Appenzeller collars

There is a whole family of dog breeds from Switzerland, including the Swiss Mountain dog, Greater Swiss Mountain dog, Bernese mountain dog and Saint Bernard.

Many of them are big and tri-colored, and they all are entitled to wear a traditional Appenzeller collar.  It’s a stout leather collar studded with brasses of cows and hikers.

I never had a dog worthy of the collar before Gracie, and bless Ebay for removing the middleman: a Swiss man in Tennessee makes them to order for $43 including shipping.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Artisan-made-Appenzeller-leather-dog-collar-swiss-brasses-

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Gracie is very particular about her neckwear–she tears off tags and licenses, and anything that dangles–but she likes this harness-weight collar just fine.

The collar is nearly always covered by her coat, but here you can see it.  Black would have been more tasteful, but I’ve always had red collars on Berners and didn’t understand how flashy the brasses are.

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Mostly you can’t see her bling,

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at least, not under a winter coat

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but sometimes there’s just a bright glimpse that’s very satisfactory.

And I’m wishing you and everyone a happy new year.

A murder of crows

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A flock of crows ganged up on a hawk.

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Here’s a close-up from the previous photograph–see how aggressive they look?

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I think the crow is actually grabbing the hawk’s wing in this shot.

There was a lot of fancy flying, a lot of diving and evading,

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and in the end the hawk survived.

But I think it’s fair to say that this is a game where the crows had a whole lot more fun than the hawk.

Happy Holidays

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Our friend Dan took a family portrait on Thanksgiving.  He’s a pro, so he stood on a rock to take the picture.  He says it’s a little-known fact that if you simply change the point of view by either standing on a ladder or crouching, you get a better picture.

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Sam is 20, and has 2 more semesters.  We had him for eight days, and my mother too; we cooked non-stop for days

Hope you’re all well, and that you have happy holidays!!

Making Cider

We made 55 gallons of cider on Sunday, with lots of help.

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We had picked a truckload of apples; friends brought another truckload and a small wagon full.

We washed the apples,

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and put them through the grinder–can you see the little bits of apple in the air, giving us all fancy facials?

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Bob has our old press bolted to 4×6s he  buried in the driveway.

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We didn’t rinse our bottles with a bleach solution, though we have in the past.

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And instead of leaving the pomace for the bears and deer, it went in the back of the pickup truck for pigs.   Cecelia and Dan are planning to slaughter their pigs in a month, so they particularly appreciate the sweet truckload.  There were four dogs: two medium, one large (that’s Gracie) and one extra-large.  Everyone said that Gracie should be able to do some of the pressing next year, but we were pretty efficient without her: 55 gallons in 3 1/2 hours.

Gracie is Grown

Gracie is about 94 pounds now, and I think she’s nearly done growing.  She still gets a lot of exercise, and is very strong.

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She’s a big bouncy youngster and a bit rambunctious, but she knows a lot of commands and a lot of words. We’ve started harness training again–she’ll start pulling this winter–and she’s working on the command “Go ahead”.

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What a glorious season it has been.

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Gracie just had her second heat, which was easy because there isn’t an intact male in a 2 mile radius.  We’re planning on puppies next summer.

Mine remediation

I spent the day up in Silverton touring mine remediation projects.

The mountains around Silverton were tunneled with mines starting around 1880.

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There were mines everywhere–see how vibrant these rocks are?  They’re permeated with metals.  The last mine closed in 1991, and many piles of mine tailings  lie directly on or beside the creeks, acidifying the water and dumping nearly a thousand pounds of metals into the river below each day.

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We tour remediation sites from about 10,500 feet to nearly 12,000 feet.  At this site, a great pile of tailings was moved off the stream; they put a french drain under it and a clay cap on top of it.

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The boarding house for this mine is to the right, and there’s a 6-hole outhouse right over the creek.  It’s a cold and rainy day.

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Here’s an adit–an entrance to a mine–at 11,000 feet.  This stream used to flow through a giant pile of tailings, since moved, capped, and revegetated, and it’s right next a mine that used to contribute nearly 80 pounds of zinc a day to the waterways below, the largest single source of zinc to the river. The shaft was plugged with cement a few years ago, and this year it was caulked/we talked with the engineers who were just finishing the job.

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Here we’re at two remediation sites where tailings were moved off waterways, capped and revegetated, and a ditch diverting water to defunct mines across the mountain was filled in and revegetated. (This is a photo of a truck-loading site from the 1930s, though the mines are older.) It’s darned hard to revegetate up here.  There’s almost no topsoil, there’s too many minerals, and the native vegetation is a complex mixture of about 60 species of grasses and forbs.  If you use fertilizer, you encourage non-native species.  There have been about $3.5 million in volunteer labor on these projects, and that includes transplanting actual plants up to these remote, high altitude sites.

It’s the first snow for me.   Bon hiver!! Good winter to you!

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Here we’re nearly at the top of the mountain, mining at 12,000 ft with the boarding house behind; the adit is to the right of the pile.  Another giant pile of tailings was moved, capped and vegetated.  The waterways had been made into a ditch, so that was recontoured.

This is the most recent mining operation, opened in 1940 (the earliest was from 1880) but you can see that these substantial industrial sites are astonishingly remote.

Mountain flowers

 These high altitude meadows are so plush.

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The wildflowers are oversized, and the orange Indian paintbrush is almost fluorescent.

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OK, it is fluorescent.

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The pink Indian paintbrush glows with ultraviolet wavelengths than we can’t quite compute.

It’s hard to catch in a photograph.

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I particularly love the delphinium, which will be peaking here next week.

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These flowers are over five feet tall, so the dog is invisible.

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This is near 13,000 ft, where trees often topple,

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and here’s Gracie taking a dip in a high altitude pond flanked with beauty.

Elephant Head Flowers

The flowers have such a short season at high altitude that they bloom all at once.

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These elephant head flowers are showing off at 12,ooo feet.

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See all the little elephant heads with their upraised trunks? They are just charming.

They remind me of my Grandfather.

Gracie Grows Up

 Gracie is now a year and half, 91 pounds, and she is still a handful.

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She has a whole lot of energy, and gets piles of exercise–two or three miles off leash every day, on the road and through the woods, with a big hike once or twice a week.

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She has many firmly held opinions about the way things should be.   Bob’s toilet bowl has the only good water in the house.   When dogfood spills from her bowl to the floor, it’s not her business to pick it up.  And absolutely no fetch.

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She swims every day.  The streams are swollen with snowmelt, and she’s bold.

And very strong.  She has been swept away a few times, but she just calmly strokes for shore.

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She loves her morning adventure, and then she’s home for the rest of the day,

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playing with her toys, helping with projects,

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and generally keeping an eye on things.

A summer visitor

I’ve been on a different track this summer, getting in shape for my pending  television show (still not fully funded) and working on the first chapter of the not-yet-accepted-by-my-agent (and without a contract)

An American Tale: How the Utes lost all and became the wealthiest tribe in the US.

Between switching computers and having to learn a new version of Photoshop, I didn’t take photos for a while.

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Since then, I learned that if you don’t use your camera regularly, the quality slips.

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In my last 139 photos, these were the only two shots that worked for me.

Gracie is well, but needs a huge amount of exercise… and the more she gets, the more she needs.  Bob thinks that if there were a Bernese Olympics, she’d be a contender.

I’m going east this week, but will have more pictures next week.