Greeley Next to Embrace Its Prairie River

Urban river trail, Fort Collins, Colorado

When I was a kid in Fort Collins, we enjoyed the Cache la Poudre River — upstream from the city. We fished in it, hiked in its canyon, my Boy Scout troop planted willow cuttings to stabilize the banks, and so on.

The river in town? I hardly saw it, except when crossing  the bridge on North College Avenue. Like so many river towns, Fort Collins turned its back on the "urban Poudre." It was junky.

Nowadays, all that has changed for the better. There are in-town trails and foot bridges and access points, with a riparian park, Gateway Natural Area, extending through the foothills.

 Now Greeley, once again, takes cultural signals from its upstream neighbor is planning to change its part of the Poudre for the better, reports the Colorado Sun:

For decades, cities across Colorado abused rivers, using them as dumps, funneling them into canals and surrounding them with concrete and bridges. Greeley wasn’t any better, and as a result, the length of the Poudre decreased by 15%, or about 2 miles. Squeezing the river increased its speed, and that led to erosion, killed much of the aquatic life and, most of all, led to flooding. It also limited, if downright evaporated, the chances of any recreation. . . .

Greeley hopes to change that by, among other things, reconnect the river with its historic flood plains, giving it room to spread out, increasing its length and creating spawning beds for fish, wetland ponds, boulder clusters, gravel bars and places where the public can spend some time with it, if not in it.

Greeley students ponder a river map (City of Greeley).

Traditionally, rivers that flowed out of the Rockies onto the Plains were seen mainly as conduits for irrigation water, their purpose being to flow "efficiently" and tp deliver said water to the downstream ditch companies.

Since roughly the late 1980s, that utilitarian approach has changed. 

Pueblo built its Riverwalk, which takes its name and concept from San Antonio's River Walk, although it will only ever be a fraction of the length. It makes downtown Pueblo a more enjoyable place.

Cañon City's Arkansas Riverwalk Trail runs seven miles from the mouth of the Royal Gorge downstream toward Florence.  

It is quite popular. Perk, my first Chesapeake Bay retriever, swam there a lot and made one of his most spectacular retrieves just below the Raynolds Avenue bridge, when he picked up a fledgling swallow that had fallen from its mud nest up under the bridge and delivered it, wet but unharmed, to my hand.

Florence has its own modest river walk. Objections from some intervening landowners have kept it from connecting to Cañon City's — and they have a point, because a trail would cut through pastures and make parts of them effectively unusable. 

Grand Junction, eyesore that it is, has done some good things in the Colorado River as it passes through. Other communities down the Arkansas seem mostly to regard that river as a flooding threat.

I hope this trend of interacting with our urban rivers continues.

Don't give away secrets so freely : )

Portions of Backcountry Discovery Routes in southern Colorado and northern New Mexico.

This blog post's title quotes a comment on another post on X (formerly Twitter) about the Backcountry Discovery Routes. These run throughout the West, plus part of New England, and are a mixture of off-pavement and two-lane blacktop routes for multi-day motorcycle trips. (Not for big highway cruiser bikes, obviously.)

There is the Continental Divide National Scenic Trail for hikers and backpackers. Last summer, a friend of mine rode a good piece of the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route, which routes riders on back-country trails and gravel roads, for the most part, but with some blacktop routes when necessary. He rode from northern Arizona to Salida, Colorado, with all his gear on the bicycle. Some of the "trails" he photographed in Arizona were more like rock-hopping.

So it seems like GDMBR and the BDR might conceptually overlap, except that parts of the former are probably designated as "no motor vehicles."

I can tell from the maps that the BDR overlaps some designated Colorado Scenic Byways, which also are mostly two-lane blacktop. The BDR maps have more information on food, lodging, etc.

The user who posted on X responded to the comment quoted above with "Most don’t leave their basement we’re good."

Wolfage: New Maps of Wolf Travels, Sort of

 Previous: CPW Tries Again with British Columbian Wolves.

Watersheds visited by wolves from late December 2024–late January 2025.
Click to enlarge.

Colorado Parks and Wildlife has released new maps of transplanted-wolf activity, BUT you have to be careful how you read them.The maps show the watersheds where wolves have been tracked, They do not show where wolves have been recently — that is kept secret, sort of. To quote a CPW news release from March 2024,

This map depicts watersheds where collared wolves in Colorado have been for the last 30 days. A watershed is a geographic unit that drains water into a specific water body. These are also known as Hydrologic Unit Codes (HUC). Information is shared at the HUC 10 level. Watersheds are the appropriate mapping unit to display wolf activity information because wolves are far more likely to use geographic features to affect their distribution than they are political boundaries. The HUC 10 scale provides detailed information that can help agricultural producers be informed of the general areas where wolf activity is known to exist without being too general (i.e., as a county-level map would be) and also is not so specific to risk the protection of individual wolves (as a finer scale HUC12 map would be). Learn more about HUCs at https://water.usgs.gov/GIS/huc.html.

For a watershed to indicate wolf activity, at least one GPS point from the wolf collars was recorded within the watershed's boundaries. Because a watershed indicates wolf activity, it does not mean that a wolf or wolves are present throughout the entire watershed or that they are currently in it.  

But I have already seen at least one journalist treat the map as showing where a certain lone wolf was traveling, which it does not do. The most recent CPW release says, "The watersheds in the southeast region that are lit up in this map represent the movement of one animal."

There was a credible recent account of wolf tracks found near Guffey in southeastern Park County, roughly north of Cañon City, which fits with the map. It was posted on Colorado Wolf Tracker, a private Facebook group.

Wolfage: CPW Tries Again with British Columbian Wolves

"Fladry" deters wolves, they say. (USA Today).

Previous wolfage: "Ute Tribe Faces Down Colorado over Wolves"

With the bad wolves, the re-captured "Copper Creek Pack," now detained in an undisclosed location, Colorado Parks and Wildlife is releasing good wolves on the Western Slope.  (See UPDATE below, however.)

Captured somewhere in British Columbia somewhere, they never eat beef or mutton and reliably vote for the Liberals. 

On dit.*

According to CPW's  Instagram feed,

"The wolves will be captured and transported in crates to Colorado, collared, and released as soon as possible once they arrive at select sites in Garfield, Eagle and/or Pitkin counties. We plan to release 10-15 wolves on the Western Slope per year, for 3-5 years, as outlined in our Colorado Wolf Restoration and Management Plan."https://www.instagram.com/coparkswildlife/

An apparently erroneous report on the Colorado Politics website led to one Pitkin County landowner being visited by camo'd up armed "sightseeers," reports the Aspen Times.   

When asked to leave, they parked on a county road behind a bush just off the property, where they remained for part of the afternoon, according to the owner. 

“This is putting the safety of my family, the livestock, the wolves, all in jeopardy, and all of the allegations were false,” the owner said of the Colorado Politics article published on Tuesday. Two of the ranch owners asked the publication to redact the article when they read it on Thursday morning, which the publication did.

Social media played its part, the article said.

But rumors continued after the new year. Apart from [Facebook group] Colorado Wolf Tracker, the Roaring Fork Swap Facebook page circulated information about the ranch family members, putting their names to the public, “adding fuel to the fire,” the owner said.

And an anonymous source claimed they witnessed Colorado Parks and Wildlife trucks and trailers driving toward the ranch, further strengthening the rumors.

 Colorado Public News rounded up the political side on Jan. 14:

Political tensions have started to boil over amid the lack of official details. The state wildlife commission denied a petition from agriculture organizations last week seeking to pause the reintroduction program. Meanwhile, another livestock group submitted a draft ballot measure to repeal the program, and state and federal elected officials have flexed their political muscles and threatened to take action to protect rural communities.

Colorado Politics did publish another piece on wolf reintroduction on January 8, written by members of the "wolf-livestock coexistence working group," which stated,

Important signs of progress in achieving coexistence are emerging. To date, 50 ranch vulnerability assessments have been completed or are in the process of being completed. Sixty-eight people have expressed interest in becoming range riders. Dozens of guard dogs have been placed on ranches. Turbo fladry and electric fencing have been deployed successfully on numerous ranches. CDA is providing grants for range riding and carcass management. And CPW and CDA are holding coexistence and stockmanship workshops in potentially affected counties. The ad hoc group is still divided as to whether the landscape will have enough coverage with site assessments before the release of wolves from British Columbia.

 "Fladry" are flapping plastic ribbons placed along pasture boundaries. How they deter long-legged hard-running carnivores, I do not yet understand.

UPDATE: On Jan 19, CPW said the 2025 wolf release was completed. Fifteen wolves from BC plus the five survivors of the Copper Creek Pack were released in Eagle and Pitkin counties. They think the Copper Creek wolves can somehow stop "depredating" livestock:

This agency decision to re-release the Copper Creek animals considered multiple factors, including the health of the animals, the timing of the B.C. releases this year and the potential proximity to new wolves on the landscape. This strategy gives the animals the best chance for survival, advancing Colorado’s gray wolf restoration efforts. 

"As I said at the time, options in the case of the Copper Creek Pack were very limited, and this action is by no means a precedent for how CPW will resolve wolf-livestock conflict moving forward. The male adult wolf was involved in multiple depredations. Removing the male at that time, while he was the sole source of food and the female was denning, would likely have been fatal to the pups and counter to the restoration mandate,” said [CPW director Jeff] Davis.

The capture of the pack was a management action that was taken to change the behavior of the animals to reduce depredations and could further impact the adult female's behavior moving forward.

* Since the wolves are Canadian, I am required to sprinkle in some French. Translation: "They say."

The Last Big Beetle-Killed Pine

Early January 2024: the blue stain of the
tree-killing fungus is all over the big pine's sapwood

My wife told me she could feel that big pine hit the ground from our house, maybe 200 yards away. 

I had had my eye on it as a firewood source for several years, and because I had been more the Grasshopper than the Ant during late 2024, I needed more wood now. And there it stood, dead for several years, another victim of the Mountain Pine Beetle and its hitchhiker, the blue-stain fungus.

The Mountain Pine Beetle is always present somewhere in the Rockies. (And in the Black Hills, where Dad, then a USFS district ranger, supervised several essentially useless spraying campaigns in the early 1960 —but that is what he was told to do.) It hits ponderosa pine in patches and lodgepole pines in huge swathes. Anyone who travels in Summit, Gunnison, Conejos or other counties where lodgepole grows has seen the mountain sides covered with dead trees.

Lodgepole pine killed by pine beetle fungus. (Colorado State Forest Service)

Meanwhile I was seeing  beetle (actually fungus)-killed ponderosa pines in little clusters. Some were right near the driveway. One fell on a power line (fortunately "de-energized," i.e. turned off). Since they were close by and mostly uphill, felling and bucking and moving the wood was fairly simple. Some were farther away, up the ridge, but I was not going to push any more road into the "back 20" than the previous owners had done, and helicopter-logging is a little too pricey.

Ponderosa pine killed by pine beetle-carried fungus
and left for the birds.

I left a couple of big ones standing because I realize that cavity-nesting birds need some dead trees. That means that woodpeckers need to make holes while looking for bugs, and then the nuthatches etc. can enlarge them.

The dead pine pictured is up back from the guest cabin. Flickers (which are woodpeckers) are always attacking its cedar siding, so I hoped that having a nice dead tree would attract them away. Results have been . . . mixed. Apparently "natural" is not always better. But I will leave it there until it falls over

When I look around, I don't see any more new beetle-killed pines. Maybe the infestation has run its course — for now. Future firewood planing will have to take a different course.

This big tree was about a century old, which places its start to when someone named William Funderbunk owned this land, apparently part of a little ranch that was never too successful. He must have had other income as well. There were others before and after him.

The original homestead claim was "proved up" in 1879, and according to the abstract of title, the land was sold for taxes a couple of times in the 1940s, when not being used for collateral on loans, until 1958, when an enterprising Arizona couple purchased 26 acres with foothills home sites in mind.

That's the history of the land in a stack of 46 little papers, fastidiously typed out and held together with a brass fastener. It covers 84 years, 1879–1963. We bought it decades later from the middle-aged daughter of that1963 purchaser. Back then, this tree was still growing up on the mountainside.

Maybe a century is a pretty good run for a pine in this arid setting. As I swing the splitting maul, I will think about its life.

Ute Tribe Faces Down Colorado over Wolves

A suitably logo'd Governor Polis releases a wolf in December 2023.

An odd news release from Colorado Parks and Wildlife popped up in my inbox last week. Having worked as a newspaper reporter, I am pretty good at translating Bureaucratese into English, so I will give this one a try. It involves a "memorandum of understanding" between CPW and the Southern Ute Indian Tribe, which is headquartered in Ignacio, La Plata County.

Headline: Colorado Parks and Wildlife and Southern Ute Indian Tribe Announce MOU on Gray Wolf Restoration

Original: CPW and the Tribe are committed to operating on a basis of a government-to-government relationship that simultaneously recognizes and respects Tribal sovereignty. The MOU also states that CPW and the Tribe will work together to provide a process to minimize conflicts, memorialize a process for information sharing on gray wolf reintroductions throughout the State and confirm the Tribe’s intent to participate in the State’s program to provide fair and timely compensation to the Tribe or Tribal Members for any losses of livestock proven to be caused by gray wolves.

Translation: We, the Southern Ute Indian Tribe, do not want any wolves near our livestock operations, and if you release them here, we will pull out the  "sovereignty card" and see you in court.

Wasn't that easy?

They cannot play the sovereignty card, but two Western Slope counties, Rio Blanco (2021) and Montrose (2021), had previously passed "no wolf reintroduction" resolutions. In November 2024, CPW said that Rio Blanco Co. had been removed from the list "due to the limited number of state-owned sites that adhered to the criteria in the plan and their proximity to livestock, elevating the risk of conflict, as well as the potential impact to elk and deer herds recovering from the severe winter of 2022-23."

In the memorandum, CPW agreed not to release wolves within 60 miles of tribal land boundaries nor within the "Brunot area," 3.7 million acres of the San Juan Mountains of SW Colorado where the Utes retain hunting rights. So they probably won't be trotting through downtown Ignacio.

In other news, someone had shot and wounded one of the original ten wolves released in Grand County.  This was one of the "bad wolves" that were released and then re-captured in August 2024

At the time, Colorado Parks and Wildlife said the wolf died four days after its capture and had “deep puncture wounds” on its hind leg that were unrelated to the capture.  The wolf’s body weight was almost 30% lower than it was when it was released in December 2023, when it weighed 104 pounds, CPW said, and it died despite receiving antibiotics for an infection. 

Now, a necropsy has determined the wolf died as a result of a gunshot wound, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said Thursday [Dec. 26, 2024]. The federal agency said it was seeking information “regarding the illegal killing of a gray wolf in Grand County” and offering a reward. . . .

The Copper Creek wolf was one of three of the 10 reintroduced wolves that have died. Another died in Grand County in September [2024] and was discovered by wildlife officials after its collar sent a “mortality signal.” A necropsy later determined that the wolf likely died from a fight with another wolf, and that it had a healed gunshot wound on its leg, according to federal officials. 

The first of the reintroduced wolves to die, also a male, was likely killed by a mountain lion, CPW said. It was found dead in Larimer County in April [2024] and had puncture wounds to its skull.

And to end the year, Governor Polis said that the whole wolf-reintroduction program would have been a lot cheaper if it had not been for those damn ranchers. Misinformation!

What Polis said at a political meeting on Dec. 3, 2024, "was Colorado will continue gray wolf restoration because it is the will of the voters, and that CPW wouldn’t have had to to go Canada for the next round of wolves 'if ranchers wouldn’t have said, ‘Oh, don’t get them from Wyoming, don’t get them from Idaho.’"

Actually, as the Colorado Sun there reported, it was the state agencies in Wyoming and Idaho that refused to supply Colorado with wolves. Sadly, "Polis hates rural Colorado" has become a journalistic trope in the past couple of years.

Did Mister Cooper's Hawk Kill Gospodin Steller's Jay? On the Politicization of Bird (and Mountain) Names

Walking up the dirt road in back of the house on December day, I saw these feathers. Obviously a Steller's jay had met a recent and violent end. But whodunnit? A Cooper's hawk? 

Just thinking about that leads to another thought: Who was Steller and how does he "own" these jays? And who was Cooper likewise?

He was Georg Wilhelm Stöller, russianized to "Steller,"  who lived a short (1709–1746) but productive life as a natural scientist including participation in "the Second Kamchatka Expedition [1741]of Captain Vitus Bering, the legendary Russian explorer whose name wound up on the Bering Sea, Bering Strait, and Bering land bridge."

He gathered lots of specimens but was also shipwrecked with others of the crew on what was named Bering Island, for Capt. Bering would die there. In Steller's memory, four birds and the Steller's sea lion, plus the doomed Steller's sea cow, were given his name, because he was the first to publish scientific descriptions.

Cooper's hawk? Named by the French ornithologist Charles Lucien Jules Laurent Bonaparte (Napoleon's nephew) for his friend Wlliam Cooper, another early 19th-century naturalist.

These names might be going away though. In 2023 the American Ornithological Society announced that all English bird names named after people within the geographic jurisdiction it manages will be changed, with the initial effort set to tackle 70 to 80 bird species present in the United States and Canada, starting in 2024.

These names are, allegedly, "racist and misogynist." So this is all bad stuff from the past that we are getting rid of. It's "racist" when an 18th-century German naturalist works for the Russian government in the Bering Sea? Maybe we should get rid of "Bering" too! There is a certain amount of guilt-by-association here. 

In Colorado, we have purified the past, even when it meant favoring one Indian tribe over another. In November 2022 the Colorado  Geographic Naming Advisory Board recommended changing the name of Mount Evans, the state's highest peak, to Mount Blue Sky, "a name supported by the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma."

There was history here: John Evans served as territorial governor from 1862–1865. That was a period of renewed conflict between settlers and some Natives. In late 1864 a force of Colorado volunteer cavalry attacked a peaceful Arapaho camp on Sand Creek in eastern Colorado and massacred many people, driving some of the survivors to align with the Cheyenne, who were more hostile. Evans did not "authorize" the attack -- he was not there -- but he did authorize formation of the volunteer unit that committed it, so in that sense he was "linked" to the Sand Creek Massacre.

But when the proposal went up to the US Board of Geographic Names, other Cheyennes objected: 

The vote has been held up for the past six months because of objections from the Northern Cheyenne of Lame Deer, Montana, the only original Colorado tribe, which is vehemently against the Mount Blue Sky name. The phrase "blue sky" is part of the sacred Tribal Arrow Ceremony and, thus, the Northern Cheyenne believe it would be "sacrilegious" for it to be spoken in common language, the tribe argued.  

Northern Cheyenne tribal leaders have, instead, long advocated to rename Colorado's most famous peak to "Mount Cheyenne-Arapaho."

The Northern Cheyenne tribe lost, because the board wanted to settle the issue. It's Mount Blue Sky, signed and delivered.

But let me speculate: Will a generation of young social-media users now think that the mountain was named for Bluesky, a social media platform that is trying to compete with X (formerly Twitter)? Will they look around to see if there is a Mount TikTok or Facebook Peak somewhere too?

As for the birds, in a year or two, will I be saying that a "stripey forest hawk" maybe killed a "Western crested jay"? Or maybe the Cooper's hawk should be the "mall hawk." On a 2020 visit I saw more of them around a California strip mall parking lot than I ever see at one time here at home in the woods.

(In pre-Communist Russia, "Gospodin" was the term of respect equivalent to Monsieur or Herr.)

Did Wolf Reintroduction Doom Colorado's Big Cat-Hunting Ban?

Someone in my area left their anti-Prop. 127 sign up well past Election Day.

First, let me say that I am still in the blogging game. There were deadlines, then there was business travel, not to mention travel to aid a sick friend, and then the business travel gave me some kind of case of the nasties that I am still sleeping off now. 

November was sort of a total loss, but on the electoral side there was one stunning surprise. Not Donald Trump — I mean the defeat of Colorado Proposition 127, which set out to ban the hunting of bobcats and mountain lions — and lynx, but there is no season on them anyway.

The proposition's text began, "The voters of Colorado find and declare that any trophy hunting of mountain lions, bobcats, or lynx is inhumane, serves no socially acceptable or ecologically beneficial purpose, and fails to further public safety." (Cats Aren't Trophies website.)

Of course, it was written so that "trophy hunting" meant "any hunting," just in case anyone claimed to be a subsistence mountain-lion hunter. Some people do eat them and find the meat tasty, but I have no personal experience there. One neighbor is a houndsman, and I have been outdoors working to be suddenly swarmed by four or five dogs with GPS collars, who give a quick hello and then tear off into the forest. (They don't know where the public land boundary is, being dogs.) I know that group has occasional success, but they've never offered me any lion chops.

Anti-127 signs were all over my county and the next one, but I figured it was a lost cause. The big urban counties would go "Aw, kitties!" and vote Yes. 

The momentum was there. Several ballot measures restricting types of hunting have passed in the last thirty years:

• 1992: A 70–30 percent vote ended the spring bear season, which usually meant hunting over bait. (I had worked briefly for an outfitter in the 1980s, making me the guy pouring Karo syrup over a pile of day-old doughnuts in front of a tree stand). Some hunters supported that one. It also outlawed hunting bears with dogs at any time, although that was never a big thing.
• 1996 A state constitutional amendment, not merely a regulatory change, prohibited "the use of leghold traps, instant-kill body-gripping design traps, poisons, or snares; providing an exception for the use of such methods by certain governmental entities for the purpose of protecting human health or safety or managing fish or other nonmammalian wildlife; providing an exception for the use of such methods to control birds or to control rodents other than beaver and muskrat, as otherwise authorized by law." It passed 52–47 percent.
  
• 2020 While not directly about hunting, Prop. 114, demanding reintroduction of gray wolves, squeaked through 51–49 percent, with urban counties leading the charge.  

So when Prop. 127 went down with 56 percent "no" votes, I was astonished. Colorado Public Radio offered an answer: Blame the wolves. 

Dan Gates, who led the opposition campaign against Proposition 127, had predicted in the run-up to the vote that the controversial wolf reintroduction effort would convince voters to reject the hunting measure — and said the results bear that out. 

He thinks watching Colorado Parks and Wildlife biologists struggle with livestock attacks from wolves soured voters on removing their full control of other predators.

After all the "wolves won't attack cattle" — wolves attack cattle — "Those are BAD wolves; we will re-trap them and replace them with GOOD wolves," who wouldn't be a little cynical. Even Cats Aren't Trophies is negative:

The team behind Proposition 127 agrees that wolf reintroduction worked against the proposed ban on big cat hunting. Samantha Miller, campaign manager for Cats Aren’t Trophies, said the management of wolf reintroduction has been a “tragedy,” and said she would have voted against that measure if she had been a Colorado resident at the time. 

Miller, who now lives in Grand County, said wolf reintroduction and the resulting backlash “has really caused a lot of distrust and a lot of really negative stories around carnivores that has bled out into this campaign.”

Surely it's no coincidence that two weeks after the election, CPW released a report on Western Slope mountain lion density.   Biologists used GPS tracking and scout cameras in several areas:

Results of the camera-based mark-resight estimates in Middle Park averaged 2.5 independent lions per 39 square miles during the winters of 2021-22 and 2022-23.

In the Gunnison Basin, CPW observed an average density of 4.2 independent lions per 39 square miles in the winters of 2022-23 and 2023-24.

[Mark Vieira, CPW’s Carnivore and Furbearer Program Manager] said, "This combination of GPS collars and ear tags on lions paired with trail cameras across large representative study areas is showing us that parts of Colorado appear to have high lion numbers compared to studies of lions in other states.”

Every time that I think I should do a big round-up post on the wolves, some new development pops up, and I don't get it done. One of these days! But meanwhile, this wolf-mountain lion interaction was a surprise at the ballot box.

How the Swiss Army Knife Will Hypnotise You

 

A few months ago, a veteran upland bird-hunter on Facebook asked people to list their favorite pocket knives. I have owned a few since I started carrying one at age 11 or whenever. Most popular brands have ridden in my jeans: Schrade, Case, Old Timer, Gerber, Buck, and so on.

But then one day I needed a knife -- apparently I had donated my last one to Amtrak -- and I picked up this Swiss Army knife that a friend had given me some years back. (He bought in Zurich, no less.) 

I own a Leatherman tool, and it's good, but where had this knife been all my life? Got a cactus spine in your hand? Get the tweezers. A wine bottle needs opening? The Leatherman won't do that ! 

When I posted a photo of it on that hunter's Facebook page, he deleted it. He is for some reason opposed to German pointing dogs, whether smooth or wirehaired, and apparently the Swiss knives are way too Mitteleuropäisch for him as well.

It's a good thing I did not mention that I hunt deer with a Mauser rifle. Or that I am now temporarily caring for a German wirehaired pointer. (How do you say "Miss Bossypants" in German?)

If you are a SAK owner, this video will help you to "level up." For instance, I did not know how to ise the wire-stripper notch correctly, mainly because there is an actual wire-stripper in my tool box. But now I see the trick to it.

Watching twenty or thirty of the "60 secret functions" has a hypnotic power to it. You may find yourself craving the color red and the mysterious, "useless" awl.

And if you don't crave one, respect "The Kind of Men Who Carry Pocketknifes." 

Watching Them Fly Away Is the Best Part

 

Most birds, when you release them into the wild, take off like rockets. Owls at night, hawks and songbirds by the day — all the same. 

Not this young red-tailed hawk. Yes, he came straight up out the box, brushing my face, but then he landed nearby. It's like it took a moment for him to realize there was nothing above him but the clear blue sky of southern Colorado's Wet Mountain Valley.

Another volunteer wildlife transporter had brought him to the Raptor Center early this summer. He had only minor problems, recovered successfully, and had been exercising in the big flight cage (a.k.a. flight barn), which is about two stories tall and . . . barn-sized.

Now he stood in the grass for a few seconds, then bounced up, caught the wind, and swung out in a low circle (the "line-control model airplane moment"), gained more altitude, circled past our Jeep and a county Road & Bridge truck (hawk life includes vehicles), and went where I knew he would go.

That was a large, mostly leafless cottonwood by a creek. He is only a dot in the video at the point, but when M. and I drove away, there he was, perched on one of the highest branches

I like to think that he was building a new mental map: mountains, creek, lake, forest farther away. Was he already scanning rodents with his 8-powered eyes?

Pot Creek: The Ruins of the Interpretation of the Ruins

Back in 2017, a columnist for the Taos News wrote about Pot Creek, the area's "best-kept secret archaeological site." It was not until earlier this summer, a mere seven years later, that I thought to check that out.

I had seen the entrance signage many times,  but I did not know that "For 25 years or so this little gem has been closed to visitors. But while still officially closed, the Forest Service turns a blind eye to eager curiosity seekers." (Yes, grammarians, that is a "dangling modifier." Evidently no one edited "Backpackerbill.") 

This is a site that was re-discovered by Luria Vickery in the early 1970s while doing work on an advanced degree in archaeology. In 1992 a Forest Service team, under the cultural guidance of a Picuris Pueblo representative Richard Mermejo, and a representative of Taos Pueblo, spent a considerable sum shoring up the remains of an ancient Pot Creek pueblo dwelling and kiva, making it available to the public.

It included a dozen interpretive signs spaced out along a hardened pathway with benches for contemplation at rest stops. The signs and benches are still there in surprisingly good condition after 25 years of neglect.

Back then, the Forest Service also developed a paved parking area with rest rooms, which sadly deteriorated beyond repair. A docent lived on the site at the time, providing information and guided tours. Of course, there is none today. Since then, the site has gone into serious neglect and has been closed for the past few decades.

Aggressive signage that the locals ignore.

Part of the problem may be a joint ownership of the site between the US Forest Service and Southern Methodist University, whose Fort Burgwin satellite site is nearby. 

I pulled in there, seeing one other vehicle (never met its occupant) and a barbed wire fence. It was easy to find the path along the fence that led to a break and to step through.

There was a map of the interpretive trail. It felt like something left by the Ancient Ones, although I could read it.

Marco the dog and I followed the trail. We walked through today's piñon-juniper forest through land that at one time was cornfield and dwellings and kivas. Few if any trees, most likely.

There are other Ancestral Puebloan sites like that in the hills south of Taos along NM 518. I was once walking one of the many "social trails" and came across a complete kiva, boarded over, with a very rickety modern ladder leading down into it.

A similar boarded-up kiva at Pot Creek itself.

I thought for a moment about exploring that other kiva, but then considered that if the ladder broke, I would be down there alone, and expecting a Chesapeake Bay retriever to punch 911 into a cell phone is expecting a bit too much.

But all was not static at Pot Creek. Forestry crews had been on-site quite recently, thinning the timber. Piles of juniper logs were everywhere — great firewood for somebody. Here they are paired with signage. Yeah, the "magic of juniper" would be in my wood-burner. Unfortunately, it is more than a hundred miles away

So clearly there is no money in the public-education archaeology budget, but there is money in the wildland fire-mitigation budget, and someone decided to spend some of that at Pot Creek, perhaps as a gesture toward preserving the site.

Finally the trail led to this parking lot, with vegetation slowly cracking the asphalt. Room for fifty or more vehicles, but none on that day. And the handrails were overdue to be repainted. 

The Ancestral Pueblo people who lived at Pot Creek abandoned it centuries ago. Maybe they were too vulnerable to incursions by mounted Comanche raiders and moved to either Taos or Picuris pueblos. 

Perhaps someday, someone will re-interpret the interpretive site: "This flat area, now thickly covered with pine duff, was once a gathering place for pilgrims who came to visit these more ancient sites. Excavations have revealed a layer of pebbles mixed with bitumen, possibly a ceremonial site or a site of athletic contests."

Or maybe the clash of bureaucracies can be resolved.

Six Years After the Spring Creek Fire

The Spring Creek Fire ripped through big parts of Costilla and Huerfano counties in southern Colorado in June-July 2018. Periodically I drive through one area because it's on my route to New Mexico.

A lot of (mostly summer) homes in this area survived — clearly because they benefited from retardant drops all around them. It sure changes the view from the old picture window though.

This photo is published in accordance with the Colorado Photography Act of 1964 (familiarly called the "Ektachrome Act"), which requires that all professional and semi-professional photographers in the state—essentially anyone who has ever sold a photo—shoot at least one full roll of slide film on scenic shots featuring golden aspen groves

How Moose Came to Colorado and How They Expanded

A bull moose in Colorado (Photo: Backcountry Hunters and Anglers)

I personally never saw a Colorado moose until 2019 -- in North Park, of course -- although I had looked for them before, both there and around Lake City in southwestern Colorado.

Since their introduction in the late 1970s, they have spread out from North Park both on their own and with human help. 

Here is an interesting long read about that process, "Of Moose and Men."  I had not idea that Marlin Perkins' Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom was still being broadcast in 1978 and that the old nature-faker managed to insert himself into the moose transfers.

Gear Review: Pocket Binoculars

 

 

From All About Birds, Cornell University's great birding site (I rely on it a lot), comes a review of pocket binoculars: "Our Search for the Best Tiny Binoculars."

The review covers a price range of $100 to $1,000, in both double-hinge or one-hinge design, which, as you can see, I prefer.  In the photo (not reviewed) -- Wind River 8 x 25. Made in Japan for Leupold; they have given good service for their low-end price. Or there is always Swarovski, which are always top-rated, have great service -- and you pay for that.

 

Reviewing binoculars is inherently subjective, and what works well for one viewer may not work for another. Individual aspects of a person’s body geometry such as eye width, eye depth, hand size, and overall size can affect how well a binocular model fits.  

Do you carry "binoculars" or a 'binocular"? Industry types seem to prefer the latter usege, as do these writers.

Of course, to put pocket binoculars in your shirts, you need capacious pockets. Some designers of outdoor clothing just don't get that.

Our Southern Rockies Desert is Amazingly Young

The northern border of the Chihuahan Desert in is (very roughly) US 50 and the Arkansas River in southeastern Colorado. It forms an "embayment" in eastern Frémont County, and otherwise it laps against the various ranges of the Southern Rockies, extending southward into the Mexican state for which it is named.

One of its iconic critters will be celebrated September 27–28 in and around La Junta, Colorado, during the annual Tarantula Fest.

In this video from New Mexico State University,

Intrepid host Kevin Von Finger guides you through the fascinating arid environment of the Chihuahuan Desert, our North American Outback. Visit ancient caves with revealing clues that indicate this desert is surprisingly young. See gigantic skeletons from animals that roamed the area in the last Ice Age-mammoths, giant sloths, and prehistoric camels. Learn about the phenomenal changes that this land has seen since the beginning of earth. Our North American Outback provides a unique journey to North America's largest desert.

And climate change? Honey, you ain't seeing nothing like the High Plains Altithermal.