Category Archives: Jefferson County

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.

Aging, GeekWorld, Health, Jefferson County, Mountains, Shadow Mountain, The West, Weather +Climate

Knee, Snow, Travel

March 23, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Maiden Moon

The knee, 20 hours later. Feeling pretty good. Almost normal. A bit creaky, a little twingey, but otherwise, pretty damned good. The cortisone effect can last from weeks to months. I’m hoping months. The big issue with the knee, beyond Asia, is my regular workout. High intensity workouts, which I’ve been doing for a while, require some speedier, more stressful moments on the treadmill. The cortisone will make them easier for now. Worth it.

In other news here on Shadow Mountain we’re getting what may well may be another foot of snow. And this stuff is wet. And therefore heavy. Of course it’s Wednesday, when the trash goes out. Gonna get the yellow Cub Cadet out, but if it plugs up all the time, I’ll wait for the solar snow shovel or find somebody to plow us out.

Up here the forecast can change quickly if a system moves a bit further north or south. Last night the forecasts were for 2-7 inches. But in reality.

Today, and maybe tomorrow, is going to be largely trip related. Finish photographing our stuff. Get necessary information onto a flash drive for portability. Open a dropbox account to put my writing in the cloud. Get our emergency box of important papers put together. Sign up for international cell phone plans. Figure out how folks can contact us when necessary. Fussy stuff.

Jefferson County, Mountains, The West

Black Mountain White

March 19, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Imbolc Maiden Moon

Black Mountain is white. I can see it out of two windows here and its looming shape, it’s about 1500 feet higher than our altitude here on Shadow Mountain, blends in with the sky. The lodgepole pines and the few aspen that cover it are snow covered. The mountains, which seem-and are-the definition of stability and bulk still surprise me by how frequently they change appearance. In the fog Black Mountain disappears. After a heavy snow it changes color, becomes different from its green and rocky self. At night, if Bishop Berkeley was right, it goes away, only to return in the morning light.

(Black Mountain is above the trees on the left)

In the fall aspen light up its elevations, gold against green. The green becomes more vivid.

The Front Range is a physical barrier to a traveler from the east as they head west along the 40th parallel. It marks the end of the Great Plains and does so in a sudden upsweep of rock. Those of us raised in the humid east find ourselves in a new, startlingly new, land. A big part of the fun of being here.

Jefferson County, Mountains

Cub Creek

March 13, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Imbolc Maiden Moon

Tai chi is over and I took my first mountain hike since hiking Upper Maxwell Falls to Lower Maxwell Falls with Ruth last fall. The Cub Creek trail winds up from 8,400 feet, the trailhead only a couple of miles from our house. So, I drove over there about 2 p.m and was back home about 3:20, having spent an hour walking up what I believe is Black Mountain. The trail is in the Mt. Evans’ Wilderness area.

Mt. Evans is a fourteener, the most prominent peak near our home and, according to our neighbors, a weathermaker for our area. There are definitely weather influences by taller mountains on lower ones, especially when the taller ones are in the west as is the case with Mt. Evans relative to Shadow Mountain. Most of our weather comes from the west and Mt. Evans changes its character before it hits us.

This trail runs first through a forest of lodgepole pine, then opens to a burned out area with a magnificent vista to the north. I’ll post the pictures later today. After the burned out area, which is fairly level, the elevation gain became serious, for me at least. The forest thins out, with older trees. When the trail continues up past a service road, it begins to get rocky.

I pushed myself going up the trail, feeling the burn in my lungs and my quads. This was my Saturday workout and it was a good one. Since it’s March, the trail varied, some spots were icy, some covered with snow, other parts bare. This will be the last time I leave my trekking poles behind. Going up is not much of a problem, but hiking down the icy portions was treacherous.

While I hiked a rifle cracked somewhere below, more than once, filling the canyons nearby with echoes. Since this is National Forest land, not National Park, the motto is mixed use, which includes hunting though I can’t imagine what’s in season in March.

This is the kind of boots on the ground experience I want to make a regular part of my life. So many trails and mountains nearby.

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.

Family, Jefferson County, Mountains

Ruth

February 17, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Imbolc Valentine Moon

Ruth and I went for a long walk yesterday at Meyer Ranch Open Space Park. Gertie, our wire haired German pointer, came with us. Along the way we talked about a possible erratic (“I know what an erratic is,” Ruth said.) because it’s top had jagged, thin sheets exposed. I wondered why it hadn’t eroded.

We saw huge Lodgepole pines that had recently been cut to protect power lines in an easement running up Doublehead Mountain. When I started to count the rings on one stump easily 3 feet wide, Ruth asked, “Are you going to count all of them?” Yes, I was. The tree was between 75 and 80 years old. We’d been alive for much of the same time.

The trail went took went through forest. Ruth picked up branches along the way to make rings. I told her I admired how she found things to make wherever she went. “It’s good to have projects.” “Yes,” she said, “I have two, three, maybe five projects at home.” Ruth paints, sews, does fashion design, builds robots and reads in a way that gives me a shock of recognition.

Meanwhile, Gertie pulled me along, straining to get to the smells along the side of the trail. We rarely walk our dogs since they have a fenced in yard to roam, so they’re leashed train only enough to get into the vet and out. When we got back to the Rav4, we were all tired.

Jefferson County, Memories, Music, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase

Oh, Lord

February 12, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Imbolc Valentine Moon

Went down the hill last night to Grow Your Own, a hydroponics shop and wine bar that features local musicians. It’s just at the base of Conifer and Shadow Mountains so very close to our house. Tom McNeill sang. “I’m an old guy,” he said, “and I know old songs.”

He sang the songs of our youth: Oh, Lord Won’t You Buy Me a Mercedes Benz, Little Red Riding Hood, Something’s Happenin’ Here, Mamas and Papas, John Denver, Pete Seeger those kind of songs. A reminder of the person who inhabited those days, the me who was out there “singing songs and carryin’ signs.”

Latin today. The Myrmidons from Book VII of the Metamorphoses

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.

Jefferson County, Mountains, Shadow Mountain, Weather +Climate

The Beauty Way

February 3, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Imbolc Stock Show Moon

Go now, the snow has ended. This paraphrase of the last words of the Catholic mass sums up life after 18 inches of snow. Things get moving again after the last snow falls and the plows get roads opened and sanded. That last being especially important for those of us who live in the mountains.

Snow storms bring beauty in their wake unlike their wilder cousins tornadoes, hurricanes, derechos. Here are a couple of photographs from this morning.

Jefferson County, Mountains, Shadow Mountain

Never Considered This in Andover

January 25, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Yule Stock Show Moon

from Nextdoor Shadow Mountain today:

“Please be very careful if you are outside tonight and if you have animals. My next door neighbor was outside with her dog about 6 tonight and a mountain lion ran out from under her deck and ran between our houses. She got her dog inside quickly.”