun. A domestic scene with wild animals. It came to my attention when a large bulk moving caught my peripheral vision. That’s the paleolithic helping in the here and now.

It amuses me, when I go to Evergreen, to see the number of people who gather at the lake. All these wonderful mountains and the locals come to look at the water. I imagine only a former native of a water rich state would notice the irony.

Vertical and flat. Humid and arid. Those are the big differences between our new home and our old one. Here I drive through canyons, over high passes, around stands of rock with the view often limited to a few hundred feet on either side, sometimes less than that. When we leave Conifer and go into Denver though, we immediately return to the far horizons common to the midwest. We frequently transit between the great plains and the mountain west, living as we do in the borderlands between the two.

Though we have had a wet summer and somewhat wet fall, when the rains cease, things dry out fast. We can go from low fire danger to high in a day. That’s why fire mitigation is constantly on my mind.

When verticality and aridity intersect, as they do at 8,800 feet and above, a genuinely unfamiliar biosphere is the result. Unfamiliar to those from the rainy flatlands of middle America, that is. On Shadow Mountain we have two trees: lodgepole and aspen. Along streams there are more species of tree and shrub and there are microclimates that might support greater diversity, but on the bulk of the land that can grow anything, lodgepole and aspen. There are grasses, flowers, a few shrubs as understory, but just as often the rocky ground is bare. The mountains have strict limitations for plants.

The plant limits determine the fauna, too. Grass eaters like mule deer and elk do well, as do predators who eat them. There are small mammals that are prey for foxes and coyotes, but there are surprisingly few insects. That limits the birds. We have raven, crow, Canada and blue jays, the occasional robin, birds of prey that feed off food similar to that preferred by foxes and coyotes and other game birds. There are, as well, black bears. We’ve seen all of these save the bear.

Still learning about the mountains. Will not stop.

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

I’m a Lumberjack and I’m OK

October 14, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Mabon Moon of the First Snow

Fire mitigation means removing some trees. Putting solar panels on the roof means removing some trees. Turns out removing trees is something I know how to do. So, every day or so until I’m finished, I’m cutting down one tree, limbing it, cutting the trunk into firewood, stacking the firewood and putting the branches out for chipping.

A complication here that I never faced in Andover is that slash is bad. That means I can’t make brush/slash piles for the critters like I did in Minnesota. Each limb removed from the tree has to be moved into a location accessible by a chipper. That’s a lot of extra work. But it’s good work and I’m looking forward to it.

Got started yesterday. The first lodgepole I cut down stood directly in the way of backing out of the garage. It doesn’t now. I know, this may seem callous, cutting trees down, but in actuality I’m thinning a garden bed, leaving more room and therefore more nourishment for the trees that remain.

Removing shadows from our solar panels is important, too. Shade has an outsized impact on electrical solar generation due to an unusual characteristic of silicon panels. Just a bit of shade shuts down the entire panel.

Most significant of all is fire mitigation. Lodgepoles are a pioneer species, that is, they come in after a fire, grow up, shade other species, then die back. They tend to grow close together and many get spindly, unhealthy. 30 feet from the house all trees have to have branches cut off to ten feet above the ground. This helps prevent fire from reaching the tree through ladder fuels like shrubs and tall grasses, slash. Within the 30 feet defensible space perimeter, the trees also to have adequate space between clumps to ward off crown fires.

The Splintered Forest guy taught me that lodgepoles need to be in clumps for their own health so the ten foot between crowns rule applies to small clusters of lodgepoles, not independent trees. Weaker lodgepoles will blow over easily due to their shallow root structure unless they have friends to break the wind.

Late fall, early winter work outside. Good aerobics. Especially when I cut the trees down with an axe like I did yesterday. With a lot of huffing and puffing. I’ll use the axe when I can because I like the handwork aspect, but the chainsaw will allow me to finish the task in a timely manner.

My limbing axe works great. With most of the branches on a lodgepole I can stand on the opposite side of the trunk and flick them off one handed. Standing on the opposite side of the trunk makes it much less likely that the axe will find its way into my leg.

Politics, The West, US History

Let Sad Make You Mad

October 3, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Mabon Elk Rut Moon

I got a disturbing call in the early 1980’s. Could I do a funeral for a young woman whose marriage I had performed on the West Bank in Minneapolis not two years before? Of course. How did she die?

Two boys playing in an alley had a rifle. It went off. The .22 bullet was so spent by the time it reached where she stood on the balcony of her apartment that it couldn’t penetrate the back of her coveralls. But it had enough power to stop her heart.

At the funeral we decided that the only way to make sense of her death was to push for gun control. And we did. We lobbied the Minneapolis city council, talked to Minnesota legislators. I don’t remember how long we kept at it, but in the end we failed. Just like gun control advocates all across this country.

I think it’s time three things happened: 1. The NRA gets put on the terrorist watch list as an enabler of domestic terrorism. 2. The second amendment gets recognized as the gun control amendment that it is. 3. Gunmakers, gun controlled lawmakers, local gun use advocates get the shame and the blame each time a shooting occurs, mass or otherwise.

Here are graphics that you might have seen elsewhere, but they’re worth seeing again. If you want to dig a little more into the numbers, go to this website: mass shooting tracker.

Great Work, Jefferson County, Mountains, The West

We Share the Mountains

September 27, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Mabon Elk Rut Moon

One of the joys of living in the mountains is the unexpected appearance of wildlife. The Lakeshore Cafe, where we go for our business meetings on Sunday morning, sits across Upper Bearcreek Drive from Evergreen Lake. This morning there was a harem of elk with two bulls drinking, swimming in the lake and wandering the marshy area. At our initial pass a multi-point buck was striding across a pedestrian bridge, a picture I wish I could have taken, but traffic behind me prevented it.

When we turned into the Lakeshore’s parking lot, Kate suggested I park and go take some photos. Here are a few: