Mabon Moon of the First Snow
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Category Archives: Shadow Mountain
Slash
Mabon Moon of the First Snow
Two more trees down yesterday morning. Much easier without the snow load. My slash piles near the driveway are part of the process. Last year when I came out for the closing on October 31st there were signs for slash collection. What was slash, I wondered? Now, almost a year later, I have created substantial piles of it myself. It’s tree tops, branches and the occasional thinner or split portion of the tree trunk. It gets collected because removing trees for fire mitigation and leaving slash on the ground makes a greater fire hazard than the one you had before.
(slash in the upper right portion of this photograph)
My current plan is to have the slash chipped by Splintered Forest, but I might move it myself with some help. I’m close to having the southeast sector of our woods thinned. As we drove out yesterday, I noticed a black X marking a tree I need to cut for the solar panels. When it’s down, I’ll move on to the southwest, both in the front.
A Snowy Burden
Mabon Moon of the First Snow
It has snowed all morning, a heavy wet snow. It clings to the lodgepole branches, their burdens bowing the green needles toward the ground. The sky creates submission to the earth.
This is even truer than I imagined. Fire mitigation requires cutting down many trees and I’m doing them a few at a time. Today two. The first one I felled, using the chainsaw this time (a lot easier than with the axe but not as satisfying), did not go where I planned. Usually I’m accurate with placement, but the snow laden branches overweighted the tree at the top while a burl at the bottom broke in a way I hadn’t anticipated. Instead of landing to the left of the basketball goal, it swayed, crossed over the backdrop (to my, oh, no. then, oh, good.) and dropped instead just to the right of the goal. (see picture above)
I’m no pro, but I am an experienced amateur so I don’t like it when luck determines a fortunate placement. Right was as good as left, thank goodness. The second tree fell right 
where I wanted it.
Another factor I hadn’t considered when felling the trees during a heavy snow was the additional weight on the branches. Trees have to be limbed before the trunks can be moved and each limb had an added amount of water. That made moving each branch more difficult.
Felt good though to keep advancing toward a culled woods. Splintered Forest will come out and chip my slash once I get it to that point. Over the weekend I’ll cut up the downed trunks into firewood sized logs, stack them between a couple of trees well over 30 feet from the house and let them season until next winter.
And So It Came
Mabon Moon of the First Snow
Wet, Cool. Precise measurements.
Mabon Moon of the First Snow
A wet, cool Sunday here on Shadow Mountain, the aspens dropping their yellow leaves, creating golden splashes on roads and driveways. Rain is the best fire mitigator and it comes welcome.
48 degrees and snow forecast for Wednesday, snow showers only, but hey, snow!
We went over to Evergreen for our business meeting. When we got back, the garage was calling to me. Moved things here and there, organizing, creating space for bookshelves removed from up here. They’ll hold my journals. Some of the ikea shelving from the old office will hold bankers boxes that don’t stay up in the loft. Another two hours or so of work down there.
This afternoon we bought new cabinets for the kitchen and picked out a quartz countertop, finished up design elements. Main goal, increase storage and create better lighting, update the appliances. We bought scratch and dent appliances, saving literally thousands of dollars, accepting a few dings in return for smaller cash outlay.
Our remodeler is here right now, making final, precise measurements.
Verticality and Aridity.
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.
I’m a Lumberjack and I’m OK
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.
Moon Rock and Baby Mountains
Mabon First Snow Moon
Friend Tom Crane sent me a package the other day. It had the familiar Amazon prime tape across it, so I didn’t check the sender. I just opened it. The first thing I saw was a blue nalgene water bottle. Filled with water. What? I ordered water from Amazon?
It was a heavy package for its size, 10# was written on the front. In bubble wrap I found two large chunks of rock, samples Tom had collected near Carleton Peak, east of the Temperance River. It’s anorthosite, he says in the accompanying note, which also identified the water as Lake Superior water.
Knowing me well, he said I’d look up anorthosite. Here’s the first thing I found:
Anorthosite /ænˈɔrθəsaɪt/ is a phaneritic, intrusive igneous rock characterized by a predominance of plagioclase feldspar (90–100%), and a minimal mafic component (0–10%). Pyroxene, ilmenite, magnetite, and olivine are the mafic minerals most commonly present.
Who needs to go further after a description like that?
Phaneritic means it has large, identifiable matrix grains. “This texture forms by the slow cooling of magma deep underground in the plutonic environment.” wiki
“Mafic is an adjective describing a silicate mineral or rock that is rich in magnesium and iron, and hence is a contraction of “magnesium” and “ferric”. Most mafic minerals are dark in color, and common rock-forming mafic minerals include olivine, pyroxene, amphibole, and biotite.” wiki
“The Plagioclase series is a group of related feldspar minerals that essentially have the same formula but vary in their percentage of sodium and calcium.” www.minerals.net
The most interesting thing I learned while looking up Anorthosite is that the highlands of the moon seem to be anorthosite, too. So the ancient Sawtooths, volcanoes of the midcontinent rift which pulled the North American landmass apart in precambrian times, created rock similar to that found on the moon.
It’s odd to consider but mountain ranges like the Sawtooths and the Appalachians, ground down by millions, even a billion, years of erosion, were once like the relatively young Rocky Mountains. So here on Shadow Mountain we are in, or rather on, a recent geological event compared to the precambrian era of the Sawtooths. In the Precambrian era life evolved and during its entire millions of years there were only animals with no hard parts.
To walk the shore of Lake Superior, in other words, is to walk on a truly ancient landform. The Canadian Shield, which exposes some of oldest rock on earth, underlies much of Minnesota, from the oldest deposits, gneiss in the Minnesota River Valley like near Morton, to the Ely greenstone found in the town of Ely.
On Shadow Mountain, by contrast, we live on evidence of the Laramide orogeny, (mountain building), only 85-55 million years ago.
Final Days. Get It While It’s Hot.
Mabon Elk Rut Moon
The final days of the Elk Rut moon are gorgeous, sunny ones. The aspen trees with their leaves still on the tree, lower down from us, blaze like magic lanterns, yellow-gold against deep green. The yellow-gold has faded to a tannish yellow on Shadow Mountain where the leaves remain. Black Mountain, which had yellow gold streaks in its green hair much like grand-daughter Ruth’s pink ones, has bald spots sprinkled here and there with darkish browns, a mountain’s equivalent of gray hair.
A certain laziness comes with the sun’s shine as it sinks lower, rising less and less each day above the ecliptic. This light seems to offer a going out of business sale for warmth. Get it while you can. Don’t waste time. Bask now or be forever chill.
Since we live on a mountain road that connects two towns and provides entry points to the Arapaho National Forest, we get different traffic on the weekend. Often it’s bicyclists, sometimes in large groups. Today it was motorcyclists, buzzing by like formula one cars, riders leaning for the curve that begins where Black Mountain Drive turns into Shadow Mountain Drive. Oddly, I find these weekend events soothing. People want to come where we live. Of course, we also get the family car with a Thule carrier on top, bicycles lashed to a carrier on back, a dog with its head out the window.
Kate’s recovering nicely so far, the pain tamped down by Vicodin and ice. I made a pot of chicken noodle soup this morning. We’re at the beginning of a long trail for her.
Uh-oh. Gotta close the windows.
Mabon Elk Rut Moon
Started physical therapy for my arthritis, scoliosis, muscle tightness on Thursday. Dana, my therapist, is a very sharp woman, maybe early 40’s. She has me tucking my chin into my chest, folding my shoulder blades up, then down and paying attention to the tilt of my head in a mirror. The muscle relaxant I’ve been given is peculiar. It has a sedative effect and knocks me out when I take it. But, each night at 1:15-1:19, it wears off and I wake up. It’s half life goes on a bit longer so I get back to sleep pretty well.
Tonight though, it’s 2:00 a.m. right now, I woke up at 1:15 and noticed a flash of light. Then some thunder. Then the sound of rain drops. Ooops. I’d forgotten to shut the windows in the loft. No. I shut them. No. I didn’t. It’ll be ok. It won’t rain much. You don’t know that. Oh, alright. So up I came. Sure enough the windows were open. Not raining much, but hard to predict.
Kate and I went into Conifer last night for appetizers and every restaurant we tried had 25-30 minute wait times. Unusual. Tourists out for something. People drive away from their homes, even come to stay for a few days, to get to the place where Kate and I live. Sorta neat. Except when the restaurant wait times are 25-30 minutes. We turned around, drove past our house and on down Black Mountain Drive to Brook Forest Inn. Good choice. This old lodge is between Evergreen and Conifer, just like we are, out of the way for tourist traffic unless you’re staying there.
And, the food is good. It’s the local joint closest to our house. We’re semi-regulars there now and are beginning to get to know people. We may go over there on Sunday for the Vikings-Broncos game. Cutting cable means no local channels, so no football.