The Sentimental Binocular(s)

 

Oshman's 7 x 35 um . . . optical instrument

I inherited this/these from my stepmother, Catharine. She was no outdoorswoman, but I can imagine her using them at Air Force Academy football games (she used to have season tickets). 

The label is Oshman's, a once-major Texas chain of sporting goods stores. Oshman's history tracks the collapse of brick-and-mortar retail stores: started by a Houston entrepreneur in 1933, the store spread to a number of Texas cities. In 1978 they bought the name of Abercombie & Fitch. Oshman's peaked in 1987 with "185 traditional stores, one Super Sports USA store, and 27 Abercrombie & Fitch stores." The Abercrombie & Fitch brand was sold off in 1988 to The Limited. No more safari-wear.

In 1991 the chain started contracting, and in 2001 it was bought out by Gart sporting goods, then folded into the Sports Authority chain. Sports Authority filed for bankruptcy and closed all its stores in 2016. 

My stepmother's sister married a Houston "awl man," so maybe the sister-in-law bought them as a gift? 

A good serviceable binocular, they might have been made by (imported by) Bushnell in the 1960s. I still have the case, although as you can see, I replaced the strap with a homemade one. They are my truck-binoculars, or it sits on the porch table as a warm-weather "bird-ocular."

But the lenses picked up the little spots and dirt of time, and then, oops, I dropped them on a hardwood floor. Out of collimation!  

The last time I needed such a repair, I went to an optics store in the Denver suburb of Englewood. It's long gone. So I went online and found Suddarth Optical Repair ("Binocular Repair since 1975") in bustling Henryetta, Oklahoma. 

I sent them in. Suddarth quoted $195 for repair and "complete rehabilitation." I know I could have bought some inexpensive 2025 Bushnell 7x35's for less, but this was for Catharine. So I gave Suddarth my credit card number.

Two weeks later they were back. So clear! So bright! So smooth the focusing wheel! I can look that evening grosbeak on the lower feeder right in the eye. Take that, entropy! We ain't dead yet.

So is it "binocular" or "binoculars"? What are its pronouns? For a short time in my early twenties I sold menswear, and I learned that some people inside the "rag trade" will talk about "a pant" whereas the average American says, for instance, "my khaki pants." (British usage is different.)

Likewise, when I was doing outdoor writing, I met optical-industry people who talked about "a binocular."  (Cory Suddarth, in his email, merely said, "Your glass arrived safely.")

Half a binocular is a monocular. Or is it it "Half of a pair of binoculars is a monocular"?

For what it's worth, Grok, Elon Musk's AI assistant, is in the plural camp:

Binoculars: This is the standard plural form, used when referring to the device as a pair of lenses (e.g., "I bought new binoculars"). The word derives from Latin "bi-" (two) and "oculus" (eye), emphasizing the dual-lens design. Since the device typically consists of two connected telescopes, the plural form is more common in everyday language and is considered correct for the physical object

Grok continues, "[saying 'binocular' as a noun] "may be considered a shorthand or error." Or maybe it's just optical-industry insider talk. Maybe that usage extends to independent repair shops.

I Was Raised to Hate Porcupines

Young porcupine at a rehabilitation center in Colorado.

 

When I was a boy, my dad was a US Forest Service district ranger. That meant he was in charge of a "district" within a national forest, a forest having usually four to six (or more) districts, depending on geography. He had a crew chief and a crew whose size varied seasonally, a half-time secretary, and a full-time assistant ranger (also with a college forestry degree). 

This is not my father, but it could be.

He was an old-school forester. Recreation, etc., was all very fine, and grazing was OK if regulated, but his job first and foremost was to grow trees, to mark timber sales, and to see that the loggers cut only what they were supposed to cut. 

At least once I heard him say, "I'm a tree farmer," probably while comparing his job to those "pressed pants" park rangers at the nearby national monuments.

And if he was a tree farmer, then porcupines were agricultural pests. As the Colorado Parks and Wildlife website says, "Several evenings of eating bark can severely damage a tree."

They damaged "the crop" by nibbling all around a pine tree, cutting the flow of nutrients.

When he saw a porcupine up in a tree, out came the .22 rifle or whatever he had. When I got to be old enough, he would pass the .22 rifle to me. Since I believed that "Dad knows best," I would sight in and start shooting until, eventually, whomp!

Not was 15 or 16 did I start to rethink porcupines' place in forest ecology. Maybe they did not all have to die, even if they "girdled" a pine tree, ate wires on a camper's car, or left their quills in a inquisitive dog's nose.

One time we were backpacking in the Lost Creek Wilderness (Pike National Forest) when he spotted an unusual light-phase porkie across a pond, fired a .22 revolver at it, and missed. I did not ask for a chance to shoot or volunteer to go after it. Maybe he felt my silent disapproval. That was the porcupine encounter that I had with him.

But when my dog Jack was "quilled" one time, he did share with me a useful trick. Don't just grasp the quills with pliers and pull them out. When you do that, the pliers squeeze the air inside the quill, forcing the barbs out and deeper into the dog's flesh. Instead, cut the quills' ends off with scissors, wire cutters, whatever and then pull. It's kinder to the dog.

Likewise, if he saw this "porcupette," he might even be moved by its juvenile cuteness. Porkies have only one offspring at a time, so they reproduce quite slowly. This one was seized this summer from a wildlife "hoarder" in Colorado Springs and brought to a rehabilitation center where it will spend the winter. 

Next spring, just to be on the safe side, I'll suggest releasing it in an area where no logging is going on. 

Blanca Gets Ducked

I've always looked out for her virtue, but I went into a shopping mall Barnes & Noble, and when I came out, Blanca, my refrigerator-white Jeep Wrangler Unlimited (that's the 4-door version) had lost her virtue. She had been ducked. The evidence was right on the driver's door handle.

We got our first Wrangler in 1997. (M. is still driving it.) Never got ducked until now. But it's a thing -- I had been seeing Wrangler Unlimiteds in particular with their dashboards covered in cartoony little ducks. 

Apparently an Instagrammer started the fad in 2020, if you believe what you read on the internet.

Where do they come from? Some factory in China must churn them out. Does the Uighur slave-worker painting their bills wonder where they will go and what they are for?

There are rules, for duck's sake.  

This Jeep was also parked near the B&N. Could be the culprit. 
Clearly its owner is part of the #DuckDuckJeep cult.

The duckies have adhesive bottoms, but it is hard to visualize bouncing in low-range down a rocky two-track and not launching toy ducks all over the passenger compartment.

Bears -- A Geological Force

"Displacement of eroded sandstone by Ursus americanus."

I live at the bottom of a steep ridge wtih exposed sandstone rock strata at the top.  Pieces fall off Over centuries and millennia huge boulders have rolled partway down and stacked up upon each other. 

Once while visiting a favorite place, I found new rock shards everywhere and worked out where maybe a dumpster-size piece had come down since my last visit. Would like to have seen that happen, from a safe distance.

So you have your freeze-thaw cycles that split rock, and then there is gravity.

And bears.

Good ol' Ursus americanus, the American black bear, found almost everywhere, plays a part in shaping the landscape too.

At this time of year, the bears are feeding actively, and one food source is fatty grubs. They walk along the slopes, flipping over every likely rock within their strength range to learn if anything edible is underneath.

Since their mamas never taught them to put things back where you found them, the rocks just roll -- downhill.

Sure it's not much, but just think: thousands of bears over tens of thousands of years. It has got to add up.

In fact, I think there is a paper here. All I need are two co-authors, one a geologist and one a wildlife biologist. I'll handle style and editing. It will be interdisciplinary, intersectional  . . .  something like that.

Setting Some Bobcats Loose in a Canyon Near Home

The bobcats in June, hostile and ready to go wild.

I not only got to release some bobcats recently, but I got to pick the place, which felt good. 

There was a certain canyon more or less torched by a forest fire nine years ago. Lots of the conifers are gone, except down along the creek where the fire skipped them, but the Gambel oak has sprouted copiously.

Steep slopes, thick brush, lots of rock outcroppings -- and I had been seeing more rock squirrels, etc. It all seemed like good country for an adaptable mesopredator. 

The local wildlife rehabilitators had raised six orphaned kittens over the winter. Now they were full size and full of hatred for civilization and all its works. As they should be.

A couple were "soft-released" — just open the enclosure at the foothills location and let them go.  Two went elsewhere on the national forest. The local district wildife manager (game warden) met my suggestion for the last two with a "Yeah sure, sounds good."

 

M. and I went to the site along with one of the rehabbers—he was mainly interested in getting photos and a chance for some sightseeing.

I set the two live trips down near the stream. I figured that if the first thing the encountered was the water, they would know where to get a drink-- and maybe the creekside area provide good hunting.

Didn't really need the heavy gauntlets, but I was taking no chances.

 

And there goes bobcat number one. A moment after the shutter snapped, it took off running. As it should.

 

The second one followed half a minute later, and our work was done. 

 

These bobcats are not collared or anything. No one knows where they are but themselves. I just hope that the prey base is there and that they are doing all right.

 

As a wildlife-transport volunteer, I am usually bringing birds and animals to one rehabilitation center or another. But setting them loose (when they survive) is even better. 

What to Watch When Herding Buffalo

Close-up of buffalo in a squeeze chute. (Owen Preece for HCN)

High Country News ran this article last March on the work of the "head bison wrangler" at the American Prairie Project in eastern Montana, Pedro Calderon Dominguez: "The Art of Moving a Buffalo."

At American Prairie, Calderon-Dominguez works with about 900 bison, divided into two herds. Each herd grazes at least 25,000 acres. The bison are wild animals, but not, legally, wildlife. Montana classifies them as livestock, and they graze land leased from the Bureau of Land Management for that purpose.

Like any big project in the West, it's not without controversy:

A few months after Calderon-Dominguez moved to Montana, the BLM permitted American Prairie to graze bison on six allotments in Phillips County. The state’s governor and attorney general both petitioned the decision, arguing that public rangelands should be for commercial agriculture. Their protests were denied by the Interior Board of Land Appeals in October 2023, and again on appeal last May.

Calderon-Dominguez tries to reduce the tension by keeping bison off neighboring property. Ranchers have his cellphone number to call if they see open gates, broken fences or off-premise bison, and American Prairie offers compensation for bison-related damage. So far, the group said, no one has ever requested it.

The owner of a now-gone buffalo ranch near me used to say that they could not be herded like cattle. No dogs. No "Yee-haw" wranglers on horseback.  When he wanted to move his herd to a different pasture, he laid a trail of hay through an open gate and just waited. 

Calderon is somewhat similar in approach: 

Moving them anywhere takes patience. When Calderon-Dominguez needs a herd to change directions, for example, he gets close on his ATV. (He said he’d rather ride a horse but cannot do so for insurance reasons.) It’s enough to pressure the bison to move without agitating them. He always watches their body language carefully.

“The way they move an ear, the eye is going to follow. Then the nose is going to follow and then the feet,” said Calderon-Dominguez. “You’re observing that all the time across the whole group of animals.”

When the herd turns in the right direction, Calderon-Dominguez drives away. Knowing when to release the pressure, he explained, is as important as knowing when to apply it.

From Sagebrush Rebellion to Tech Bro Megacities: Someone Always Wants the Public Lands

What a change a week makes. Last week my email blew up with responses to the possible sale of public lands  in the West, thanks to language inserted in the "Big Beautiful Bill" by Senator Mike Lee (R-Deseret). 

Now the bill has passed and been signed by the president but without that language, thanks to a huge outcry by organizations and ordinary Westerners (and others).  

(I don't like huge "omnibus" bills on principle, because who knows what horrors lurk on page 635, but apparently Pres. Trump wanted One Big Bill as a part of the "shock and awe" tactic he has adopted in his second term.)

Backcountry Hunters & Anglers was one of the most involved groups, but as the graphic suggests, it was a multi-headed effort.

“This win belongs to the hunters, anglers, and public landowners who stood up and said loud and clear: Our lands are not for sale,” said Patrick Berry, BHA President and CEO. “BHA members flooded the phone lines, sent emails, rallied their communities, and kept the pressure on until this provision was pulled. We didn’t just show up—we led the charge.”

Some crisis is always invoked to justify taking public lands away. "States can manage them better" was the war cry of the 1980s "Sagebrush Rebellion" during the so-called Energy Crisis. What that really meant was that it would be easier for oil companies etc. to influence state legislators while it would be harder for conservation groups to fight battles in Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, etc all at once. 

Now the war cry is "housing." But at this map that shows the lands identified for sale in Senator Lee's proposal. Housing for cities? For ski-town workers? Or for mountain mini-mansions? Lost forever to hunters, campers, etc.

Condos are often the first step on the home-ownership ladder, but Colorado, for instance, killed condo building by piling too much legal liability risk on builders. So they just stopped building. This year the legislature tried to undo its stupidity with "Governor Pudge" proclaiming that the new  "Construction Defects Law, Ending Years of Gridlock to Build Housing People Can Afford."

Resort towns zone for big houses on big lots while the workers sleep in their cars.

Selling public lands will never be "the fix," but you can bet someone will propose it again.  How about brand-new high-tech cities in the desert? 

The always-radioactive idea of selling off federal land comes and goes from Mesa County [western Colorado] and the environs, where 3 out of every 4 square feet of the high desert is owned by a government. Biting off a piece of forlorn pasture next to a highway exit for an apartment building may be controversial, though it has been done. 

But when the proposals started flying this month for everything from selling the popular Lunch Loops bike trails, to plunking 150,000 new residents down onto a no-rules “Freedom City” of the sage, the tech-bro think tanks floating the edgy concepts are finding that the practical folks of the Western Slope have a few questions.

 There will be more, you can bet on it.

 

It's Spring, When Large Animals Stomp You

On May 4, 2025, a  47-year-old Florida man was gored by a bison in Yellowstone National Park. He survived. 

“We see about two or three (bison attack victims) a year,” Dr. Kirk Bollinger with the Emergency Medicine department at Cody Regional Health told Cowboy State Daily in May. “I haven’t seen a lot of goring injuries where the victim’s guts are coming out. The big thing is the internal bleeding.” 

Then on Tuesday, June 10, a New Jersey man got the treatment at Upper Geyser Basin:  

Park officials said in a statement that the man was in a group of visitors that “approached (the bison) too closely” when it turned and charged.Emergency medical personnel treated the victim for minor injuries.

 The Buffs aren't much of a threat in Colorado (Joke intended), but I've seen equal risks run in Custer State Park-Wind Cave National Monument in South Dakota, which I think of as a sort of mini-Yellowstone, less geysers and grizz. 

 But we now have moose: 

 

Cow moose give birth to calves in late spring and early summer. During this time, they can become more aggressive toward perceived threats to their young. Cows will hide their calves to protect them from predators but will stay nearby. Turn around or leave an area if a calf is spotted. If a moose begins to charge, get behind objects like trees or boulders to put obstacles in its path. Respect posted signs warning of aggressive moose behavior or calf activity on trails. Choose a trail with good visibility and make noise when recreating through thick vegetation.

Most moose conflicts involve dogs. When recreating near riparian or willow habitats, keep dogs on-leash to avoid startling moose near a trail. Off-leash dogs can venture off-trail, surprising hidden moose calves or cows. Cows will, in turn, chase retreating dogs, which can bring the moose in contact with humans. 

A moose sees your happy, bouncy dog and thinks "Wolf! Danger! Attack!" You can read about some specific attacks at the link, but here is one:

On Fri., May 30, two women walking four dogs off-leash encountered a cow moose along Fourmile Creek Road in Fairplay. The moose charged and trampled the women multiple times. Eventually, they  were able to climb onto a nearby roof to escape. A neighbor hazed the moose away with a fire extinguisher. Neither woman sought medical treatment. CPW officers responded to the scene and found two cow moose. Unable to definitively identify which moose was involved in the attack, no further action was taken. 

One moose was shot recently in Grand Lake, Colo., as an act of what was judged to be self-defense. Again, a dog was involved.

 And then there are cow elk. This from exactly a year ago in Estes Park: 

“While newborn calves are immobile, cow elk can become aggressive towards perceived threats,” CPW said. “People are encouraged to be aware while recreating outdoors that calves could be hidden nearby. Cow elk can charge from many yards away.”

Mule deer does are hiding in the oak brush right now, waiting for fawns to drop, if they have not already. Not as threatening as cow elk though!

Claret Cup, the Mis-named Cactus?

 

Echinocereus triglochidiatus, the claret cup cactus, is the state cactus of Colorado. Yes, since 2014. And here you thought the Legislature just debates wolves and higher taxes-I-mean-fees.

More botanical info here, including a typical dispute over subspecies. 

But let's talk about wine instead. "Claret" is a largely British umbrella term for dry red wines from the Bordeaux region of France, which is probably short on cactus.

Click to embiggen.

 

As this Google Ngram shows, use of the term "claret" in books fell off fast in the 20th century, although it's still heard conversationally in the UK, I know.

Maybe some fussy American wine merchants, wine judges, etc. still use "claret." I don't hang out with that crowd so cannot say for sure.

The grapes used in "claret" include those favorites Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, and Malbec, among others.  

Really, to Americanize the name, we should be calling it "California Fruit-Bomb Cabernet Cup." 

"Cab Cup" for  short.  

When Your Dog Sends You a Message

Late in May (a month when I did not blogging, sorry, but I had reasons), my wife and I made a short trip to Taos, New Mexico, to decompress and spend the evenings having dinner with various friends there. 

We had rented an AirBnB that permitted dogs, so Marco the Chesapeake was coming along. 

Like every dog I have known, he recognizes when you are packing, whether for a trip to town or a long trip, and he is right there expecting to come along. Sometimes, yes, sometimes no.

This time, I had left my bag on the bedroom floor while I tossed in last-minute items. I came back to it after doing something else — and there was his Kong toy in the bag

"Don't forget me."

It gave me great pleasure to send him the "You're doing, for sure!" signal, which was to load his crate into the Jeep.  

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.